‘In the eyeblink of a planet you were born, died, and your bones disintegrated’: scales of mourning and velocities of memory in Philipp Meyer’s American Rust

Abstract

ABSTRACTTom Cohen (2012) contends that critical accounts of climate change have a tendency to collapse the ecological into the economic, reinscribing the privileged epistemological and ideological homelands of liquid modernity (Bauman). Such slippages underscore the conceptual insecurities inherent in imagining the era of the Anthropocene. As Robert Markley (2012) asserts, the Anthropocene ‘poses questions about […] different registers of time’. Timothy Clark (2012), meanwhile, foregrounds the ‘derangements of [spatial] scale’ that attend the analysis of climate change. Bearing these comments in mind, this article examines the ways in which Philipp Meyer’s (2009) American Rust attempts to reckon with the mutable dynamics of the Anthropocene. Exploring the social and environmental degradation of the American Rust Belt, Meyer posits the post-industrial era as a period of conjoined economic and ecological precarity. The narrative veers across temporal and spatial scales, linking the casualties of the Rust Belt to other stories of dispossession and dislocation. Ultimately, however, Meyer’s novel suggests that the study of literary planetary memory must examine not just the scales, but the speeds that inform cultural and critical practices of remembrance as well, analysing the uneven memorative velocities that shape the representation of diverse forms of loss across human and more-than-human milieux.