If the Anthropocene is the age during which fossil capitalism indelibly inscribes its image upon the earth, it is also, by the same token, the age of vagrants, migrants, fugitives, and tramps—that is to say, the unsettling, unsettled persons who are both displaced by socioecological violence and, very often, conscripted to reenact it elsewhere. Perhaps it is not surprising that these figures play such an outsize role in literary history, given their intimacy with the planetary upheavals of the last several centuries.1 Impeccable accounting principles have driven them between enclosed commons, the plantation complex, settler colonial outposts, company towns, mill districts, and other extractive enclaves. They haunt the shipping lanes, railroads, and highways that have enabled them to move, and to be moved, among the shadows of empire. Scholars agree that these itinerant, precarious figures are crucial to the rise of the novel and several other modern and contemporary forms, from the Romantic lyric to the Indigenous testimonio. One might even claim that texts involving persons displaced by eruptions in capital markets are as emblematic of the Anthropocene, in a cultural sense, as the isotopic evidence usually adduced by geophysicists.2Their literary-formal and socioecological significance notwithstanding, unhoused people, typically moneyless and far from their places of origin, remain at the margins of a critical enterprise broadly oriented toward the traditional centers of bourgeois culture. To recognize this peripherality does not entail a kind of vagrant turn that would round up such figures and forcibly resettle them nearer the imagined core of the discipline. On the contrary, as two recent monographs on unsettled persons in Atlantic and American literature demonstrate, a lot of productive work can be done from the margins. John Allen’s Homelessness in American Literature, first published in 2004 and rereleased as a paperback in 2018, argues that the demands of the US literary marketplace since the Civil War have led well-meaning writers to either objectify or romanticize homelessness in ways that undermine their stated desires for social justice. Sal Nicolazzo’s Vagrant Figures, released in 2020, constellates an extraordinary range of texts from the eighteenth-century Atlantic world around the claim that the open-ended, indeterminate nature of vagrancy, as it was imagined in law and in literature, made thinkable the institution of the police as a technology of population management adaptable across variously racialized imperial geographies. While each book utilizes cultural studies methodologies, their different approaches shed light on how the discourse has shifted in the last two decades, moving from Allen’s concern with the sympathetic representation of marginalized subjects toward the transpersonal purview of Nicolazzo’s work, which analyzes global, systemic forms of racialized and gendered violence.With the usual caveats, it may be useful to consider Allen’s and Nicolazzo’s books as approximately representative of the recent past and the leading edge of poverty studies, respectively; the one focusing on sentiments, the other on systems, especially racial capitalism. Assuming this trajectory continues, I would suggest that future scholarship will likely remain invested in systems thinking but, pressed by ecological crises, will necessarily move toward even greater integration with environmentally oriented, Anthropocene paradigms such as those exemplified in Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence (2011). World systems theorists like Jason W. Moore (2015: 63) have underscored the socioecological character of modern capitalism as it has developed for centuries through the production of “cheap natures.” Sundry millions have been thrown to the winds by minor clerks and police officials laboring in the service of what David Harvey (2003: 149), following Rosa Luxemburg’s expansion of Marx, calls “accumulation by dispossession.” Today, climate change and other compounding catastrophes render environmental intersections more crucial than ever in conceptualizing the ways that capital dispossesses and extracts value from the poor. To take perhaps the most salient example, we are already witnessing W. E. B. Du Bois’s international color line becoming also a matter of shorelines, as small island nations and postcolonial megacities struggle to defend against rising seas. These and other climate impacts such as droughts and stronger storms are expected to force hundreds of millions to flee their homelands as refugees by the end of the current century.3 Given the impending global surge of unsettled persons, in what follows I often pursue a socioecological exploration of the texts under review, one that is alert to their potential entanglements with the environmental humanities. At the same time, I also privilege the authors’ favored critical approaches, and consider Homelessness in American Literature and Vagrant Figures on their own terms and according to their own stated aims.Vagrant Figures, Sal Nicolazzo’s first monograph, has all the makings of a touchstone work in literary thinking about poverty, displacement, and the policing of marginalized populations. Expertly argued and engagingly written, Vagrant Figures invites us to reconceptualize vagrancy in the Atlantic world of the long eighteenth century as a signal element of “racial capitalism developing in the context of empire” (27). In Nicolazzo’s view, literary discourses often get caught up in “fantasizing ‘the vagrant’ as a kind of person—particularly a lyric subject or a narrative protagonist” (14). Against this loose, romantic account, Nicolazzo examines period documents to historicize vagrancy as “the name for a kind of threat-placeholder, and for populations and spaces beyond the pale of responsibility” (26). Nearly any behavior, or even the perceived threat of future behavior, could be classified as vagrancy, an obscurity evidenced in the long, paratactic statutes that attempt to define it (about which the book is delightfully astute). Vagrancy’s purposefully undefined, proleptic nature, Nicolazzo argues, ultimately gives rise to a kind of policing that can claim extraordinary discretionary authority over public spaces under the aegis of threat preemption. At the same time, vagrancy also colors literary representations in ways that alternately reveal, buoy, or complicate it as a strategy for managing empire’s laboring populations.The methodological virtuosity of Vagrant Figures owes much to this conjunction of obscurity, interpretation, and power. Exciting perspectives open up when the figure of the vagrant in literary texts is seen primarily as a creation, not of inspired authorship but of imperial policing. Vagrants become protean outlines, vectors linking dispossessed, racialized multitudes, rather than wellsprings of transposed interiority. Doing criticism in this way—from the perspective of police, one might say—enables Nicolazzo to demonstrate how “connections across empire become visible through the category of vagrancy,” an idea they explore in an impressive array of British and American texts (28). Nicolazzo’s lively readings, contextualized throughout by social histories and cultural objects such as the letters of local magistrates, will prove rewarding—and occasionally thrilling—even for scholars working outside the discourses to which the book directly contributes, most notably queer theory, critical race studies, and Marxian analysis. In its scope and perspicacity, Vagrant Figures exemplifies the possibilities of systematic, rather than symptomatic, reading practices—even if the book leaves some of these possibilities, especially in regard to the constitutive links between racial capitalism and the Anthropocene, tantalizingly unrealized.Probably the chapters of greatest interest to Americanists will be those that chronicle how British ideas of vagrancy were transformed in the colonies and the early republic. Setting the stage, chapter 1 performs a tour-de-force reassessment of the early picaresque novel by examining instances of spiriting—that is, the practice of deceiving poor and vulnerable people into colonial indentured servitude. Nicolazzo dazzlingly argues that picaresque plots are fueled by an extractive narrative economy in which a lumpenproletariat of minor, vagrant characters “exist[s] simply to be discarded, and the text recoups narrative value from their disposal and their disposability”—often by spiriting them off to the New World, as John Locke and many others espoused doing at the time (52). Attending to the poor multitudes in these texts through Nicolazzo’s optic of vagrancy yields an economic vision of the early novel at once more nuanced and more troubling than the conventional picture centered on the middle-class burgher or his stand-in, the reformed picaro. Yet the chapter’s arguments could have pushed even further by noting that the narrative economy in question applies not only to peripheral characters but also to peripheral ecosystems, which, by the same extractive logic, are profitably wrung of value and then discarded. This slight recalibration would have encouraged us to comprehend racial capitalism as the socioecological system that it always has been. Population management regimes like vagrancy and police would then be revealed as some of the most powerful technologies by which capital—sometimes with the aid of the novel—undertakes to reorganize the earth’s productive, metabolic forces in its own image, for its own ends, with consequences that now imperil even the metropolitan core.Chapter 4, equally illuminating, builds upon chapter 1 by tracing how legal and literary ideas of vagrancy evolved on American shores. Juxtaposing readings of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) and the 1972 Supreme Court decision that drew on literary precedents to strike down vagrancy statutes, Nicolazzo argues that westward-streaming white Americans effectively split the conceptual elements of vagrancy to accord with colonial racial schemas. Elements that take on a positive valence under settler logic, such as enterprising mobility and resistance to rote labor, are “reclaimed from criminalization through their identification with American whiteness” (201). At the same time, the threatening shadows of these elements are projected onto racialized others in order to justify and enforce conquest. No summary can capture how elegantly this chapter unfolds its disparate archive to craft a novel, tragic account of the origins of American exceptionalism. Here too, though, Vagrant Figures performs a deeply environmental reading without fully elaborating the implications it unearths. The chapter hinges on the rhetorical association of nomadic savagery and rural English vagrancy, arguing that “this figuration reflects on Native land, rendering it ripe for enclosure, or even already imaginatively enclosed” (179). As Steven Stoll (2017) and others have shown, extractive interests, often abetted by the literary arts, have consistently used similar logics to subject the lands of agrarian peoples around the globe to the churn of capital cycles.4 Even a brief comment on the ways that racializing ideologies render the earth discursively available not only for seizure but for extractive despoliation could have made an outstanding chapter even stronger, while adding breadth and precision to the book’s presentation of racial capitalism.The book’s other chapters also navigate the Atlantic world, though their insights often bear more directly on the British context. Chapter 2 reads Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband (1764) through the framework of parish poor relief laws, artfully complicating the tendency in queer theory to view police as a system for surveilling middle-class desires rather than for ordering the social reproduction of laboring bodies. A book like this one almost has to address the Romantic lyric, and chapter 3 does so in a compelling way, using the migrant sailors in Mary Robinson’s poems to connect distant imperial territories and disrupt insular ideas both of the English countryside and of the archetypal Romantic vagrant as a suitable vehicle for poetic interiority. Chapter 5 analyzes itineracy in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) as a modality of critique and countervailing knowledge that works to reclaim Black mobility from and against assumptions of fugitive threat. The book ends with a short, timely coda that historicizes broken windows policing theory in light of vagrancy statutes as a hopeful step toward imagining police abolition.5Preferences will vary, but the book contains no laggards; each chapter makes a strong contribution to its fields, and they read coherently as a sequenced narrative. Throughout, Vagrant Figures enriches the texts and even the literary traditions it touches, using vagrancy as a prism, never a pry bar, to reveal the material connections they entail. Moreover, seen through an environmental lens, the book shows police and vagrancy to be major forces in the production of the Anthropocene, even if it never directly locates the analysis within that rubric. Had it done so, and elected to emphasize that the racial capitalist world system is always already socioecological in its operations, Vagrant Figures would have become more deeply what it already is: a terrific achievement, crucial not only for understanding how literary ideas of vagrancy have mutually shaped police regimes but also for comprehending the role of this disciplinary complex in today’s planetary upheavals.John Allen’s Homelessness in American Literature pursues a very different but frequently complementary project. Allen argues that commercial pressures and differences in social status between authors and the poor pushed representations of homelessness in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century US literature toward a pattern of reflexive othering—through romanticization and objectification alike—that still impedes progressive change. As a corrective, he suggests that the presumably greater authenticity of collective genres, such as the Latin American testimonio and certain proletarian forms, may cut through these accumulated impediments and move readers to reconceive unhoused persons, not as the other but as equal members of their communities. First published in 2004, Allen’s book was reprinted in paperback in 2018, likely in response to renewed interest in homelessness among academics and the broader public, as seen in the enthusiasm for popular sociology works like Matthew Desmond’s 2016 book, Evicted. This attentional shift surely derives from, among other things, rising housing costs, swelling tent encampments, and similar signs of the extreme income disparities that characterize late neoliberalism in the Western core. But one is left to speculate here, as the contents of the reprint edition are unchanged from the 2004 original, with no new materials or prefatory matter that might contextualize the new release.Considering Homelessness in American Literature alongside Vagrant Figures elucidates some of the ways that critical discourses on poverty have developed since the former first appeared. Whereas Nicolazzo analyzes how texts mutually constitute global systems of dispossession across scales and continents, Allen operates within a more subjective ambit, assessing literature’s much-debated ability to render experience, evoke empathy, and forge connections with marginalized groups. Readers today will likely find Allen’s presentations of empathy and authenticity somewhat undertheorized, given how thoroughly such concepts have been problematized in recent decades. At times, his apparent conviction that the right kinds of literature can reliably produce the right kinds of affective bonds among broad publics—a process he calls “productive” or “positive cultural work,” as opposed to the “detrimental” or “negative cultural work” of othering—may even seem troublingly inattentive to questions of race, gender, and other intersecting differences (133). For example, chapter 1 argues that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s figuration of the enslaved as universally homeless in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) “creates empathy with slaves in the reader and encourages a corresponding resistance to slavery,” as though these presumed responses are merely natural and uncomplicated (32). Similarly, the book’s tendency to taxonomize and adjudicate literature’s cultural impacts in terms of a simple, authoritative binary can sometimes seem reductive at best.However, rather than designating these oversights as faults of the book, we might reflect on what they could indicate about shifts in the discourse. Homelessness in American Literature, after all, was conceived before major scholarship on the complex, sometimes contradictory ways that empathy can operate in readers and spectators had pervaded the discipline.6 Indeed, the gradual uptake of this work within the humanities was certainly one of the principal factors encouraging the turn toward systems thinking in literary studies this century (and, after the usual lag, in politics and culture), the fruition of which we can observe in the nuanced insights that a book like Vagrant Figures derives from racial capitalist analytics. Allen’s study would have benefited significantly from exposure to such perspectives—which, one imagines, may have led it to engage with, or even to mention, the convict leasing system and other antiblack uses of vagrancy laws during the period. Nonetheless, despite its occasional shortcomings, the book covers a lot of useful ground, and it is particularly insightful on testimonial literature and on the ways that commercial pressures may have shaped literary representations of the unhoused and other vulnerable groups.Chapter 2, for example, skillfully juxtaposes Horatio Alger’s idealized street children with documentary accounts of urchins and tramps to argue that each kind of writing, the sensationalist exposé and the romanticized rise from penury, sacrificed subtlety to the demands of publishers. Similarly, chapter 3 situates the “tramp menace” (82)—a moral panic of the late nineteenth century—alongside works by Jacob Riis and Stephen Crane, advancing the idea that the market’s hunger for tales of the slums created such pressures that each artist, contra their liberal convictions, failed to overcome the limitations of the participant-observer position and “produced cultural work which was detrimental” to the poor (75). Even if these chapters might have more closely analyzed the consistent demand in the United States for stories about extreme poverty, they do succeed in emphasizing that literature is not simply written—it is edited, published, and sold, whether for money or for its surrogate, prestige. Chapter 4 discusses the latter in relation to the many tramp autobiographies published by aspiring literati like Jack London during the Progressive era. Drawing productively on social histories of the period, Allen suggests that the emergence of the public intellectual as a viable livelihood owed much to these chronicles of down-and-out experiences, the unsavory aspects of which were often sanitized to accord with editors’ tastes.Finally, in chapter 5 and a linked coda, the book casts the writings of Meridel Le Sueur as an instance of testimonial literature’s capacity for “positive cultural work,” in this case on behalf of the “homeless women [who] have been relegated to the margins of a margin” (116). Like the Latin American testimonio genre, Allen argues, Le Sueur’s texts exemplify the possibilities of literature as a “collective or communal project” that “lets the poor speak for themselves” (115, 119). Allen’s calls for more attention to testimonial writings and oral histories as works of literature seem prescient and increasingly necessary in our age of enormous textual proliferation, when curation and collage have become established across mediums as major art forms. Surely we should more often read and teach the accounts compiled by the WPA Federal Writers’ Project or by widely celebrated figures like Studs Terkel and Svetlana Alexievich, not only as sociology but as complex, carefully crafted art.Allen’s faith in the “positive cultural work” of testimonies, however, may strike today’s readers as overstated, if not esoteric. For him, testimonial texts can break through the chasms that impede solidarity; namely, the “division between the author (as knowing subject) and the poor (as the objects of study)” (119) and, relatedly, the “divisions between subaltern groups and readers of the privileged classes” (136). Yet Allen struggles to demystify the alchemy by which the voices of the oppressed might move bodies toward action and systems toward justice in anything like a reliable way. He quotes Richard Rorty: “Solidarity . . . is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people” (150). Even so, the previous chapters of Homelessness in American Literature sometimes seem to render Rorty’s statement less a blueprint for producing robust forms of solidarity and more a practical description of book royalties. Saidiya V. Hartman and James Agee, in their respective masterpieces, each refuse to deliver detailed chronicles of “the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people,” even when these would have been related in the people’s own voices. As Hartman (1997: 4) explains, “At issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator.” The testimonial writings that Allen’s final chapters put forward, despite their underacknowledged virtuosity as literature, nonetheless fail to resolve the impasse Hartman and others have clarified. Today, moreover, the proliferation of texts within the digital commons further exacerbates the issue, as testimony and fabrication can become nearly indistinguishable. In the end, it seems that the most we can say about the vagaries of readers’ responses to testimonial accounts, especially when transposed to the arena of politics, is that they are profoundly inscrutable.These impasses, the deepening ambiguities of Hartman’s “uncertain line,” are not the only factors driving the recent critical and cultural turn (which, as always, may be more accurately called a return) toward impersonal, systemic modes of analysis. Another motivating force comes from new materialist and environmental philosophy, where the sheer scale of geophysical alteration has shifted critiques beyond individual desires and into the realm of planetary networks and assemblages. The progression from Allen’s hope in transcendent empathy to Nicolazzo’s focus on hegemonic systems exemplifies how the literary study of poor, displaced, and unhoused populations has developed in keeping with broader intellectual trends over the last two decades. The current challenge, then, seems to lie in integrating the most germane elements of environmental, broadly Anthropocene thinking and the racial capitalist frameworks Vagrant Figures employs to such advantage.Indeed, accelerating events are making it impossible to conceptualize one sphere apart from the other, particularly in regard to the loss of homes and homelands. What Pope Francis calls “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” are growing increasingly inextricable in an age of spiraling social and ecological breakdown.7 Christian Parenti (2011: 20) argues that our contemporary crises of dispossession and displacement are already building toward a “politics of the armed lifeboat,” in which developed economies “transform themselves into fortress societies” walled off against the climate refugees without and the lower classes within. Further complicating this idea, Anne McClintock (2020) observes, “Displacement is not merely the violent removal of people and other species from place. Displacement is also the removal of place—the loss of place in place—manifest in damaged ecologies.”8 As Western nations continue to answer environmental crisis with policies of carceral expansion, McClintock’s dual vision of upheaval—which considers forced mobility and forced immobility alike—grows more urgent by the day.Against these potentially dystopic scenarios, which threaten marginalized populations with the kinds of unbounded police regimes that Vagrant Figures highlights, researchers are striving to conceive alternatives.9 Doing so is necessarily a multidisciplinary undertaking that calls together various periods and fields under the sign of transformation. If, as the Brazilian trade unionist Chico Mendes is reputed to have said shortly before being assassinated, “Environmentalism without class struggle is gardening,” so too does the study of race, class, and poverty benefit from engagement with the environmental humanities toward this end.10 Debates remain vigorous, but I would contend that scholars of ecological Marxism and the environmentalism of the poor (several of whom I reference here) have constructed some of the most promising avenues for answering the urgency of the moment and conjoining social and ecological critiques in a way that pushes systems thinking forward. These lines of research, when interwoven with the racial capitalist analytics pursued in works like Vagrant Figures, can help us to better comprehend the deepening links between impoverished and unsettled persons in the Anthropocene and the ongoing degradation of our shared, planetary home at this critical juncture.