Slow Violence Research Articles

Environmental justice and slow violence: Marikana and the post-apartheid South African mining industry in context

Environmental justice and slow violence: Marikana and the post-apartheid South African mining industry in context

Yan Lianke’s Mythorealist Representation of the Country and the City

This article considers Yan Lianke’s literary method of shenshi zhuyi (mythorealism) evidenced in Lenin’s Kisses and Garden No. 711: The Ultimate Last Memo of Beijing and examines Yan’s post-Maoist representations of macro- and micro- shenshi (mythoreality), political dystopia and ecocritical utopia, the humiliated and insulted and their silence and speech, as well as the large-scale ferocity of slow violence in the country and city.

The Monster of Representation: Climate Change and Magical Realism in Beasts of the Southern Wild

This article argues that formal and thematic elements of magical realism can bridge reality and fantasy in particularly productive ways when dealing with the imaginative challenges of representing climate change and environmental injustice. My analysis of Benh Zeiltin’s film, Beasts of the Southern Wild , situates magical realism in the emerging environmental discourse about climate change and focuses on the techniques used to make slow violence visible, including the monstrous symbols in the form of beasts that embody climate change and reflect the social anxieties associated with an uncertain planetary future. Magical realism engages with the temporal and spatial scales necessary for depicting the state of risk and crisis associated with anthropogenic climate change, and it produces narratives that include marginalized voices, which are indicators of contemporary environmental ethics in the U.S. that mobilize discourses of race, gender, and class. Finally, the article explores how the film represents the material consequences and cultural anxieties surrounding climate displacement and concludes that stories about climate change refuse narrative closure. The realities of climate change necessitate a shift in the ways we understand humans’ relationship to the material world and the narratives we use to represent it.

Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work by Noah Heringman

588 BOOK REVIEWS after Enclosure to the dispossession of land from its inhabitants in Jamaica, among other sites in the Global South that Rob Nixon analyzes in his re­ cent Slow Violence and the Environmentalism ofthe Poor. And, towards the end of the book she connects nineteenth-century Northamptonshire to con­ temporary Detroit, with its predicament ofan urban abandonment that be­ speaks an administrative attitude of population disposability. This last sta­ tion in a global itinerary ofconnected histories is for Guyer a homecoming, insofar as she acknowledges in her coda that it is a beginning: both the birthplace of the book as a critical project and the place where she herself and generations of family members were born. Guyer movingly inscribes herself in a legacy of homelessness-at-home that makes Clare her—and, as she argues, our—contemporary, his writings texts to read our contempor­ aneity with. In another sense, in reading with John Clare, Guyer performs “reading with” as an act of doubling companionship or fellowship. What kind of doubling does she perform, and what does this doubling reveal? At the be­ ginning of this review, I compared the power of her writing to a subtle, soft-laser light that illuminates with precision and surety. In the coda, Guyer uses the term “flickering” to describe passages in and around Clare as these flicker and reflect contemporary scenes and passages in what Walter Benjamin calls a “constellation” capable anachronically of opening up re­ pressed, forgotten, minor histories. In the elegance and economy of this book, Guyer reflects the specifically minimalist economy of Clare’s writing itself, illuminating its uncanny power of abstraction. Like a few other writ­ ers of Romanticism whose texts stage conversations between the literary and the philosophical in a minimalist vein (Holderlin, Dickinson, and Buchner come to mind), Clare’s abstraction itselfgives a theoretical power that illuminates in flickers the dotted lines that organize particulars. In re­ sponding to the power of this poetry, and reading with John Clare, Guyer exercises a vigilance that maintains a warm and light touch of critical care. It is this attitude that, I suggest, makes her plea for and performance of close reading one precisely of careful reading. Emily Sun Barnard College/National Tsing Hua University Noah Heringman. Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 369. $110. The Romantic age is, as John Keats writes, an age of emergent disciplinarity : “Every department ofknowledge we see excellent and calculated toSiR , 55 (Winter 2016) BOOK REVIEWS 589 wards a great whole. . . . An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people, it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening specula­ tion, to ease the Burden of the Mystery. ” This burden can be ascribed to alternative temporal narratives that blasted open a reassuring 6000-year theological story via Orientalist William Jones (ageless Hindu chronolo­ gies), geologist James Hutton (“no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end”; Theory of the Earth, 1788), or Byron’s geopolitical cycles (Childe Harold, 3:1630—38), the Shelleys, Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, etc. Reassur­ ance remains, however, wholly anticipatory, and hence anxious. Disciplin­ ary “ease” never quite manifests itself without the “heat and the fever” of epistemic anxiety, before devolving into interdisciplinarity in the Human­ ities. Recent attempts to recenter this disciplinary drift via consilience, in­ tegration, and other science-biased quests for a new order, oppose, in turn, a pre- and post-disciplinary Disorder of Things (see the Eighteenth Century Studies Special Issue, edited by Adriana Craciun and Luisa Cale [45, no. 1, 20111). Noah Heringman’s Sciences ofAntiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work intervenes in this problematic historiography of discipline (de)formation. Heringman’s wide-ranging and deeply re­ searched book is interested in uncovering the unruliness of predisciplinarity , in particular the interaction between natural history and antiquarian­ ism as “sciences of antiquity” respectively dedicated to making sense of nature and culture. An unproblematic division between nature and culture is undone over the course ofthis highly readable book by showing the mu­ tual dependence of each on the other. Ethnography, for instance, connects natural history and antiquarianism when “knowledge workers” (Hering­ man’s...

Ecopoetic Encounters: Amnesia and Nostalgia in Alexis Wright's Environmental Fiction

In Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), Alexis Wright establishes an allegorical mode where she reimagines Europeans' first encounters with Australia from an Aboriginal environmental perspective. In this narrative system, the discovery of Australia is not realised by exploring colonisers, but by vulnerable strangers who apprehend the continent both experientially and linguistically. In Carpentaria, the Stranger-figure of Elias Smith is left amnesic after surviving a shipwreck during a cyclone; his first encounter with Australia is extremely violent and results in a loss of personal (hi)story. In The Swan Book, the character of Bella Donna seeks refuge in the nostalgia of swan stories after the disappearance of her native lands due to climate change; her first encounter with Australia is characterised by slow violence and results in a profusion of stories. In this essay I argue that by drawing attention to the interweaving of language and experience and by dramatising the relationship between organism and environment, ‘ecopoetic encounters’ allows readers to rediscover major episodes of Australian environmental history. Indeed, through the experiential and poetic meetings of Stranger-figures with Australia, Wright does not depict the initial moment of discovery as a nation-building event; rather she re-narrates it as a counterdiscursive episode of environmental historical rediscovery. Journeys of migration, environment transformations, and the marginalisation of populations are translated in an Aboriginal allegorical mode that allows European readers, through self-reflexivity, to rediscover the Australian continent through the perceptions, actions and emotions of Stranger-figures.

Remembering the Bengal Partition: Trauma and the “slow violence” of refugee existence

I read Jyotirmoyee Devi's 1967 Bengali novel The River Churning as a trauma narrative by focusing on the female protagonist Sutara's experience of a “social death” in the aftermath of an attack on her village. The text is a function of memory, depicting Sutara's failure to remember while serving as a point of entry into how the Partition was collectively re-memoried in the 1960s in Bengal. The novel, in its focus on how the Partition was assimilated into the everyday, depicts the “slow violence” of udbastu (refugee) experience as a perpetual homelessness as identities are coercively nationalized.

The River Talks: an ecocritical ‘kōrero’ about ecological performance, community activism and ‘slow violence’

On 27 February 2013, Mad Ave staged The River Talks, a collation of linked performances in and on the banks of the Omaru River in Glen Innes, Auckland, New Zealand. The event brought together artistic and discursive works that challenged a view of this local river as always and forever degraded. An example of committed ecological performance, The River Talks created time and space for kōrero (dialogue) between people with diverse views and stories of the river. Both the enactment of performance and the performance of meeting drew on Māori protocol on the marae and on Māori concepts of the relationship and obligation to the natural world (kaitiakitanga). The writing of this article was invited by the director Tamati Patuwai as part of extending the kōrero to a global audience. In the article we explore how ecocriticism might be applied to ecological issues in performance. To begin to discuss The River Talks ecocritically, we draw on Rob Nixon's postcolonial analysis of the textual response to the ‘slow violence’ of environmental harm. Together, we consider the question of how far The River Talks provides a model of performance that could inform other activists, educators and artists.

Nature and environmentalism of the poor: eco-poetry from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria

What is increasingly known as Niger Deltan poetry is a poetry that distinctly identifies itself with the peoples and environment of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The poetry of Gabriel Okara, Christian Otobotekere, Tanure Ojaide, Ogaga Ifowodo, Nnimmo Bassey, Ebi Yeibo and others seeks to draw attention to the fate of both humans and non-humans in the face of oil exploration and its negative consequences in the region. The ecocritical imagination informing this poetry is two-pronged: a celebration of the flora and fauna of the region before the advent of exploration, and a combative engagement with institutional powers responsible for destroying the rich environment. Deploying Rob Nixon's concept of slow violence and environmentalism of the poor, I analyse selected poems by poets from the Niger Delta which have as their theme the plight of the people and their environment in the wake of oil production, and also demonstrate the consummate activism inherent in poetry from and on the Niger Delta.

Fast Machines, Slow Violence: ICTs, Planned Obsolescence, and E-waste

This paper brings the temporalities of the global e-waste recycling trade into the temporal reckonings of speed, acceleration, and simultaneity typically associated with information and communications technologies (ICTs). Following feminist philosopher Sofia, it begins with a reconsideration of theories of technology as they relate to time and the environment. The second part of the paper suggests that recycling practices do not address the tempos of production, especially planned obsolescence. Bringing together Nixon's concept of slow violence with Sofia's theory of container technologies, this paper interrogates the speed, acceleration, and simultaneity often attributed to ICTs and globalization to argue that planned obsolescence functions as a type of slow violence, and that it structures the environmental politics of the information age.

Necrocracy in America: American Studies Begins to Address Fossil Fuels and Climate Change

Necrocracy in America: American Studies Begins to Address Fossil Fuels and Climate Change Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (bio) Oil Culture. Edited by Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 456pages. $90.00 (cloth). $30.00 (paper). Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. By Stephanie LeMenager. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 263pages. $49.95 (cloth). Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America. By Christopher F. Jones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 320pages. $39.95 (cloth). American studies’ short lifetime is concurrent with the gradual expansion of de jure democratic rights to the entire populace regardless of race, gender, class, and sexuality, a project it has often seen as fundamental to its academic (and political) mission. It is also concurrent with the maturation of oil capitalism in the United States and around the world. So profoundly has petroleum affected the contemporary politics, identities, and subjectivities of American life that some scholars have asked whether the United States is a democracy or a necrocracy.1 This term refers to the rule of deceased former rulers but also denotes the ancient flora and fauna that became, millions of years postmortem, fossil fuels: oil, natural gas, and coal. If observers once imagined that the legacy of the United States would be its experiment with democracy, there is now little question that one of its enduring legacies will be the development and dissemination of a way of life premised on consuming fossil fuels at a staggering rate. Future historians may remember the United States in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries principally as the progenitor of the rising seas, extreme weather events, volatile climate, and acidified, littered oceans that plague their times. The human experience of this “slow violence” [End Page 529] is already tangible—scientists estimate that three hundred thousand people already perish every year as a result of anthropogenic climate change, while three hundred million are negatively affected.2 Moreover, it disproportionately affects the people that most American studies scholars study and support: groups marginalized and powerless because of their race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and/or nationality. The World Bank reports that 75–80 percent of the damages and costs of climate change will be suffered by countries in the global South,3 and scholars predict there may be two hundred million climate refugees by 2050, primarily from the poorest and most vulnerable countries.4 We can infer that climate change will ultimately stand alongside the European colonization of the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade as among the most egregious collective acts of injustice in history. One might not know that we are in the midst of an unprecedented global crisis (in which we are, individually and collectively, deeply complicit) from reading American Quarterly or attending the American Studies Association’s annual conference, however. American studies, the academic discipline arguably most dedicated to progressive political engagement, social justice, and activism, has for the most part ignored climate change and the still-accelerating consumption of fossil fuels despite our awareness of the catastrophic environmental and human consequences. This lacuna is particularly surprising given the United States’ central role in extracting and consuming fossil fuels, developing and normalizing oil capitalism, and denying climate science. If climate change was once seen primarily as a scientific, technological, economic, or policy issue, and thus beyond the purview of the humanities, it is increasingly recognized as a problem deeply rooted in social, cultural, and political systems. As climate change and the consequent social, economic, and political destabilization becomes a regular feature of our news cycle and daily lives, scholars and students are responding; while humanities and social science budgets are being slashed nationwide, the emerging interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities is gaining recognition and environmental studies departments are rapidly expanding. Whereas anthropology, sociology, geography, history, philosophy, religious studies, and literature increasingly turn their focus toward climate change and its effects, American studies—another interdiscipline that arose to fill a set of intellectual and cultural voids—has remained aloof, beyond a dedicated but relatively small group of scholars who make up the Environment and Culture Caucus. In the last fifteen years, for example, American Quarterly has published only five articles or...

In the Warming Arctic Seas

In the Warming Arctic Seas

Capital’s Fastness as Sticking Point

Before had anything to do with speed, it referred to quality of being firmly or securely fixed (OED). Somewhere in Middle English, its meaning shifted to refer to closeness or immediacy with idea of rapid movement only later being reflected in adjectival use. It is this last sense of quickness that is taken up most directly in current references to capitalism. Capitalism gains its momentum by reducing points of fastness, eroding points of security to increase rapid accrual of profit, or so story goes. In critical culture arising around capitalism, its speed is often posed as core of its evil, perhaps most famously by Paul Virilio, but also by Sunday magazine critics lamenting breakneck pace of modern living who advocate instead for slower choices. Slowness has also been taken up in more radical positions, from Bartleby, who prefers not to, to Franco Bifo Berardi, who argues for political potential in expanded notions of both psychic and social depression. What these accounts have in common is a binary sense of fast/slow: if one is slow, one resists capitalism; if one is fast, one cannot be radical. When individuals begin to become immobilized psychically, emotionally, or physically, rapid, exuberant flow of neoliberal capitalism has reached its limit--fast capitalism has fully eroded points of fastness, but, instead of an unrestricted, quick-flowing freedom, many of those who live here find themselves caught in eddies or whirlpools. From these situations--what Lauren Berlant calls impasses--one can neither move forward nor backward; instead, best that can be hoped is merely to keep up. For many affective experience of what Berardi calls the universe running too fast is one of inertia (180). In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari describe experience of psychic chaos in terms of infinite speeds that blend into immobility of colourless and silent nothingness they traverse (201); against this threat of blankness, brain grasps at any thread of order, they suggest. This description of brain and thought works as a metaphor for experience of capitalism: there are those who live in chronic vacancy and invisibility spawned by its chaotic speeds. Working on a just-in-time schedule, enduring long commutes, shouldering loads of debt, one can experience churn of capital as a kind of fast-paced slow violence from which there is no clear exit. This is not a fastness of security but a fastness of fixity, of impasse. …

Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Destitution

A powerful new wave of alienating land from those who live on it is sweeping the global commons, and discourses such as “Emerging Economies” and “Brazil, Russia, India, China” are the ideological mediators of this wave. In India, the “slow violence” of the Nehruvian decades has been replaced by the accelerated pace of such processes under a neoliberal dispensation. In both periods, the overwhelming costs of “development” have been preponderantly visited upon Dalits, tribals, and landless laborers. Colonial laws regarding land acquisition and Eminent Domain have been an important legacy for the postcolonial state in its efforts to acquire land for private capital. They have intersected with notions of race and caste within the habitus of the Indian middle class, whose efforts to make the nation are simultaneously the unmaking of various subaltern groups and classes. Yet, as the struggle between the multinational Vedanta Corporation and a tribal group called the Dongaria Kondh in the Niyamgiri Hills of Odisha in southeastern India demonstrates, the outcomes are by no means a foregone conclusion.

Facing the Death of Nature

Facing the Death of Nature

Environmental Innocence and Slow Violence

Any day now, says teacher in Benh Zeitlins 2012 film, Beasts of Southern Wild, fabric of universe is coming unraveled. Ice caps gonna melt, water's gonna rise, and everything south of levee is going under. Y'all better learn how to survive now. The film poses a nearly unthinkable, yet all too present, question: how does one prepare a small child for a future marked by imminent environmental collapse? The scene of impossible pedagogy stages paradoxical relation between child, so widely theorized as sign of futurity, and her place at what Bill McKibben has called the end of nature (Edelman 2004; Stockton 2009; Sheldon 2013; McKibben 1989). In this essay, I wish to suggest that as a temporal structure and as a form of absence, deeply informs environmental representation, causing it to make special claims on figure of child. I am especially concerned to illuminate negative or nonpresent dimensions of innocence and their affordances for psychic apprehension of environmental harm. As Anne-Lise Francois has observed, privileged environmental figure is precisely one of nonimpact, of leaving no trace-a figure of environmental innocence bound up in Romantic childhood that literature of environmental advocacy works to disallow, asserting instead, and in face of what Francois has identified as nature's withheld response to violence, a call to responsibility (2014, 6). Environmental genres work to expose environmental innocence-a nonculpable earliness or having-time-as a fiction to be strongly countered by a sense of urgency (in reality, we're out of time). Building on Robin Bernstein's analysis of innocence, I suggest that such efforts rest on racialized temporalities of both anticipation (not-yet) and foreclosure (already- over). Environmental innocence plays out against a long-standing shadow drama of specifically environmental black culpability seated in figure of black child. I am especially concerned to illuminate negative or nonpresent dimensions of innocence and their affordances for psychic apprehension of environmental harm. I take Beasts of Southern Wild as an exemplary object for illuminating deep interchanges between environmental innocence and racial innocence by situating it in a longer trajectory of stagings of black childhood, from William Blake poem cited in film's title to Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.Beasts of Southern Wild, filmed in midst of ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill cleanup, is a self-consciously post-Hurricane Katrina environmental narrative set on an outlying Louisiana island that Zeitlin has described as literally forgotten by system (Mohney 2012; Gallot 2012). Through subjective centering of a very young child, Hushpuppy (Quevenzhane Wallis), film seeks to render visualizable what Rob Nixon has called unspectacularizable-indeed, almost imperceptible-slow violence of environmental destruction. Why is a child's subjectivity key to this visualization? And why must that child be a black girl who is frequently conspicuously misidentified by both age and gender? I wish to suggest that film's temporalities of realized formally through adoption of Hushpuppy's fantastical consciousness, depend on a racialized logic of childhood-a logic that film attempts to transcend but ultimately only reinscribes. Yet this is not a one-way street: film's logic also opens out for us environmental forms already present in conceptions of racial revealing wider consequences for environmental genres and representation of slow violence.Temporalities of InnocenceFrom concept of Anthropocene, geological period of humans' mark upon earth, to its calls to urgent action, environmental discourses are deeply implicated in negotiations of time-too much time to comprehend, too little time in which to act (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007; Nixon 2011,12). …

Climate science and slow violence: A view from political geography and STS on mobilizing technoscientific ontologies of climate change

This paper's central concern is to trace how dominant, scientific understanding of climate change is mobilized in ways that set a course towards slow violence. Slow violence is indirect, latent, and results in neglectful human suffering. It can result from particular actions or decisions; it can result from epistemic and political dominance of particular narratives or understandings. This paper takes a constructivist Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective to look at the emergence of a technoscientific understanding of climate change and to consider political geographic implications of this interpretation. Following an overview of inroads already made in applying an STS approach to climate studies, I turn to two examples of specific scientific narratives or practices, reliance on Global Circulation Models by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and carbon data, to consider ways in which selective, political mobilization of these interpretations of climate change may contribute to forms of slow violence. The science in either case is not in question. Instead, the foreclosure of other ways of understanding human-environment interactions is brought about in part by geopolitics as usual and through the work of powerful actors and interests. The paper argues for a re-politicization of climate change and considers examples of alternative narratives and efforts towards equity and transparency.

War's Remains: Slow Violence and the Urbanization of Military Bases in California

Abstract Military bases are extremely polluted places, often contaminated with industrial wastes along with the various chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons of war. Today many former bases are converted to civilian use, a process requiring extensive remediation. The reuse of military bases involves extracting toxic sediments as well as the sedimented histories of war and military violence. This article examines questions of environmental injustice at two base conversion projects in San Francisco—at Naval Station Treasure Island and at the Hunters Point Naval Station—using Rob Nixon's (2011) concept of “slow violence.” Slow violence emphasizes the dispersed and slow moving forms of environmental disaster and toxic suffering, expanding the spatialities and temporalities by which we might understand environmental injustice. In relation to Hunters Point and Treasure Island, the concept of slow violence suggests that these base conversion projects are not simply “cleanups,” or breaks with the military's v...

The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962–2007 by Sally Bachner, Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010) by Aimee Pozorski

<i>The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962–2007</i> by Sally Bachner, <i>Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010)</i> by Aimee Pozorski

Slow Violence and the (Post)Southern Disaster Narrative in Hurston, Faulkner, and Beasts of the Southern Wild

DANIEL SPOTH Eckerd College Slow Violence and the (Post)Southern Disaster Narrative in Hurston, Faulkner, and Beasts of the Southern Wild THE STEREOTYPE OF THE EMBEDDED SOUTHERNER, THE SUBJECT WHO, thoughpotentially offered the opportunity to venture beyond his or her “home place,” nonetheless chooses the simple comforts of the local over the wide world, is utterly intrinsic to representations of the region in twentieth-century media. This concept persists despite the unprecedented fluidity of political borders, the ease of travel, the increasingly multicultural makeup of the South, and the proliferation of micro- (pseudo-, quasi-, anti-, crypto-) Southern sites in contemporary culture. Recent critical work by Martyn Bone, Scott Romine, Leigh Anne Duck, and James Peacock, among many others, has insisted that the South (if it exists at all) must be reconceived as more fluid, problematic, varied, and contradictory than historical studies frequently make it.1 The necessity of this change, these authors assert, is at least partially due to the metamorphosing of Southerners themselves—more mobile, less reactionary, connected to the worldat large rather than excluding it.2 All of these readings could be said to be iconoclastic (though steadily becoming less so), effacing the narratives of provincialism, isolation, backwardness, and unity embodied by the period of early to mid-twentieth century Southern criticism emanating from the Agrarian school and its scions.3 This critical debate is about more than simply 1 See also Smith and Cohn; Jones; and Hobson. 2 Michael Kreyling paints this critical shift in broad strokes in The South that Wasn’t There (2010), stating that “postcolonial theory, leading the way for other theoretical projects, is evicting an earlier critical practice” (11). 3 In fact, Smith and Cohn, the editors of Look Away! (2004), offer their choice of title as a straightforward rebuke to this early criticism; they “wish to refute for good the fetishization of community, hierarchy, place, and so on of another ‘Dixie’-titled anthology: the paradigm of white southern nativism, I’ll Take My Stand.” (13). 146 Daniel Spoth probing for the most profitable areas of academic study, however; the stakes of this argument, and its manifestation in literature, film, and other media, are: how does the South, which has perennially been represented as a site of pastoral desire, actually treat the relationship between humans and the land they inhabit? And what does the nature of that relationship—be it stasis, antagonism, convenience, or harmony—say about how we write our own lives, our own use of the land, into narrative? This essay proposes that the frequently postulated fracturing of the South has its roots considerably deeper than recent demographic and cultural changes would suggest, and that this instability manifests itself in terms of the relationship of Southerners with landscape. The most evocative instances for interpreting this relationship are not Wordsworthian paeans to that landscape recollected in tranquility, but accounts of natural disaster. Representing an event such as Hurricane Katrina, Brad Richard claims in “A Poetics of Disaster,” requires an intimate understanding of not only “the bellicose and paranoid Zeitgeist of the post-9/11 world, but also the ecological and economic histories of the Gulf Coast, the histories of race in America, and many other factors” (162). Addressing disasters in written or visual media requires us to come to terms with rapid and radical alterations of the physical and cultural landscape of a place, and with the human actions, histories, and failures that have preceded it.4 Working from this assumption, this essay will read three separate representations of Southern disaster in literature and film—the flood of 1927 in William Faulkner’s “Old Man,” from If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms] (1939); the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928 in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and the unnamed hurricane in Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). As I will show, Southern media, rather than reinforcing the stereotype of embeddedness, tends to deconstruct its 4 For example, Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires, in their introduction to There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster, call Katrina “a shorthand for a set of economic, social, and political conditions that characterize most of metropolitan...

“I Get a Bad Taste in My Mouth Out Here”: Oil's Intimate Ecologies in HBO's &lt;em&gt;True Detective&lt;/em&gt;

The first season of HBO’s popular series True Detective (2014), set in rural Louisiana, has garnered critical attention due to its postmodern sensibilities, postsecular metaphysics, and its star-studded cast, yet the show’s navigation of the industrial Gulf Coast remains under-examined. This essay focuses on what creator Nic Pizzolatto designates the “third lead” of the show—the poisoned landscapes of Louisiana’s ubiquitous petroleum industry. In a narrative that ostensibly invokes the Southern Gothic to cast its fictional corruption as regional peculiarity, the omnipresent spectacle of the petro-industrial complex implicates transnational networks of capital in the region’s “slow violence.” In this way, True Detective’s oily aesthetic provides a crucial framework through which to examine the ecologies of violence sustained by oil capitalism. Drawing on materialist ecocriticism such as Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology” and Stephanie LeMenager’s “petromelancholia,” this essay argues that True Detective’s visual emphasis on oil, which emerges most provocatively in the main title sequence, offers a crucial aesthetic strategy for representing the ambivalent pleasures and anxieties of US fossil-fuel modernity. As images of bodies and oil continually entangle through superimposition and dissolve, True Detective mobilizes a queer intimacy of human and environment that insists on apprehending petromodernity through its making and unmaking of identities.