Dana Phillips

Mapping Common Ground: Ecocriticism, Environmental History, and the Environmental Humanities

The emergence of the environmental humanities presents a unique opportunity for scholarship to tackle the human dimensions of the environmental crisis. It might finally allow such work to attain the critical mass it needs to break out of customary disciplinary confines and reach a wider public, at a time when natural scientists have begun to acknowledge that an understanding of the environmental crisis must include insights from the humanities and social sciences. In order to realize this potential, scholars in the environmental humanities need to map the common ground on which close interdisciplinary cooperation will be possible. This essay takes up this task with regard to two fields that have embraced the environmental humanities with particular fervour, namely ecocriticism and environmental history. After outlining an ideal of slow scholarship which cultivates thinking across different spatiotemporal scales and seeks to sustain meaningful public debate, the essay argues that both ecocriticism and environmental history are concerned with practices of environing: each studies the material and symbolic transformations by which “the environment” is configured as a space for human action. Three areas of research are singled out as offering promising models for cooperation between ecocriticism and environmental history: eco-historicism, environmental justice, and new materialism. Bringing the fruits of such efforts to a wider audience will require environmental humanities scholars to experiment with new ways of organizing and disseminating knowledge.

Thoreau's Aesthetics and 'The Domain of the Superlative'

Recently, “ecocritics” have tried to show how literature might help us weather the global environmental crisis both emotionally and intellectually. Their arguments have been based, in part, on the assumption that despite its obvious strengths natural science has well-defined intellectual and ethical “limits,” and that environmental values are (therefore) best articulated by concerned humanists more in touch with the imagination. This essay addresses some of the problems faced by green humanists in their uneasy, mistrustful relationship with natural science, using passages from Thoreau as touchstone texts and juxtaposing those passages with remarks made by Bachelard, Coleridge, Stevens, Nietzsche, and Kant. — Text from The White Horse Press website

Introduction: Special Issue on Animal Studies and Ecocriticism

The essays published here were originally solicited as contributions to a special issue of Safundi devoted to ecocriticism focused on South Africa, but also premised on the idea that environmental issues are inherently transnational. Once these contributions were received, however, the editors recognized that they also could and should be arranged under the rubric of animal studies. This seemed serendipitous, but no doubt it ought to have been anticipated, given the vital role played by animals, especially large game animals, in South African landscapes both real and imaginary. So the copy of Safundi you hold in your hand marks a merger of two fields that may have charted separate courses for some time, but which have now begun to find grounds for common cause. This does not mean that the essays published here announce a new consensus, merely that they converge on a number of the same issues, which the seven authors all see as crucial to the scholarly task of understanding South African (and global) environmental realities from the ecocritical and animal studies perspectives, and to the more urgent task of protecting those same realities from further harm and degradation brought about by poorly conceived public policy and abusive private ownership of natural resources. Some of the issues that matter most to our contributors are: the interpretation of animal behavior, especially of animal consciousness, communication, and emotion, and the implications of this interpretation for animal rights; the ecological centrality of animals in the habitats where they have evolved, and from which too many of them have been removed; the disruption of both animal and human lives by globalization, which is seen by several of the contributors as having a longer history than is generally assumed; the ethics and the politics of human-animal relations; the effect of assumptions about gender, class, race, and—more broadly— subjectivity on representations of the natural world, and the niches that humans and animals occupy in it; place and the colonial, postcolonial, neocolonial, and transnational politics that implicate the local in the global, and the global in the local;

Weeping Elephants, Sensitive Men

I had seen a herd of Elephant travelling through dense Native forest, where the sunlight is strewn down between the thick creepers in small spots and patches, pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world. . . . When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find that it is the same in all her music. What I learned from the game of the country, was useful to me in my dealings with the Native People. Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

Nature as Noir: Kem Nunn’s California, “Where the Sewage Meets the Sea”

ABSTRACT This essay questions what relevance the genre of noir might play in the representation of today’s degraded environments. I argue that Nunn’s novels offer readers an important and startling alternative model of California to that suggested by the mythology of the Golden State—an idyllic paradise that provides its inhabitants with daily doses of sunshine, ocean breezes and avocado. In Nunn’s surf novels, California is a violent and unpleasant space, in which even the most isolated and exurban natural environments are fallen worlds marred by unlimited development. I argue that noir—a genre that has not yet played a large role in ecocritical analysis—is a useful lens with which to read Nunn’s storyworlds. I also read Nunn’s noir novels refractively, exploring the new directions they suggest that this classic genre may take in its representation of today’s “dark” nature.

Introduction: Django Unchained and the Global Western

This special issue originates in a standing-room-only session devoted to Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film Django Unchained at the 2013 meeting of the Western Literature Association in Berkeley. In their papers, the four panelists—Michael Johnson, Neil Campbell, Hollis Robbins, and Johannes Fehrle—discussed the contexts, and the many intertexts, that inform Tarantino’s film, prompting a lively conversation with their audience during the Q&A session that followed. Sitting in that audience, it seemed to me that this was a topic Safundi might pursue, and I was able to persuade the panelists to consider the possibility of a roundtable when I pitched them the idea in the corridor a few minutes after their session concluded. Tarantino’s film is immensely entertaining, not despite but because it is so very audacious—even, at times, downright lurid, thanks to its treatment of slavery, race relations, and that staple of the Western, violence. No doubt these are matters that another director would have handled more delicately, and with less stylistic excess, than Tarantino, who has never been bashful. Another director also would have been less willing to proclaim his film the first in a new genre, the “Southern”—a proclamation that has irritated some viewers of Django Unchained, and is challenged several times here. As the four original essays, and the responses, gathered in this issue illustrate, Tarantino’s shameless combination of Hollywood values with an irreverent treatment of hot-button topics is provocative, and in a multitude of ways. If I had to sum up these ways, I would argue that the problem that Django Unchained presents to its would-be interpreters has to do with the near impossibility of contextualizing the film in terms that capture its richness—and its excessiveness—without sacrificing a sense of that richness and excessiveness to one’s own interests (as a film buff, a scholar of race, literature, and culture, a person of colour, or what have you). Tarantino has taken his source materials and amped them up in his characteristic fashion. As a result, his Django Unchained outdoes the original Spaghetti

The World in Which We Occur: John Dewey, Pragmatist Ecology, and American Ecological Writing in the Twentieth Century (review)

upon the logic of the figure in space, that is to say, a dependency on corporality, rather than on cause-and-effect action unfolding in time. From the outset, Auerbach eschews sociological concerns (questions of how bodily presentation differentiated social identities during the politically tumultuous years of 1896-1903) as well as historical contextualization for reception. For example, in What Happened on Twenty-Third Street, New York City (1901), Auerbach fixates on “the relentless, planted stare [at the camera] of a curious boy in a brilliant white shirt” (124). He argues that the figure upstages the self-presentation of a woman whose skirts are lifted upward on a city street and thereby makes ambiguous the status of the film as a window onto the world (124-25). Both Miriam Hansen and I have written about the operation of dual modes of theatricality and absorption in this individual film, pivoting not on the boy’s return gaze to the camera but on the woman’s return laugh at the camera. Auerbach refuses to acknowledge that the sexual difference of the two “returns” might make a difference in how self-consciousness is rendered. Similarly, for Auerbach, figures running in chase films are all simply human forms in locomotion whereas men, women, children, men in drag and/or blackface, the fat, and the skinny all have differentiated movements that elaborate upon the depiction of movement itself. Instead, the author “redeems” early cinema for a radical post-modern contemporaneity that makes it both a study of the newness of cinema aesthetics as well as purposeful for the study of the human form in relationship to today’s new media. Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901), an exterior actuality coupled with a studio re-enactment of the electrocution of McKinley’s assassin, is for Auerbach both the disintegration between public and private spaces (characteristic of modernity and post-modernity) and “a postmodern impression of its own fictionality in relationship to the fictionality of the world it purports to represent” (38). Repurposing early cinema for a study of the inter-dynamics of body, space, and motion in new media is by turns clever, erudite, illuminating, and maddening. University of Iowa Lauren Rabinovitz