Kolson Schlosser

Malthus at mid-century: neo-Malthusianism as bio-political governance in the post-WWII United States

This paper provides a discursive history of neo-Malthusianism in the United States, focusing primarily on the mid-20th century. In the process, I critically examine texts invoking Malthusian arguments in relation to the politics of sex and birth control, class and eugenics, and race and geopolitics, focusing on how they rendered human population growth intelligible in particularly reductive and naturalistic ways. The purpose is to show how this history impinges upon the construction of population-resource theory after WWII, focusing specifically on William Vogt’s Road to survival and Fairfield Osborn’s Our plundered planet. I argue that the production and circulation of generalized models of population-induced conflict in the post-war United States was an important part of the nationalization and government harnessing of science in the name of national security, and relevant to post-war developmentalism and early Cold War containment doctrine. This helps us understand how neo-Malthusian discourse has been deployed as a form of bio-political governance.

Apocalyptic Imaginaries, Gramsci, and the Last Man on Earth

Spatial imaginaries of the apocalypse are as commonplace as ever. Whereas many geographers have critiqued them as politically disabling and categorized them with the rise of postpolitical discourse, others have argued that they are potentially generative of new, progressive forms of politics. In this article I contribute to this discussion through a Gramscian reading of the apocalyptic imaginary of “the last man on Earth” as encapsulated in the novel I Am Legend (Matheson [1954] 1995) and its three filmic adaptations, The Last Man on Earth (Ragona and Salkow 1964), The Omega Man (Sagal 1971), and I Am Legend (Lawrence 2007). Gramsci is useful here for his analytical method of situating political expression within the historical structure that enables and constrains it. Likewise, how the end of the world is imagined is not strictly something that politicizes or depoliticizes, but can also be seen as an effect of the established social order. I argue that this can be discerned both in terms of how the book and films are situated historically, and in terms of how they portray violent civilizational upheaval as a function of its own past. The meaning of the term legend, and its dialectical relationship with the conjunctural moment of the apocalypse changes drastically across all four iterations of the narrative.

Problems of abstraction and extraction in cultural geography research: implications for fieldwork in Arctic North America

If methods are how we answer research questions, then theories are how we know what question to ask. Therefore, all research begins with a necessarily high level of abstraction which then informs decisions about the appropriate targets, goals, and scale at which methods are carried out. Numerous critics have argued that fieldwork should not be extractive, meaning it should not collect data for the benefit of the researcher without returning anything to the community. The distinction between the “abstract” and the “on the ground” work done by geographers is thus far from distinct. In this essay, I discuss questions about how to do field-informed research of intellectual value that is neither extractive nor perpetuates colonial imaginaries of spaces of problem and solution. While a single essay cannot answer these questions, I use research involving northern Canadian communities, and in particular, my own focus group research on the cultural politics of diamond mining in Nunavut, to add clarity to these questions. Ultimately, I argue that methods not only should be flexible and tailored to theory but also should be “field informed” in the sense that informants help researchers shape reflexive accounts by highlighting what is unknown, unknowable, or situationally contingent.

Critical geosophies: A pyschotopological reading of Rice’s vampires and Romero’s zombies

Anne Rice and George Romero are two of the foremost transformative authors of vampire and zombie fiction in the United States. This reading of their work applies a psychotopological lens to the first two novels of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and the first three films of Romero’s Living Dead series. It differs from numerous preceding analyses of monster fiction mostly in the theoretical apparatus it articulates to link the psychic fear vampires and zombies evoke with the topologies of space and power they evince. This intervention invokes a negative understanding of dialectical materialism to analyze human-monster thresholds as political sites. It builds this theorization primarily from the works of Slavoj Žižek, Sara Ahmed, Julia Kristeva, Kojin Karatani, and to a lesser extent Joan Copjec. The result is a psychotopological analysis that challenges understandings of the monster as either timeless allegories for the systemic order or as endlessly interpretive contingencies. It also reads the topological forms of Rice’s vampires and Romero’s zombies in relation to each other. Understanding psychic space and topologies of power as integral to each other helps read the vampire and the zombie as myths which endure because of the fears of class exploitation and social collectivism they stoke.