In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Generational Timescapes and Biotic Kinship in Omar El Akkad's American WarMichael Boyden (bio)References to future generations and how they might be impacted by decisions in the present abound in climate change communication—from scholarship dealing with the energy transition and climate control, to international agreements, and to public debates in civil society generally. One oft-noted reason why generational views are so frequently invoked in such contexts is that they serve (...) to make tangible otherwise intractable problems so vast in proportion that they tend to confound conventional ways of allocating ethical responsibilities and considerability. Conjuring the ways in which our choices and actions affect the quality of life of concrete individuals to whom we are connected by means of kinship ties awakens the present generation's sense of obligation toward the future.As a number of scholars have noted, however, generational views might also hamper our ability to work toward the kind of sustained transformation of the global economy that is required to ensure that Earth remains inhabitable in the future. In philosophy, political science, and adjacent fields, critiques of generational discourse have revolved around the limitations of governing models of ethics, as in discussions of Derek Parfit's "repugnant conclusion" (388) and in efforts to find new models of distributive justice that depart from utilitarian and contractualist approaches.1 In turn, scholars working in the interdisciplinary frameworks of critical posthumanism and queer feminism have attempted to rethink notions of kinship in ways that consider the ethical value of the nonhuman world and identities not grounded in biological kinship.2In this article, I argue that climate change fiction has the potential to [End Page 11] dramatize the conflicting valences of generational discourse—in ways that less layered, nonfictional narratives often fail to do—and in doing so points up the possibility of conceiving of environmental ethics in a different, less kinship-based fashion. Using Omar El Akkad's American War (2017) as my tutor text, I will argue that this novel presents a potent critique of the kind of generational discourse prevalent in debates about global warming today.My analysis is meant to show how El Akkad's novel, which adopts a markedly transcultural perspective that questions Western exceptionalism, brings out the limitations of—and visualizes alternatives to—the generational schemes through which the consequences of anthropogenic climate change are rendered intelligible. At the same time, I suggest, the novel offers pathways toward conceiving an ecocentric ethical framework that does not reproduce the anthropocentric assumptions of generational discourse.Climate Change and Generational DiscourseI start by defining more closely what we mean when we talk about generations. Political scientist Jonathan White has usefully distinguished three strands of generational views that tend to blend into each other in recent debates on climate change but that deserve to be kept analytically separate. The first of these is the genealogical understanding of generations, which pertains to familial "relations between individuals in their specificity" (765). This genealogical conception of generations has been with us for a long time. It is present, for instance, in biblical texts and classical historiography, which invoke family bonds to justify a given social order. Genealogical views are equally present, however, in modern evolutionary thinking and in the ordinary understanding of the generations of a family. The second strand identified by White is the sociological understanding of generations, which refers to "social groups defined by an apparent unity of ideas and attributes, irrespective of personal ties" (765). Sociological generations convey differences between young and old, or progressive and backward-looking forces, in times of societal transformation. Scholars trace this sociological conception of generations back to the nineteenth century, when the forces of industrialism and nationalism [End Page 12] magnified experiential divergences among social groups. Finally, White considers philosophical generations, which refer to "a society at different moments of existence" (765). Here, we may think of postrevolutionary contexts, when the clock is figuratively turned to zero and a new understanding of the social order emerges. Contrary to genealogical and sociological schemes, such philosophical generations are not grounded in a specific empirical formation; rather, they constitute a conceptual formula for organizing the (long-term) future.What makes generational... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dogs and MonstersObservations on the Evacuation of Afghanistan and the Intersection of Human Rights and the AnthropoceneK. M. Ferebee (bio)On August 28, 2021, former Royal Marine and charity worker Pen Farthing was evacuated from Afghanistan with almost two hundred dogs and cats that his Kabul animal charity, Nowzad Dogs, had rescued. The role of the British government in this evacuation remains hotly contested: At the time, the British Ministry (...) of Defence tweeted (Fig. 1) that Farthing's escape had been assisted by the British military, but Farthing later disputed this claim and argued that his rescue was not the result of high-level intervention in the British government. In January 2022 controversy erupted around the emergence of documents suggesting that Prime Minister Boris Johnson had lied to Parliament about the personal role that he played in just such an intervention. Notably, Nowzad's Afghan staff members were not evacuated alongside Farthing and the animals, though they would eventually escape to Pakistan. Following Farthing's escape, the British government failed to evacuate hundreds of British citizens and residents (Merriman and Ghouri), as well as many more Afghans who had worked on behalf of British forces. The Nowzad Dogs evacuation became a site of symbolic struggle over Britain's respect (or lack thereof) for human rights. "What a story to tell the world: Britain values dogs more than Afghan people," the headline of an opinion piece in the Guardian (Hinsliff) read.The story of Nowzad Dogs is interesting to me not only as a tale of human-nonhuman relations, but also because I was, at the time it occurred, volunteering within the Afghan aid community to assist relatives of a friend, British Afghans who had been visiting Kabul when the government [End Page 52] collapsed. The family repeatedly asked for assistance from the British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office—assistance that never appeared. Ultimately, due to the generosity of donors and the coordination of a volunteer team, the family was able to flee to Pakistan, where they boarded a commercial flight to London. This case was a particularly stark and powerful illustration of the negotiations of rights and value that took place during and following the evacuation. It seemed nonsensical, in August 2021, to suppose that British citizens, including British children (the family I worked with included a six- and an eleven-year-old who were British citizens), would be abandoned while Afghan dogs had their rights prioritized. As I hope to demonstrate here, however, such an incident becomes comprehensible and even logical when it is understood as part of a specifically Anthropocene manifestation of subjectivity.Upendra Baxi suggests that 1948's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) marks a broad shift from the era of "modern" (42) human rights (which began with the American and French Revolutions) to the era of "contemporary" (42) human rights. His periodization links these eras in human rights to shifts in the ideology of capitalism and empire. The "modern" era of human rights, he writes, "signals a whole variety of ideological 'justifications' for colonization and world domination" and "provides a register of major development in industrial capitalism" (42), while the "contemporary" era of human rights "is based on the premise of radical self-determination" (46). Such a periodization also brings human rights into close alignment with the Anthropocene, which is rooted in the capitalist-colonial Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, yet often dated most concretely to the circa-1950 shift that some (such as J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke) label the "Great Acceleration." Indeed, one could reasonably appropriate Baxi's terms and speak of "modern" and "contemporary" Anthropocenes mapped identically onto the global timeline.I propose to use the 2021 Afghan evacuation as a site from which to explore how human rights and the Anthropocene have together coproduced certain forms of subjectivity that are essential for the continued smooth functioning of world-ecological capitalism. These new forms of subjectivity are necessary to sustain the important fiction of individual [End Page 53] agency and value and conceal the ways in which the Anthropocene moment renders this fiction meaningless. Ultimately, I paint a picture of an Anthropocene without any human agency at all. I want... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Tracing the Anthropocene and Entangled Trauma in Yashar Kemal's NovelsMore-Than-Human Lives in the Post-Ottoman WorldDeniz Gündoǧan Ibrişim (bio)Yashar Kemal (1923–2015), one of Turkey's most prominent Kurdish-Turkish novelists and human rights activists, largely engages with the southern Turkish countryside, which the author himself had known well in his early life.1 Kemal is commonly recognized as the writer of Çukurova or the Clician Plain (Cilicia Pedias in antiquity), a large fertile (...) plain in southern Turkey. The plain covers the easternmost areas of Mersin Province, southern and central Adana Province, Western Osmaniye, and Northwestern Hatay, and it has been a major place of anthropogenic change and industrialization since the 1930s, in the aftermath of transition from the Ottoman Empire to the modern Republic. Kemal presents the severe impact of the destruction of the forests and the draining of the swamps on the nature of the local people, whose way of life was transformed by this anthropogenic uprooting during the modernization and industrialization brought about by successive political and environmental administrations in post-Ottoman Turkey:The earth was covered with woods from Misis to the Mediterranean Sea in the olden days. There is a tree called Kars. Due to the fact that the Kars tree grows there the place was called Kars for a long time.... Now there is nothing; not one single tree until the Mediterranean. Historians write that the land was a great forest even in the 19th century. This was stated in a letter of Cevdet Pasha written in 1865.... Hundreds, even thousands of [End Page 32] tractors entered the Çukurova, everything happened overnight, so to say. Farm workers digging the earth to a depth of 75 centimeters were left with nothing to eat and nowhere to dwell, left with no forest, no Kars, no tree, no cane thickets, no bushes, and no swamps. I witnessed unbelievable destruction. The Çukurova turned into a desert of agriculture. This is the reality of our century, the actual conditions of our times.(qtd. in Andaç 61–62; my translation)I suggest that Kemal's lamentation here introduces non-Western stories, placing post-Ottoman vulnerability and resilience into the Anthropocene, our current geological era in which humans as a collective are said to have become a geophysical force on a planetary scale.2 The above excerpt encourages the reader to embark on an alternative reading in which the anthropogenic changes have deep and environmentally damaging roots in the Middle Eastern region, including Turkey (see Inal and Turhan 1–9). Despite the global and universal staging of the Anthropocene within North America and Western Europe, it is crucial here to underscore how the Anthropocene renders both a global process of anthropogenic climate change and a local laying down of industrial change in other landscapes and cities beyond its Eurocentric roots and routes.Within this context, this article argues that Kemal's literary works speak well to the concerns of the Anthropocene epoch, characterized by rapid and fundamental human-driven alterations of Earth, revealing longue duree linkages between weather, war, industrialization, empire, agriculture, urbanization, and deforestation that have created extraordinary changes on local and global scales. In the above passage, where we read the loss of the woods from Misis to the Mediterranean, Kemal manifests an acute awareness that the tree already disappears amid a vanishing ecosystem. Elsewhere, Kemal recounts the destruction of the forests and swamps that grants the Çukurova region its richness and vitality. At the same time, he shows how the particular process of deforestation dramatically changes ordinary lives of both human and nonhuman communities in the area during the modernizing and westernizing processes in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire. This dramatic change is illustrated in Hüyükteki Nar Ağacı (The Pomegranate Tree on the Knoll). Andaç quotes Kemal as follows: [End Page 33]Çukurova was a whole forest of pomegranate trees from here to the sea at one time. In spring and summer time, these trees would be covered with red blossoms, so that the whole area from here to Ayas would be all red and would wave like the sea. Black snakes used to mate... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comparative Critical Perspectives on the AnthropoceneAn IntroductionAdeline Johns-Putra (bio) and Xianmin Shen (bio)Ever since Eugene Stoermer coined the term Anthropocene in the 1980s and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Crutzen identified the present period as the Anthropocene, this ecological and geographical concept has been adopted in other disciplines beyond the realm of science and has taken on particular resonance in the environmental humanities. This is because the advent of the (...) Anthropocene not only connotes a physical phenomenon, that is, a possible new geological epoch in which the damaging effect of the human species on all other species and on our planetary home has become so great as to leave a mark in the planet's fabric. It is also a revelation of human liability and responsibility, in which that stratigraphical scar must be recognized and the global socioeconomic dynamics of exceptionalism and exploitation that it belies reckoned with. This reckoning is one between those with the greatest responsibility for that impact, who are also the ones who will feel that impact least, and those with the least responsibility, who will feel that impact most. Moreover, those vulnerabilities lie with both human and nonhuman individuals: the Anthropocene demands that human-nonhuman as well as intra-human injustices are dealt with, that the ways in which global systems are interlocked with planetary ones are properly understood.Such questions of justice require a critical response, in various senses of the word and its origins. This encompasses a measure of scrutiny and critique; an honest judgment and even criticism of faults and shortcomings; and an awareness of urgency and crisis. With this in mind, and with both planetary and global questions of justice before us, we have [End Page 1] sought with this special issue of Intertexts to bring together analyses of sociocultural representations and discourse in the widest sense (not just literary or other artistic texts, but political events). We asked that these analyses consider how such discourse has been shaped by global workings now taken for granted—the trappings of modernity and the impulses of capitalism—and also to ponder the potential for reshaping those dynamics as part of a collective consciousness.Anthropocene Criticality: The Planetary, the Global, and the WorldWhat kind of Anthropocene criticality would be both an act of recognition of human responsibility and a reckoning across boundaries (whether intra- or interspecies) of agency, power, and vulnerability? How, in other words, do we take full stock of what is signified by anthropos in the term Anthropocene? We invoke here a range of frames for understanding the place of anthropos both as and within the collective that experiences—altogether but not all the same—the Anthropocene. We call these the "planetary," the "global," and the "world."1 We are not the first to distinguish between these terms and to employ them as devices for (re)framing and (re)visualizing the web of human-nonhuman as well as human-human relationships. In 1999, Gayatri Spivak spoke of the "imperative to re-imagine the planet" and, in this talk and updates of it in 2012 and 2014, outlined the need to contemplate "planetarity" instead of "globalism" (An Aesthetic Education, 335–50). In the fields of comparative literature and world literature, debates have occurred over what Pheng Cheah suggests is the encroachment of ideas of "globalization" on to notions of "worldliness" (28), with the question complicated more recently by what Sarah Nuttall sees as the possibility for a "planetary literature" (924–41). What we offer here adopts and adapts these conversations, and as we define and deploy our terms below we will indicate how these overlap.Under the rubric of the "planetary" we place Anthropocene discussions of how to truly comprehend the human as species and as geological agent, that is, both as one species of many and as a species that has occupied an outsized positionality alongside any other species (even [End Page 2] the idea of an "alpha species" seems hardly to do justice to the magnitude of anthropogenic effect on every inch of the biospheric fabric, from the deepest oceans to the upper levels of atmosphere, lasting for millennia). This is not merely about sentimental catch-phrasing... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Extractivist OntologiesLithium Mining and Anthropocene Imaginaries in Chile's Atacama DesertMauricio F. Collao Quevedo (bio)The term energy transition generally refers to efforts to switch from one energy system to another. In light of the current climate crisis, energy transition projects have sought to move societies away from their reliance on fossil fuels and toward a renewables-based energy system. Yet such projects have not been easy to undertake. As Marie Forget (...) and Vincent Bos point out, an energy system based on renewables requires a transformation of energy "regulatory frameworks, technical and organizational structures, geographic forms and network practices" (1). More specifically, current energy transition models rely on the expansion of lithium production, accompanying systems of private property rights, and complex logistical and technical strategies. This article examines the interplay between lithium extraction, national development, and Anthropocene imaginaries in Chile's Atacama Desert, arguing that the green brand of extractivism that characterizes the industry relies on elaborate institutional arrangements aimed at expanding and protecting extractivist ontological and epistemological regimes in the politically contested region. As such, struggles over lithium in Chile's Atacama region demonstrate the extent to which efforts to decolonize the Anthropocene and make possible non-extractive futures of collective survival must unfold on ontological grounds, against the consolidation of the Age of Man.Mining, Water Rights, and Indigenous Communities in the Atacama DesertAmong today's most promising energy sources and materials are sodium, copper, sulfur, nickel, cobalt, rare earth metals, and lithium. These [End Page 78] have become central to energy transition strategies and states seeking to attract investors for development (Lunde Seefeldt). As a report by the World Bank points out, demand for transition minerals like lithium, cobalt, and graphite could increase by 500% by 2050 ("Climate-Smart Mining"), highlighting the extent to which global energy transition efforts are counting on greater extraction of transition minerals and the expansion of extractive frontiers to previously unexplored or unexploited regions (Moore, Capitalism; World Bank Group). Lithium is at the center of this economic and technological shift toward green economies.Global lithium demand is growing rapidly, with investment and production rates growing significantly in recent years (Narins) and catching the attention of states (e.g., China) and corporate tech giants (e.g., Tesla) that are already trying to secure greater shares of the global market. The light metal's popularity is largely due to its internal chemistry, which meets many of the technical and practical requirements associated with green energy transition. Lithium is light, conducive, and energy-dense, which in the context of batteries means faster recharge, lower costs, and charge-holding abilities that make lithium-ion batteries more efficient than a nickel-metal hybrid equivalent (Perotti and Coviello). Because of this, lithium is increasingly being considered as promising for human development and survival as its energy predecessors, inspiring labels such as "white gold," "white petroleum," "the new copper," "the 21st century's petroleum," or the "new gasoline" of sustainability (Acuña and Tironi; Lunde Seefeldt; Voskoboynik and Andreucci).But the industry is not without its downsides. The negative impacts of lithium extraction in Chile's Atacama Desert have been challenged by local communities for whom the metal does not exist as a discrete entity that can be easily extracted from its socioecological context. For many of these communities, lithium is more than a transition metal found in an appropriable and materially heterogenous underground brine: it is an ontologically contested, socioecological entity that sustains and participates in complex webs of life-supporting, place-based, and more-than-human relations. Such accounts of the brine are radically incompatible with "official" state accounts of it, which are maintained through an institutional architecture that allows the ontological basis of the brine to be manipulated for extractive purposes by both corporate and state actors.In the following pages, I examine the ways in which Chile's legal and institutional arrangements, informed by imaginaries of green modernization, [End Page 79] create conditions under which extralocal actors can manipulate along extractivist lines the ontological ambiguity and material heterogeneity of lithium-containing brines in the salt flats of the Atacama Desert. Through an analysis of the ways in which lithium industries in the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Contemporary IlluminationsReading Donne's "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day through Three Twenty-First-Century PoemsTheresa M. DipasqualeIn his contribution to the 2017 volume John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Judith Scherer Herz, Jonathan F. S. Post explores "a nearly endless landscape of comparisons and contrasts" that unfolds between Stephen Edgar's 2008 poem "Nocturnal" and Donne's "A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day."1 Post's essay illuminates what Calvin (...) Bedient, in the same volume, calls the "great glacier-gloom" of Donne's "Nocturnall," its devastated "solemnity."2 In doing so, Post renders largely moot many questions that have preoccupied critics of Donne's poem: whether or how this poem reflects Donne's experience; whether the woman lamented by the speaker is a fiction or a historical person lamented by the poet; and if the latter, whether the poem mourns the 1617 death of John Donne's wife, Anne More Donne; the 1627 death of Donne's patroness Lucy, Countess of Bedford; or the Countess' near-fatal illness in 1612–13.3 These biographical and historical questions are not without value, but they draw the critic's attention away from more compelling questions regarding the "I" of the poem—a persona who claims not to be a person at all, but an inscription, a grave, "A quintessence" derived or "expresse[d]/... even from nothingnesse."4In this article, I widen and intensify the pool of light cast on Donne's "Nocturnall" by Post's presentist and intertextual analysis of Edgar's poem, examining three of the many other twenty-first-century poems that tap into Donne's poem, allude to it, quote it, adopt its structure, or respond to the anguish it expresses.5 Each of the three I discuss is [End Page 1] luminous in its own right but also a potent critical response to Donne's five-stanza poem. Each teaches something different about Donne's lyric. The poets whose work I consider—Liz Lochhead, Jay Wright, and Meena Alexander—all address twenty-first-century concerns; they grapple with questions and sorrows beyond the scope of Donne's conscious imagining yet latent in his poem. Each picks up where critics leave off when they "assume," as Alison R. Rieke notes, "that the speaker... is a husband or lover, possibly Donne, who experiences grief upon his wife's or mistress' death."6 Each takes up the challenge that Donne's persona issues when it denies that it is either "a man" (30) or any other living thing.In the first stanza of "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day," this anti-persona observes that "all" other things around it are "Dead and enterr'd" and "yet" that "all these seeme to laugh, / Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph" (8–9). If it is an incised text rather than a human being, the poem's "mee" can no more speak than laugh; it is as silent as the grave it marks or as the dead flesh interred there. Indeed, it goes on to claim that it is "every dead thing" and that love's alchemical "art" has "expresse[d] / A quintessence even from" this mass of nonliving objects, this "nothingnesse" (12, 14–15). Struggling to define its anti-essential essence, it declares itself a mass burial site: "I, by loves limbecke, am the grave / Of all, that's nothing" (21–22). An epitaph, dead things, nothingness, a grave: all these are silent. And yet, in Donne's poem, they strenuously assert their nonbeing; they pulse with a paradoxically audible sense of self. After "Compar'd with mee" in the final line of the opening stanza, the reader encounters sixteen additional instances of the first-person singular in the poem's forty-five lines: "my" appears once, "mee" five times, and "I" eleven times. And the "I" issues a directive to readers: commanding, in the opening line of stanza 2, "Study me then, you who shall lovers bee" (10). But those who obey this order, making themselves students of the poem's inscribed nothingness, find themselves dismissed in the poem's final stanza. Having insisted that its "Sunne" will never "renew... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Echoes of Romanticism and Expatriate Englishness in Charlotte Brontë's The ProfessorDavid SiglerCharlotte Brontë's many debts to Romanticism, and especially Lord Byron, are a well-known feature of her fiction. Yet only recently has this become an important part of the discussion surrounding The Professor, her first-written and last-published novel. The novel, written between 1844 and 1846 and published posthumously in 1857, is increasingly seen to be in dialogue with William (...) Wordsworth and Walter Scott, in addition to Byron. Anna Barton, seeing Brontë as "the pupil of Wordsworthian Romanticism" and "a daughter of Romanticism," shows how The Professor develops "intertextual exchanges that perform the failure of the Romantic lyric within the Victorian novel."1 Tanya Llewellyn has argued that the protagonist William Crimsworth, seemingly influenced by Byron's Turkish tales, Orientalizes the women in his life as a way to manage sexual threats.2 Mandy Swann, meanwhile, sees in Brontë's early work an ambivalent response to the Romantic figure of the poet-prophet, as part of the author's general struggle, early in her career, to theorize female creativity.3Yet in other recent accounts, William Crimsworth seems to be as un-Byronic and un-Wordsworthian as possible. Crimsworth has been said to be a "particularly off-putting" narrator, "defensive and humourless," whose "dubious masculinity," passionlessness, and, in one reading, stiflingly repressed homosexuality render him a comically overliteral thinker.4 I will suggest that this incapacity in him for meaningful human engagement is what leads him to fixate on British Romantic poetry as a solution, however backhanded, to his erotic and professional difficulties. [End Page 30] Yet as the echoes of Romanticism that haunt his erotic and professional relations quickly take on lives of their own, they enable the story, and its ethical vision, to exceed William's control. Once the novel directs its protagonist's obsessive personality in the direction of Romantic poetry, it can become an intriguing meditation on ethics, expatriate Englishness, and time.William Crimsworth is a hardworking Englishman living and working in Brussels. The city, which William finds too "cosmopolitan," becomes the site of his zealous self-exploration as he mingles, ever defensively, with the locals.5 Approaching the city like "a morning traveller," as he puts it, William must analyze his foreignness if he is to survive his own residual and aspirational Englishness.6 The phrase "morning traveller" is drawn from Robert Southey's 1798 poem "The Traveller's Return," which describes love as an echo-effect. It is a very auditory poem: Southey's "morning traveller" spends the day listening to unfamiliar sounds, until, in the evening, he hears a "distant sheep-bell," which teaches him that "sweetest is the voice of Love / That welcomes his return."7 A sheep bell is, of course, a tracking mechanism, facilitating the free movement and eventual return of sheep to a shepherd. Southey's speaker learns to grasp the hidden similarity between love and the sheep bell. Just as the sound of the bell goes away and comes back, signifying the wandering and return of livestock, the human "morning traveller" must begin to identify with it. He himself, hearing the sound, gets interpellated by it, once it becomes his objective correlative. Brontë's The Professor, in matters of love, uses Romantic poetry, including Southey's, as a similar tracking device for William. The echo it produces constantly and ambivalently connects the protagonist to England and secures his place within the ideological apparatuses of the state.Judith Butler has observed that "my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others."8 She explains that because there are aspects of oneself that remain forever baffling and inexplicable, we should suppose that other people—who can also seem foreign and inexplicable—contain similar aporias. If their accounts of themselves are difficult for us to understand, we should recognize, through our inability to sympathize, that we too are surely baffling and that they, like us, are likely also baffling to themselves. Thus, [End Page 31] through the sheer dubiousness of understanding other people, we can achieve a kind of negative shared humanity. We all probably confront an inassimilable kernel... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Names Alive Are Like the Names in GravesBlack Life and Black Social Death in Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future AssassinLee Spinks"After blackness was invented / people began seeing ghosts."1One of the most powerful and provoking responses to the political rise of Donald Trump appeared with the 2018 publication of Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Hayes began writing these poems (...) straight after Trump's remarkable triumph in the 2016 presidential election, and they race to keep pace with the rapidly metastasizing effects of the Trump phenomenon, from his relentless radicalization of the modes and mores of political speech ("Newshounds ponder the tweets of a bullhorn"), his continuous assault on American democratic institutions, and his singular success in marshalling a newly cohesive political constituency seduced by the reactionary allure of resurgent white nationalism or what Hayes caustically calls "a mandate for whiteness, virility, sovereignty / stupidity" (AS: 38).2 As the phrase "mandate for whiteness" suggests, integral to the story of Trump's ascendancy in American Sonnets is another story, a story about race and social authority in the time of Black Lives Matter when blackness remains "the color of this country's current threat / advisory" (AS: 10). At home and abroad the appalling incandescence of Hayes's contemporary American political moment is reflected by the names of its black victims, names like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and, perhaps most explosively of all, George Floyd, whose May 2020 police killing on a Minneapolis street reprised such a familiar configuration of racial power that Hayes had already glimpsed its spectral outline two years earlier: "A [End Page 60] brother has to know how to time travel & doctor / himself when a knee or shoe stalls against his neck" (AS: 77).3Without compromising the intensity of Hayes's focus on this contemporary social emergency, I want in what follows to expand our sense of the historical and metaphysical scene of his writing by reading it as an imaginative response to a larger and more fundamental question: What does it mean to live a black life in an antiblack world? I'm moved to do so by the double register of his writing vividly exemplified by the penultimate sonnet in the sequence which memorializes "All the black people I'm tired of losing / All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson / Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago / Baltimore, where the names alive are / Like the names in graves" (AS: 81). What's remarkable, to my mind at least, about the phrase "the names alive are / like the names in graves" is its fusion of a directly contemporary perception of the precariousness of black existence within a culture of white supremacy (the perception that every black life could share the social fate of Tamir Rice at any particular moment) with an encompassing metaphysical vision of blackness as the embodiment of social death and the continuing afterlife of slavery. Paying close attention to several of Hayes's poems, I will trace this double register to explore a number of ideas central to his thinking in American Sonnets including the foundational role of antiblackness in organizing American reality for both black and white identities, the dialectical relationship between antiblackness and the libidinal economy of white supremacy, and the hope of imagining new possibilities of life capable of contesting the antiblack conditions of contemporary social existence.4 In doing so I will place particular emphasis on Hayes's development of a distinctively dialectical and dialogical style of poetic address that reimagines lyric subjectivity as a drama of racial becoming focused on the relationship between black social death and the culture of white supremacy.5Black Social Death and the Libidinal Economy of WhitenessBefore continuing let me briefly develop three ideas above which help shape my reading of American Sonnets: the social life of social death, the continuing afterlife of slavery, and what Hayes calls in my epigraph "the [End Page 61] invention of blackness." The first draws on the Afropessimist radicalization of Orlando Patterson's famous redescription of slavery as social death that sees the slave as a "social nonperson" whose relation to... (shrink)