Narrative Of Progress Research Articles

Appositions: The Future in Solarpunk and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

The essay discusses images of the future in solarpunk and post-apocalyptic fiction, focusing on their distinct approach to the narratives of progress, science, and individualism. The dystopian perspective of post-apocalyptic fiction is juxtaposed with the hopeful stance of solarpunk stories in order to outline the attempts to move beyond environmental pessimism and to imagine a liveable future. A reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes’s The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014), and Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) provides an overview of early 21st-century dystopian motifs and visions, while the ideas and development of solarpunk fiction are discussed on the basis of three anthologies of short stories: Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Ecospeculation (2017), Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers (2018), and Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures (2021). The aim of the essay is to argue that apocalyptic and solarpunk fiction stand in a relationship of apposition to one another, representing dominant and emergent structures of feeling.

‘A vision for the future’: Professional ethos as boundary work in Mozambique’s public sector

Global imaginaries of middle-classness, although resonating in very different ways in specific national contexts, more often than not conform to broadly capitalist-liberal aspirations, through globalised markers of consumption and individual social advancement. However, as this ethnographic material from Mozambique’s mining and hydrocarbons sector suggests, even under contemporary conditions of neoliberalism, alternative imaginings of middle-classness, based on technical competence, cosmopolitanism, work ethos and professionalism as contributing to a larger narrative of national progress persist as echoes of socialist technical assistance among the technocrats managing the sector. This article explores how professionalism is constructed across regime changes, from a socialist, high modernist socio-political project that has all but vanished today as a global emancipatory reference, to the current, neoliberal economic and political dispensation that requires of public administrators to promote a business-friendly climate. Professionalism, I show, cuts across generations despite considerable differences, indexing this class’s shifting claims on the state.

Women Leading University-Community Engagement: Disruption, Resistance; Resilience

This paper explores the identity jolts and professional responses of female leaders of institutionalized university-community engagement in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. Using a feminist narrative approach we explored the disorienting dilemmas, critical events and identity jolts related to women’s participation in the institutional leadership of social change initiatives, in particular university-community engagement (UCE). Themes of disruption, resistance and resilience in the neoliberal institutional cultures and practices in which university-community engagement (UCE) is situated are shared through participants’ stories of praxis. This paper is one of a series exploring sociocultural influences on the institutionalization of university-community engagement and the development of engaged and engagement scholarship as an intellectual domain in higher education.

Visions of the good future

Abstract The relationship between time and politics is complex and multilayered, especially in issues such as global warming. This facilitates political playing with and about time; political actors use and frame time in various ways. Drawing upon the work of Reinhart Koselleck, this article examines temporal statements about the environment and the climate in Swedish election campaigns 1988 to 2018 and shows how political rhetoric has been constituted by several competing modalities of time. However, these modalities can become problematic for political thinking about the future. To resolve the climate crisis, we need a politics that acknowledges both historical and political contingency. Engaging with the past, without seeking to extrapolate a unified narrative of historical progress, explores the past from various perspectives and shows how the present is contingent. This could enable a renegotiation of possible futures and a politics for the future that facilitates both understanding and action.

Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia ed. by Aaron D. Purcell

Reviewed by: Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia ed. by Aaron D. Purcell Madison Cates Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia. Edited by Aaron D. Purcell. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 283. $48.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-589-9.) Displacement narratives have long occupied a central place in Appalachian literature and film. Fictionalized stories of love, conflict, and loss that unfold when Duke Power or the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) come to town appear in works ranging from Ron Rash's novels to the star-studded 1960 film Wild River. Taking such legacies of dams and lost towns as its starting point, Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia, a [End Page 802] collection of essays edited by Aaron D. Purcell, offers a cohesive and welcome antidote to the relative paucity of historical studies on loss and displacement in the modern South. Of course, prominent works by economic and environmental historians do show well how dams and national parks reshaped the modern South. But few of these histories have centered the local experiences and memories of displacement fundamental to the region's twentieth-century history as effectively as Lost in Transition. Not simply a critique of the bureaucratic "progress narrative" that was central to public and private land actions, this collection shows the power of local histories to peel back the layers of the physical and imagined landscapes of the South and reveal pasts often hidden in plain sight (p. 216). Using case studies including the atomic weapons labs of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, dams built by Duke Power and TVA, and three different national parks, the authors explore how intertwined discourses of "progress" and "removal"––formerly used to justify the dispossession of Native Americans––were repurposed to justify removals in the twentieth century. To do so, they rely on a wealth of government documents, oral histories, and local newspapers. This archive of Appalachian dispossession is one of the volume's most important contributions. As Purcell and others show, opening documents hidden behind sanitized, euphemistic labels like TVA's "population readjustment case files" helps expose the emotional and contested process of creating parks, lakes, and dams (p. 41). These archives also reinforce the diversity of Appalachia. As Alyssa D. Warrick and Russell Olwell point out in their respective essays on Mammoth Cave and Oak Ridge, federal documents provide in-depth profiles of Black communities that struggled to remain amid eminent domain and white repression. These essays work well with pieces by Margaret Lynn Brown on the Great Smoky Mountains and by Katrina M. Powell and Savannah Paige Murray on Shenandoah National Park and the New River Valley, which examine how ideas about race, class, and nostalgia influenced later efforts to remember, lament, and protest communal dispossession. In each chapter, oral testimonies––collected both at the time of removal and in more contemporary interviews––offer powerful correctives to the progress narratives that sought to erase these communities. Two of the later essays, Matthew Chisholm's study of Bryson City, North Carolina's "Road to Nowhere" and Stephen Wallace Taylor's conclusion, analyze the fluidity of local memory through the changing politics of Appalachia. Here, the growing resentment toward public land actions owes as much to the New Right and its challenge to the New Deal as it does to local grievances. Historians of the region's environment, politics, and memory should learn from and engage with the valuable insights provided by such in-depth local studies. To the authors' collective credit, the juxtaposition of the rural, small Appalachian communities against the "nearly unstoppable" forces of public and private actors only occasionally strays toward what Taylor calls a "hero narrative" (pp. 186, 216). It is easy to portray displaced communities as tragic figures, often defiant but usually doomed. But at their best, these essays avoid [End Page 803] that temptation by showing how communal memories are constructed and contested. Such stories offer a more fitting elegy for Appalachia, where nostalgic lamentations are both recognized and examined. Madison Cates Coastal Carolina University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

The Advertising Museum in Seoul: Dream-Images and the Freedom to Advertise

Abstract This article examines how the Korea Advertising Museum in Seoul participates in constructing narratives of past and present in postmillennial South Korea, and how historical advertisements create ambiguities within those narratives. The analysis is inspired by Benjaminian scholarship on collective dreamworlds and on advertisements as dream-images, while the curatorial choices are situated against, first, the historical-cultural specificity of advertising in South Korea and, second, the social-political imaginaries of the mid-2000s, when the museum was developed and opened. The article details how the Advertising Museum constructs the post-democratization South Korean present as the dreamed-of future, by equating historical progress with a triumphant march of technological, political, and aesthetic freedom to advertise. When museumified old advertisements are brought into the present as technologically and aesthetically archaic, they support the hegemonic narrative of progress and arrival. However, the article also shows how the dream-images of old advertisements are not perfectly contained. Old advertisements still may shock because their collective utopias remain unattainable in the postmillennial present, despite its technological and industrial sophistication and despite it being declared the hoped-for future.

Black Life and Photographic Time

Photographer and video artist LaToya Ruby Frazier’s The Notion of Family series (2001–14) strikingly looks forward through the past. The project traces its origins to Frazier’s teen years growing up in the industrial suburb of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once-thriving mill town just nine miles outside of Pittsburgh that drew many African Americans northward in the decades following the failures of Reconstruction. Braddock began experiencing rapid decline in the 1970s when American steel no longer dominated the global market. The Braddock that Frazier grew up in was characterized by many of the markers of industrial disintegration: widespread unemployment, decaying infrastructure, increased drug addiction, and palpable rage and despair about the collapse of the economy and local industry, among them. Frazier uses her photographic practice to document some of these developments and reckon with the implications and meanings of these changes in conditions for those suffering their consequences. Often central to and reflected in the artist’s work is a critique of narratives of progress. This article examines the ways The Notion of Family series bears witness to Black life experienced in real time while also demonstrating the impossibility of the dominant temporal order to account for Black living and being. Sharpening focus on several of the images of Frazier’s Grandma Ruby, featured in the series, The Notion of Family also examines how Frazier uses her photographic practice to refuse the kind of willful forgetting and violent obfuscating that insists upon rendering invisible or fungible Black people who have vitalized communities like Braddock for generations.

Review: Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World, by Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre

Review: <i>Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World</i>, by Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Silent Agents of Nationalist Struggle? Women of Mozambique, Fighting a War Within a War

ABSTRACT What narratives carry women who experienced war in the first person, even if they are not military or even directly part of a nationalist movement? How can they challenge the colonial and nationalist archives, that insist in silencing women’s experiences in their chronicles? In contemporary Mozambique, while the dominant nationalist historiography has acknowledged the role played by the women who left home and joined the nationalist armed struggle, the analysis tends to rend invisible the experiences of women that, from home, participated in the struggle. Methodologically, archival research is combined with ethnographic methods to explore the lived experiences of African women whose destinies were crossed by the nationalist war in Mozambique (1964–1974). In-depth interviews with three women, supported by semi-structured interviews with relatives and acquaintances, are used to research ‘home’ as a key political space of women’s anti-colonial resistance and a context where emancipatory projects were dreamed. In parallel, this article aims to discuss the patriarchal dimension of knowledge kept in official archives, thus contributing to questioning the masculine hegemony in the ‘national’ discourse, as well as to reintroduce the question of agency and instrumentality back into the liberation narrative.

Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture

Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture

Life of Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk, or Black Hawk, An Autobiography

From its initial publication in 1833, Black Hawk's autobiography has challenged readers to confront dominant narratives of race and progress, justice and inequality, and US territorial acquisition and Native sovereignty. A Sauk war chief, Black Hawk related the annual cycles of his peoples’ lives from the 1780s in the modern border area of Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri, including their several relocations, aspects of their spirituality, society, and economy, their sometimes-violent relations with other Indian peoples as well as with British and Americans. Black Hawk credits the British with being more honest and trustworthy, particularly as the US perpetrated a fraudulent treaty in 1804 in which the Sauks and Foxes were supposed to have ceded much of their lands. While Black Hawk and his people had regular interaction with American traders over the years, the treaty fraud and intermittent violence led some Sauks to follow Black Hawk into siding with the British in the War of 1812 and later to fight the US again in the so-called Black Hawk War in the summer of 1832.Black Hawk's autobiography recounts the causes and course of the 1832 conflict as well as the subsequent tour of Eastern cities that he and his main Sauk advisors were compelled to take as prisoners at the insistence of President Andrew Jackson. As well explored by Michael Loraro, Black Hawk's message to white America was much more than an account of the eponymous war; it offered a broader criticism of the cultural and political context of the conflict and a vision for future peace and friendship. Black Hawk's autobiography both reflected and influenced Romantic literature and emerged as one of the most important and compelling works by a Native American in the nineteenth century, retaining a canonical place to the present day.Loraro's new engagement with Black Hawk's autobiography is a welcome update to Donald Jackson's 1955 edition from the University of Illinois Press. For those who may wonder whether they should upgrade their bookshelf with a new edition of Black Hawk's Life, I assure you that you should. Whereas Jackson's introduction and notes provided solid historical context from relevant primary sources, his book is obviously decades out of date regarding scholarship and includes some cringe-inducing verbiage. Loraro's update includes three main forms of editorial commentary. First, a brief introduction offers a sketch of Life's content, its implications for contemporary readers, and an overview of scholarly analyses. Second, Loraro includes a more developed version of this introduction as a distinct essay, “Resistance, Rebellion, Resignation, and Re-creation: Black Hawk's Life as Negotiation, Transition, and Testimony.” As suggested by the complicated title, the essay delves more thoroughly into literary analysis and modern scholarship, advancing several interesting observations and arguments, culminating in the idea that whereas Black Hawk failed militarily in 1832, he succeeded the following year in publishing a widely read and well-regarded Nativist criticism of American settler colonialism. Black Hawk influenced subsequent critics in the nineteenth century, and Native writers continue to reflect his ideas. Third, Loraro includes explanatory notes throughout Black Hawk's narrative, with clarifications, some primary sources, and references to recent historical and literary scholarship. Finally, Loraro adds to the Native voice element of Black Hawk's Life with inclusion of lines from Meskwaki (Sac and Fox) poet Ray A. Young Bear, “For You, a Handful of the Greatest Gift.”Loraro rightly points out that Black Hawk's Life continues to be considered and analyzed by new generations who bring their own interests and ideas to their reading of this foundational work. Loraro's edition reflects his own background as a literary scholar of frontier writings mostly east of the Mississippi River. He largely takes Black Hawk's authorship at face value with some limited consideration of his nineteenth century editor and mediator, J. B. Patterson. The third player in the production of Black Hawk's Life receives almost no attention, the interpreter Antoine LeClair, a culture broker of French and Indian descent, and the man who rendered Black Hawk's oral testimony and performance into written English. Perhaps a scholar will develop this crucial third element of the narrative's triangular production in a future edition Black Hawk's Life.

Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

“Some Wonder If Government Is Coming Out against Love”

Section 213 of the 1932 Federal Economy Act mandated that if both members of a married couple worked for the federal government, one of them—usually the wife—would be dismissed when cuts were made. The law codified widespread prejudice against employed wives. This article interrogates how Depression-era feminists used their organizational publications to combat Section 213, primarily through sensationalist narratives about family hardship and couples scandalously cohabitating. These narratives were amplified in the mainstream press and in a widely syndicated fictional newspaper serial, which was optioned by Warner Bros. for a movie. That mainstream newspapers picked up feminist narratives illustrates the power of sensationalism at a time when objectivity is believed to have dominated news practices. The feminist campaign complicates that view, demonstrating sensationalism’s value as a persuasive tool and its use in “political mimesis,” with feminists asserting political agency by creating “correspondence” with opponents to raise consciousness.

"On the Bridge between Life and Death" … A Biography of Aisha Abdurrahman (The Beach Girl),Circles of Silence, and the Clamor of Questions

The present study represents a critical and analytical approach to a feminist biography of a well-known writer in our modern Arab culture, Aisha Abdurrahman (The Beach Girl). The title of this biography is "On the Bridge between Life and Death," which she wrote soon after the death of her inspiring professor and husband, the Sheikh and the renovated scholar (Amin Al-Khuli). The study attempts to look at this biography as one of the contents of the Arabic feminist narrative reflected (shaped) by practicing autobiographical writing, which motivated the researcher to formulate fundamental interpretations of the contents of this speech via addressing the psychological projections of the internal and external conflict created by the social and intellectual relations of The Beach Girl, as well as through the awareness paths produced by this biography. Additionally, the researcher adopts the Dialectical Approach of silence and the clamor of questions that the researcher explors by a profound reading of the author’s character that accompanies her throughout her journey, on the bridge between life and death. Keywords: Biography, Literary criticism, Feminist discourse, Narration, Conflict.

John Berryman’s Blackface Jokes: The Insights of Literary Failure

Blackface minstrelsy is a major presence in John Berryman's The Dream Songs. Critics have debated whether Berryman's use of blackface minstrel conventions undermines or reproduces the racist ideological work of this cultural form. However, in Dream Song 40 and Dream Song 68, Berryman embarks on a related yet distinct project: a purportedly authentic, and unsuccessful, representation of Black personhood rather than a rendering of minstrel tropes. These two poems' complex failures in speaking of and for Black subjectivity and experience position Blackness as a site of opacity, negation, and social death: a presence that can't be represented or made the material of literary figuration. In this manner, they stage a challenge to postwar liberal narratives of racial amelioration, revealing how American social and symbolic orders themselves are predicated on racial abjection.

Editorial

Editorial Margherita Zanasi This October 2022 issue presents four articles spanning the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and addressing varied themes including the impact of the global commercial trends on Chinese performing arts (Yu Shi), the construction of the huaqiao (華僑 overseas Chinese) identity (Rachel Leow), the socialist transformation of the Chinese bicycle industry (Yujie Li), and the experience of rusticated youth in Maoist China (Yi Ren). Shi analyzes 1907 recordings of Chinese folk performers by the French company Pathé Records to explore the tensions between the global “modern commercial media and Chinese native performers.” Shi argues that the process of selecting which performers to highlight in the recording project reflected the logic of global capitalism and technological advances in the recording industry. Ultimately the “grand, linear, and progressive narrative of modernity” that inspired the Pathé recordings led to the marginalization of female performers as they came to be increasingly identified with eroticized courtesan singers. Through an exploration of the work of the prominent sociologist Chen Da (陈达 1892–1975) on Nanyang Chinese communities, Leow’s article offers an insight into the construction of the idea of huaqiao in the early twentieth century. Leow argues that despite Chen’s call for more rigorous studies of Chinese society based in social sciences, his work betrays “deep racial and gendered assumptions about the huaqiao.” As a result, Chen produced a unifying understanding of immigrant communities as sharing patriotic and patriarchal values that overlooked more nuanced and diverse realities. The third and fourth articles shift their focus to the early decades of the People’s Republic of China. Li explores the transformation of the Shanghai bicycle industry from the early 1950s to the 1960s as local independent factories merged into a single, state-owned industry better suited for a centrally planned economy. Li focuses on the experience of private owners of bicycle factories, mostly small-scale proprietors highly involved in production and repair work. Ultimately, Li argues, these “entrepreneur-technicians” came to be condemned as “petty capitalists” and lost their identity as businesspeople, even as their technical skills continued to be valued. They, in fact, proved crucial to successfully standardizing manufacturing methods and laying the groundwork for later mass production. The article contributed by Ren also addresses the issue of the socialist transformation of social identities: moving away from industrial Shanghai, Ren explores the experience of the rural educated youth sent back to their countryside homes in Southeast Shanxi between 1961 and 1965. Yi’s article contributes to complicating a narrative that emphasizes the returned youth’s hardship in readjusting to the rural environment and their growing discontent at the lack of opportunities there. Yi argues that, by participating in [End Page 221] the rural clubs (农村俱乐部 nongcun julebu) organized by the government to facilitate their reintegration into rural life, Southeast Shanxi returned youth were actually able to leverage “their literacy for better positions in the party, wielding their education as a tool for self-emancipation.” Contributing under the Note on Archives and Sources rubric of Twentieth-Century China, Covell F. Meyskens comments on a recently published collection of archival documents titled Xin zhongguo xiao sanxian jianshe dangan wenxian zhengli huibian (Compilation of archival documents about New China’s Small Third Front; Shanghai: Shanghai kexue jishu wenxian chubanshe, 2021), which Meyskens describes as a “rich resource for the study of political dynamics and socioeconomic patterns in Mao’s China and the early years of the Reform era.” Three book reviews are available at Project MUSE (https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/390). Finally, Rachel Leow is the author featured for this issue in our interview series, available at http://hstcconline.org/interviews-with-authors/. The interview includes a link for free access to her article. [End Page 222] Copyright © 2022 Twentieth Century China Journal, Inc

Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion by Sarah Muir

Reviewed by: Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion by Sarah Muir Yazan Doughan Sarah Muir. Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 200 pp. This is an ethnography of Argentina that weaves together two concerns of contemporary social theory: late- or post- neoliberal temporality and the status of critique in academic and broader intellectual practice. The book's proximal focus is a particular structure of feeling that informs the historical and practical sensibilities of middle-class Argentinians in Buenos Aires in the period immediately succeeding the economic crisis of 2001–2002. Among this milieu, Muir notes, the "dashed promises of twentieth century progress" have given way to a "widespread sense of foreclosed futures," whereby people felt they were now living "an after-ward in which no new beginnings were in sight" (8). This historical sensibility has become "the grounds on which people grappled with all manner of practical issues, both public and intimate" (8). Following the 2001–2002 financial crisis, middle-class Argentinians in Buenos Aires, Muir shows, have come to understand their biographical and national history as a series of repeating crises that continue to unfold in the present. This understanding informed how they lived their everyday life and how they interpreted their own and other people's behaviors—in friendship, marriage, public behaviour, electoral politics, and the politics of solidarity. In all these spheres and others, moments when one's expectations or aspirations are not met tend to elicit discourses of excruciating self-criticism, narratives of lament about the status of the middle class, and a sense of disillusionment about the world and with the promises of one's national and class membership. Key to the argument here is the central place accorded to the Argentinian middle class, particularly in the capital Buenos Aires, in [End Page 895] narratives of national progress and international development, whereby it stands as a synecdoche for the whole nation. The book's five substantive chapters illustrate the historical sensibility of routine crisis in Argentina, its emergence, and how it operates at different scales. The first chapter discusses public discourses on the middle class prior to, during, and after the 2001–2002 financial crisis. It traces the emergence of what Muir calls "the middle-class consensus," a structure of feeling and habitual interpretive practices that came to define middle-class subjectivity. If the crisis as a historical event was experienced in vivo as chaos and disorder, later discursive practices on that event served to render this disorder meaningful. In this later representation, crisis became the "real" reality of Argentina that would rear its head every now and then. Moreover, the ability to see crises as the "really real" and any semblance of order simply as a veneer came to be constitutive of middle-class subjectivity. In this way, Muir argues, members of the middle-class could assure themselves of their class membership through their practice of critique, or the ability to penetrate through orderly appearances to reveal the ugly reality that lurks behind them. The rest of the chapters develop and elaborate on this core argument. Further, Chapter 2 situates the sensibility of the Argentinian middle class in the context of a longue durée history of the country's political economy and public culture, particularly in relation to two salient genres of critical interpretation, psychoanalysis, and conspiracy theory, both of which produce a suspicious form of critique that questions its own efficacy. Chapter 3 situates their sensibility in the context of the devaluation of the national currency during the crisis. The last two chapters look at how the suspicious sensibility of the middle class informed their interpretations of their daily lives at the time of Muir's fieldwork (2003–2007). Chapter 4 focuses on corruption as a folk concept by which the middle class apprehends the apparent loss of virtue, even the ability to know what virtue is, in Argentina. Middle-class Argentinians, Muir argues, see themselves as compulsive participants in their own national and personal undoing by simultaneously condemning corruption and taking a certain pleasure in it—a situation that she calls "historical exhaustion." The final chapter shows how even social initiatives that seek to...

Swinburne

Swinburne Justin A. Sider (bio) At the end of Ezra Pound's querulous review of Edmund Gosse's biography of Algernon Charles Swinburne, he concludes his own portrait of the poet—alternately admiring and exasperated—with this summary: "At any rate we can, whatever our verbal fastidiousness, be thankful for any man who kept alive some spirit of paganism and of revolt in a papier-mâché era, in a time swarming with Longfellows, Mabies, Gosses, Harrisons."1 "Paganism" and "revolt" are [End Page 403] watchwords for the small run of Swinburne scholarship this past year, a set of essays and chapters that sees our poet lending Aleister Crowley the formulae for versified sex "magick," pondering the limits of rational thought, and celebrating the erosion of the human world. Though the number of essays and chapters was small, these cover a fair range of the field's current interests. In the introduction to Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910: Decay, Desire, and the Pagan Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), Dennis Denisoff turns to Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866)—"the main catalyst for literature having a voice in the formulation of British decadence" (p. 12)—in order to show how the era's decadent paganism produced an "expansive conceptualization of ecological reality" (p. 19). Victorian critics like Robert Buchanan (Thomas Maitland) had themselves described the "fleshly" poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne in ecological terms–as a biological threat to the moral health of the nation. Yet decadent writing, Denisoff argues, did not offer straightforward rebellion against "an artificial image of a stable society" but pursued instead images of "mutation, excess, and inconstancy" that joined human and nonhuman worlds: "Like biological decay, decadent culture is not a threat but an inherent aspect of an open ecology" (p. 11). In Denisoff's readings, paganism and decadence collaborate in portraying a world of "indeterminate, open . . . relationships" within which human beings are merely one set of coordinates rather than an organizing center (p. 19). Swinburne's neopaganism (represented, in this case, by "Hertha" and "The Garden of Proserpine") is treated rather briefly. Denisoff notes that Swinburne challenged the rigid moral vision of Victorian society by celebrating pagan divinities like the eponymous Hertha, who represents a "timeless" and "ongoing" force without being "tied to a narrative of progression and improvement" (p. 14). Denisoff devotes more attention to "The Leper," which he contextualizes with Victorian essays and poems on fungus and disease, drawing out the tendency in the era to represent decay not as a natural force but as a hostile (moral) agent. Against such habits of thought, "The Leper" exemplifies the perspective of decadent ecology by "contrasting the common impulse to shun the other—whether deemed abject, sickly, foreign, or unnatural—with the decadent drive for appreciative incorporation" (p. 19). Though Swinburne appears primarily to introduce the preoccupations of the book as a whole, Denisoff's discussion suggests the richness of Swinburne's work for ecocritical approaches to Victorian poetry and decadence. Swinburne's ecological imagination is also the focus of Keri Stevenson's "The Death of Birdsong, the Birdsong of Death: Algernon Charles Swinburne [End Page 404] and the Horror of Erosion" (in Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, ed. Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles [University Park: Penn State Univ. Press, 2021], pp. 91–109). Stevenson treats the eroding landscapes in "A Forsaken Garden" and "By the North Sea" as examples of what Greg Garrard calls "disanthropic" literature—that is, literature that imagines a world without humans. The challenge or paradox of artistic disanthropy, Stevenson explains, involves forgetting that any such representation of the world is itself a human product, arranged and designed for our consumption. Stevenson's readings of Swinburne's poems explore the strategies by which he works through this challenge. Erosion is the principal figure here because Swinburne strives to render landscapes "free of the colonization of human minds and needs": "There is nothing here humans can use, want, name, or eat," writes Stevenson of Swinburne's gardens and seashores (p. 97). Conventional poetic images—birdsong, flowers, and trees—are offered not in the redemptive mode of pastoral. Rather, these objects survive our...

Birdseye’s Frosted Possession: Processing, Storing, and Transmitting the Gift of Inuit Thermocultural Knowledge,

On August 12, 1930, Clarence Birdseye patented his “Method of Preparing Food Products,” a “quick” freezing machine that “for the first time produced ... a compacted, quick frozen block of comestibles ... which can be stored ... transported ... and ... after being thawed, reassumes its original condition.” Birdseye’s innovation in the frozen food industry is typically historicized as a progress narrative, wherein the lone inventor masters the molecular forces of water, salts, metal, cardboard, flesh, and plant matter. This teleology is further contextualized within an exploration account, wherein Birdseye’s curiosity is piqued during his years as a fur trader who observes the Labrador Inuit practice of quick-freezing fish. In this article, I use Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s concept of “white possessive logics” to interrogate how Birdseye’s racialized assumption of ownership dislocated Inuit epistemologies into industrial metanarratives. To trace the possession, but also the survivance, of Labrador Inuit thermoculture, I reconsider frozen food as a communication system, characterized by dynamics of processing, storage, and transmission. Within this system, food is thinkable as data—information and gift—and frozen food is understandable as an Inuit gift of knowledge and sustenance provided to, and unreciprocated by, Birdseye. Comparatively reading Birdseye’s papers and patents with ethnographical and autobiographical Labrador Inuit and Inuit-Metis narratives, I rethink the historic event of knowledge-sharing that gave Birdseye his thermocultural inspiration. Furthermore, I consider how Labrador Inuit communities reappropriate the mechanical freezer as a traditional technology, and I argue that the globalization of frozen food technology poses an ongoing challenge of reciprocity for Birdseye’s white possession.