EARTHLY ENTANGLEMENTS
EDITED BY RIANNA TURNER
“Earthly entanglements” describes the knotty set of relations manacling things and beings that share a planetary home. Animal, vegetable, and mineral all depend on one another for survival. These entanglements—though they invoke intimacies and demand ethical openings—may bind imagined futurities. A question and provocation: what’s ‘the future’ after heat death? What’s ‘the future’ but the specter of destructive pasts, Benjamin’s Angel of History breathing petrochemical fumes? The reviews in this section ask how ‘futurity’ as a keyword for scholarship and criticism might accommodate the limitations and demands of environmental crisis, the very anthropogenic phenomena that places futurity in question.
Michael Mason reviews Brenda Hillman’s poetry collection In a Few Minutes Before Later, a work of ecopoetics that uses poetic forms as strategies for indexing human and nonhuman life. The poems link our endangered world to the endangered words tasked with its measurement, description, and appreciation. While “in a few minutes before later” could simply mean “right now,” Mason describes the poems as methods for discovering new futures and timescales in more-than-human life. In Mason’s words, Hillman “marks time while making it,” as if “according to the hidden laws of Hillman’s poetics, the poems were dissolving habitual time—and with it, habitual feeling—in anticipation of futures our habits obscure.”
These entanglements are not only evident in human language and its forms, but intellectual formations: namely, Darwinism. The next two reviews take up Darwinism’s afterlives in literature and politics. These reviews demonstrate, though, that Darwinian frameworks have various implications for the project of defining ‘humanity.’ Carla Christina Hustak, in The Politics of Love: Sex Reformers and the Nonhuman, writes that in the wake of social Darwinism, even affects as seemingly-obvious as ‘love’ become linked to the construction of the ‘human.’ Halley Roberts’s review of Hustak’s work points out the ways in which ‘love’ as a definitional quality of human sexuality is a result of both (1) scientific testing on nonhuman animals and (2) the sex reform movement’s racialized motivation to separate so-called civilized sexualities from deviant sexualities. Though love was marshaled in science and politics to make humanity singular, “love’s temporalities are genealogical, connective, fluctuating, and recurring, rather than linear.” Allen MacDuffie, in Climate of Denial: Darwin, Climate Change, and the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, tracks how Victorian (and some modern) authors responded to Darwin’s reconceptualization of Man as Homosapien: just another organism in the taxonomy. Michael Vaclav’s review emphasizes how the metacognitive work required to hold two contrasting views—humans are singular, humans are another component of the natural world—lays the cognitive ground for contemporary climate denialism.
As this section’s turn to the nineteenth-century indicates, ‘entanglement’ also refers to imperialism’s attendant flows of capital and labor. These flows are global, earthly, binding individuals, nation-states, and the resources they carry. The final reviews in this section consider the economic and political effects of globalization and resource extraction, and probe what may constitute an adequate contemporary response to these histories. Nathaniel Wachtel reviews Brett Christophers’s The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save The Planet, an explanation and critique of the global electricity markets that continue to render renewable energy investments unfavorable. Wachtel points out that “the value of this hefty study is in its detailed attention to market structures and its refreshingly informed left critique of market policies,” and the author’s “refusal to moralize the private sector as a force for public good.” The imperialist’s tools will only further dismantle everyone’s house. Allison Pujol reviews Jenna Hanchey’s The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO, a work that asks “what it means for aid work to collapse on itself,” a pressing inquiry in the immediate wake of the February 3 executive order pausing all funds Congress appropriated to USAID. Hanchey coins “haunting reflexivity,” a process and method by which individual actors revisit and comprehend the effects of colonialism, and models this method with an assemblage of auto-ethnography and systems theory. Hanchey concludes that decolonial transformations cannot occur within colonial structures; NGOs must collapse and rebuild to meet the needs of the communities they serve. Lastly, Junika Hawker-Thompson reviews Oneka LaBennett’s Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond, another work mobilizing autoethnography to critique Western resource extraction and capital accumulation. Hawker-Thompson writes that the work “sweeps together Guyanese ecology, social processes of racialization and gender, and resource extraction” to unsettle the erasure and erosion of these histories in Guyanese and colonial archives. Thus, resource extraction and labor extraction are parallel processes; the gendered and racialized conception of the human (back to the European eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) imbued in Western science and ethics burrows into the soil.
These reviews evince that ‘earthly’ entanglements are not simply spatial. They don’t only tie us to each other via touch, or via the planet we sense and share. Earthly entanglements are temporal, binding us to the ecological and intellectual histories that sculpt and whittle potential futures.
