Publications

“What is the role of art amid climate disaster?” This is the fundamental question posed the team of the Coasts in Crisis project. They provide many examples, including their very own in the form of a spiraling curatorial space. Straddling the boundaries between art and scholarship, disaster response and media production, enviromentalism and library science. Coasts in Crisis offers us a model of curation and digital archiving that goes beyond the homogeneity of mainstream digital archiving systems, preserving the delicate balance between context over metadata. The project statement and the dialogue that follows below reflect the richness of thought that such digital exercises enable.

Can humanity survive climate change and mass extinction? Concepts of humanity assumed or implicit in the field at the founding of this journal are under critical pressure from multiple directions. Reading across schools of thought confronting relations sometimes called Anthropocene, this essay explains five tasks for religious ethics “after humanity:” (i) incorporate species-level relations of power and vulnerability; (ii) denaturalize planetary myth-making; (iii) undo colonial humanisms; (iv) recompose ways of life after the end of the world; and (v) reanimate ethical inquiry in attentiveness to multispecies worldmaking.

The Garden Politic argues that botanical practices and discourses helped nineteenth-century Americans engage pressing questions of race, gender, settler colonialism, and liberal subjectivity. In the early republic, ideas of biotic distinctiveness helped fuel narratives of American exceptionalism. By the nineteenth century, however, these ideas and narratives were unsettled by the unprecedented scale at which the United States and European empires prospected for valuable plants and exchanged them across the globe. Drawing on ecocriticism, New Materialism, environmental history, and the history of science—and crossing disciplinary and national boundaries—The Garden Politic shows how new ideas about cultivation and plant life could be mobilized to divergent political and social ends.

Reading the work of influential nineteenth-century authors from a botanical perspective, Mary Kuhn recovers how domestic political issues were entangled with the global circulation and science of plants. The diversity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s own gardens contributed to the evolution of her racial politics and abolitionist strategies. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s struggles in his garden inspired him to write stories in which plants defy human efforts to impose order. Radical scientific ideas about plant intelligence and sociality prompted Emily Dickinson to imagine a human polity that embraces kinship with the natural world. Yet other writers, including Frederick Douglass, cautioned that the most prominent political context for plants remained plantation slavery.

The Garden Politic reveals how the nineteenth century’s extractive political economy of plants contains both the roots of our contemporary environmental crisis and the seeds of alternative political visions.

The Unsettled Plain studies agrarian life in the Ottoman Empire to understand the making of the modern world. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the environmental transformation of the Ottoman countryside became intertwined with migration and displacement. Muslim refugees, mountain nomads, families deported in the Armenian Genocide, and seasonal workers from all over the empire endured hardship, exile, and dispossession. Their settlement and survival defined new societies forged in the provincial spaces of the late Ottoman frontier. Through these movements, Chris Gratien reconstructs the remaking of Çukurova, a region at the historical juncture of Anatolia and Syria, and illuminates radical changes brought by the modern state, capitalism, war, and technology.

Drawing on both Ottoman Turkish and Armenian sources, Gratien brings rural populations into the momentous events of the period: Ottoman reform, Mediterranean capitalism, the First World War, and Turkish nation-building. Through the ecological perspectives of everyday people in Çukurova, he charts how familiar facets of quotidian life, like malaria, cotton cultivation, labor, and leisure, attained modern manifestations. As the history of this pivotal region hidden on the geopolitical map reveals, the remarkable ecological transformation of late Ottoman society configured the trajectory of the contemporary societies of the Middle East.

Where in the realm of the sensible can we locate the impact of large-scale anthropogenic processes on biodiversity? In this article I develop a critical approach I term "biocultural phenomenology," focusing upon the intersection of ecological crisis and literary form. I read psychological and social realisms by Henry James and H. G. Wells for instances of small-scale, granular sensations of widening access to imperial and settler-colonial practices of consumption, prevalent forms of bourgeois sociality, and emerging patterns of feeling. I argue that "everyday" and often mundane feelings that are the focus of dominant strands of historical realism are inextricable from the biocide they produce. This article engages ongoing conversations in environmental humanities and novel studies, current styles of critique, and identifies new possibilities for the history of realism. First, biocultural phenomenology displaces affective responses of mourning and ontological accounts of absence governing conversations about literary form and anthropogenic impacts on nonhuman life. Second, I argue that realist logics in these highly anthropocentric texts that appear superficially unpromising for environmental thought nevertheless bind accounts of phenomenal experiences to emergent systemic behaviors across time. Third, I reframe the critical category of the "everyday" in the history of realism to encompass global multispecies impacts and accreting, complex causal structures across very long timescales.

This essay examines how contemporary Puerto Rican art contests the island archipelago's twenty-first-century public debt crisis and its effects on the government's failed response to the devastating 2017 hurricane season. Puerto Rico's colonial status makes life on the island inherently unstable because its residents are subject to fiscal, social, and environmental laws not of their own making: the island's finances have been dictated since 2016 by an unelected Fiscal Oversight and Management Board. Perhaps because of this lack of democratic representation, contemporary art has flourished as a space in which Puerto Ricans can make their voices heard. Traditional gallery installations, public murals, community art projects, and digital media have all emerged as sites in which Puerto Ricans resist colonial disaster capitalism and its disregard for the lives and landscapes of the island. This essay considers how the art of Daniel Lind-Ramos, the organization Beta-Local, and the project Valor y Cambio challenge differing forms of indebtedness, asking who owes what to whom given Puerto Rico's history of occupation, enslavement, and economic exploitation.