Christopher Lloyd

‘Family territory’ to the ‘circumference of the earth’: local and planetary memories of climate change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour

ABSTRACT This article argues that Barbara Kinsolver’s novel Flight Behaviour (2012) responds to the transformations of climate change by charting interactions between local and planetary environments, prompting readers to contextualise the micro – geographically bounded human experience and memory – within the macro context of the Anthropocene. As a long-standing process in the past, present and future, climate change requires epistemological frames attuned to complex scales of time and place which are central to this special issue’s interest in planetary memory. In accordance with these dynamics, the novel suggests a definition of planetary memory in which remembrance is both human (and global) as well as more-than-human (exceeding the global, moving to the planetary). The novel is also explicitly concerned with imagining (or re-membering) the future as much as the past and present. Echoing the dynamics of the novel itself, the article works from the ground up, beginning with a consideration of the environmental contexts of Tennessee, Appalachia and the South, before moving to a wider sense of the planetary. In all, though rooted in a specific part of the rural South, Kingsolver’s novel has an imaginative reach beyond its pages and locale.

Conclusion: Corporealizing Southern Studies

This conclusion ties together the previous chapters and restates the central premise of the book: that the corporeal legacies of slavery onward are manifest through bodies in contemporary culture set in the US South. The chapter calls for a corporealized southern studies, a broad mode of analysis that attends to the materialization of the body in many forms and guises. Pointing to other texts that southern studies might examine in this framework—Bitter in the Mouth or Sing, Unburied, Sing, for instance—as well as other theoretical modes—like disability studies or the new materialisms—the book’s conclusion suggests the many more routes that this project might travel. The body, here, continues to matter, as matter.

The Home of Jim Crow: Toilets and Matter in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help

This chapter looks at another charged site in the US (southern) imaginary: the home, and particularly the bathroom. It analyzes Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help (2010) through the lens of embodiment in and around toilets, especially the materialization of feces and urine. Extending the psycho/somatic logics of Chap. 2, the chapter shows how the black body in this historical novel is shaped by Jim Crow segregation in the southern home. Beginning with a brief discussion of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), the chapter then goes on to survey the continual toileting of The Help’s characters and a major plot point that involves a chocolate pie filled with feces primarily through the lens of psychoanalysis. While academic commentators have largely critiqued the book, the argument here is that its representations of bodily waste and instability reveal legacies of the US past.

The Plantation to the Penitentiary: Monster’s Ball and Bodies at Their Limits

This chapter explores the historical trajectory from the southern plantation to the contemporary prison’s regulation of black bodies. Reading Marc Forster’s film Monster’s Ball (2001) in light of this racialized continuum, the chapter argues that the film traffics in physical, psychic, and geographical spaces of southern memory. Following the film’s focus on its characters’ bodies—vomiting, breathless, fat, thin, incarcerated—the argument is that memories of violence in the past are traced through to contemporary practices in the present. Beginning with a discussion of the plantation to penitentiary narrative, the chapter tracks bodies that are both static and also coming apart. The film embeds memory into southerners that live in the shadow of the prison and its past.

The Plantation to the Apocalypse: Zombies and the Non/Human in The Walking Dead and A Questionable Shape

This chapter continues to think about the legacies of the plantation in contemporary texts by focusing on two zombie narratives: AMC’s television series The Walking Dead (2010–) and Bennett Sims’ novel A Questionable Shape (2013). Beginning with a consideration of the post-apocalyptic genre in the southern imaginary, the chapter then reviews the zombie’s ubiquity in contemporary culture and theory. Tracking the zombie’s transnational history requires an understanding of its roots in slavery, the Middle Passage, and thus in questions of life and death. Thinking about these ideas briefly in relation to The Walking Dead, the chapter turns to Sims’ novel for the way it engages questions of the human and memories of southern disaster. The novel’s focus on the zombie as an emblem of memory will be discussed in relation to biopolitics, racializing assemblages, and the turn to the posthuman.

“Fabric of the Universe Is Comin’ Unraveled”: Beasts of the Southern Wild, from Flesh to Planet

This chapter argues that Benh Zeitlin’s film Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), in its scalar attention to flesh and the planet, dramatizes corporeal legacies that inhere in, and transcend, the US South. Beginning with a consideration of the non/human beasts in “the Bathtub” (the film’s island location), the chapter then goes on to show how a big storm that displaces the protagonists evokes memories of Hurricane Katrina in particular and the crisis of the Anthropocene in general. Exploring the overlaps between humans, animals, matter, and environment will reveal how Beasts scales up and down from racialized flesh to a planetary perspective.

“Everything Deserve to Live”: Salvage the Bones, Hurricane Katrina, and Animals

Examining Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (2011), this chapter looks at how this novel represents notions of vulnerability and precarity across species lines, especially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and longstanding racial dispossession. The chapter unpacks the knotty world of multispecies life, first through the novel’s obvious comparisons between people and nonhuman animals, and then through the character Skeetah, who is close to his pit bull. Ending with a consideration of the “flesh,” as articulated by the novel and Black studies, the chapter shows how, embroiled in the non/human world of the US South, Salvage the Bones configures corporeal legacies in creaturely ways.

The topographies of literary study

Pedagogic criticism, Ben Knights argues in this wide-ranging and thoughtful book, is an attempt to “bring into focus the transactions between the study and interpretation of texts and the social forms and rituals of pedagogy” (1). Knights draws together a historiography of the rise of English Studies in the UK, literary criticism, close readings of writers from Henry James to Annie Proulx, as well as critical reflections on pedagogy. Entangling both the study of literature and teaching demonstrates how “pedagogic criticism involves reading texts through teaching, and teaching through texts” (1). This simple formulation is the book’s key strength: it is across the topography of the teaching–reading relationship that Knights mounts his thesis. Pedagogic Criticism argues that the study of English should be “conceptualised as a border subject” (9). The shape and substance of this discipline—caught on the edges of other subject areas, rooted in networks and spaces of learning, built from a variety of perspectives and orientations—is such that Knights’ book traffics in images of spatiality: from “topographies” and “boundaries” to “landscapes,” (158–159) and “places on the fringe” (188), as well as corporeal geographies like “interiority,” “membranes” and “excised tissue” (198). The “energies generated at and across borders” (9) drive the book’s intellectual journey. Knights maps numerous of historical, theoretical, literary and pedagogic encounters: for instance, he argues that “The space of teaching is a threshold, a liminal or transitional space” (6). As middle space, the classroom mirrors the discipline of English, which is multivalent. In chapter 1, Knights argues that pedagogic discourse has led us to see “Education as a ‘becoming’” (3), both at an individual and group level. Such ongoing transformation plays out in the relationship between student, teacher

Sexual Perversity in New York

This chapter explores Lena Dunham’s Girls through an examination of sexuality and its ‘self-shattering’ effects. Framed by queer and psychoanalytic theory, Lloyd explores a few scenes from the early episodes of Girls that present sex as awkward, erotic, and shattering. Though the series has a narrow sociocultural window, alternative sexualities are still viscerally present throughout. Following Linda Williams’s notion of ‘screening’ sex on television and Lauren Berlant’s conception of cruel optimism, this chapter tracks the ways in which sex is seen as a mode of social and sensual attachment, as well as its undoing, for these white New Yorkers in the twenty-first century. Borrowing its title from David Mamet’s play, this chapter ultimately asks what sexual perversity looks like on the small screen today.