“Re-expression” as Expression: Race and the Environment in the Work of Mary Hunter Austin

Abstract

If Anthropocene discourse considers environmental breakdown as a post-racial horizon in light of which the human might be reconceptualized as geological agent, this article turns to early twentieth-century environmental writer Mary Austin to identify a similar positioning of particular environmental conditions beyond the scope of human habitability as a horizon in relation to which she could imagine Indigenous and settler territorial boundaries to “fail together.” The idea of un-inhabitability serves a regulative function when it comes to conceiving of difference—racial, cultural, gendered —thought to be both bridgeable and unbridgeable. Austin’s poetic “re-expression” of what she termed “Amerindian songs” into written poetry has been read as attempting, appropriatively, to bridge such a divide. This article reads Austin’s “re-expressions” in the context of her autobiography and fictional narrative work to argue that the writer did not believe in the aesthetic promise that she is often criticized for espousing. Austin’s understanding of the gendered, racializing, and individualizing aspects of disclosure makes her poetic “re-expressions” of Indigenous oral forms as written poems examples of a self-conscious failure of both literary and anthropological modes of cultural representation. Her work is full of this tension. On the one hand, there is an appeal to the aesthetic in a philosophical register, an abyss that also impossibly bridges what is known and what is understood; on the other hand, a realization of literary production’s desire for a kind of anthropological presentation of what it is not. In this sense, Austin’s early twentieth-century environmental writing can help us to recognize the stakes of twenty-first-century environmentalisms that are full of, but rarely conscious of, similar tensions.