“Introduction” in “Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth”
Introduction
Gothic in the Anthropocene
We live in gothic times. This has become a cliché in the critical literature. But in a new epoch overflowing with narratives of excess, exploitation, death, self-destruction, tipping points, and apocalypse, it is more than a mere platitude. Gothic forms are as useful as they are pervasive: they can conjure dark terrains layered by plantation slavery and petro-economic cultures like in the television series True Detective (2014–19); they can imagine apocalyptic landscapes ravaged by environmental destruction and consumed by zombification like in the novel The Girl with All the Gifts (2014); they can reflect the tortured bodies of nonhuman animals within the destructive economies of animal agriculture like in the film Raw (2014); they can depict the brutalized bodies of human animals when nonhuman animals bite back like in the film Crawl (2019). The realities of planetary destruction are disseminated in gothic fictions. In the Anthropocene, in other words, gothic has the potential to present us with a “realer,” if darker, reality wherein we can imagine a future world based on what we have done in the past, whether it be excessive consumption, exploitation of resources, murder, or other kinds of transgression. For in gothic, as in the Anthropocene, we will claim, the “boundaries between fiction and reality blur, to the extent that each interpenetrates and shapes the other, dismantling conventional patterns of differentiation.”1
We call this study Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene despite being deeply aware of the latter concept’s inability to make plain the long material history of the violence that has brought on a notably unequal climate crisis. This is an awareness that has prompted us to structure this collection with the help of three additional denominations: Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene. As discussed in more detail later in this Introduction, these recognize crucial histories and biological entanglements that the Anthropocene, as a concept, is often perceived to evade. Still, we hold on to the Anthropocene because the historical and scientific provenance of the term makes sense in ways that, from the perspective of the gothic at least, are eerily familiar. As a term first proposed in geology, the Anthropocene has a natural affinity with temporalities that reach far beyond the human, as of course with the chthonic2 elements of all that which lies below. Indeed, as Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor suggest in Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (2017), we might usefully begin “to read the Anthropocene as a literary object and at the same time to recognize the Anthropocene as a geohistorical event that may unsettle our inherited practices of reading.”3
Yet what if we read the Anthropocene not just as a geohistorical event but as a gothic geohistorical event? As any reader of gothic tales will know, the desire to upend and unearth is generally speaking one that should be left alone, a maxim that seems to be doubled down on in the Anthropocene. Digging in the dirt is a hazardous pursuit, whether it is for the extraction of oil, minerals, and precious stones or the reverse activity of depositing plastics, spent nuclear fuel, and other toxic materials that have already caused irreparable ecological destruction in the Global South and that are now beginning to haunt also the Global North with a vengeance. Digging in the dirt is of course but one of the many upendings and disruptions instigated by anthropogenic change on a planetary scale. In our release of fossil fuels from the bowels of the earth to fuel the bright lights of modernity, for instance, it is important to recall that “fossil” fuels do in fact come from dead matter, but also that the dormant organic matter of fossilized remains of what was once alive is given new life as it has been released into the atmosphere. Rotting plants and decaying corpses, over time turning into amorphous masses of gas, coal, and oil, have after millions of years entombed once again seen daylight, only to be turned into the fire and smoke that have for the past couple of centuries been heating up the world’s climate, in turn playing a key role in the sixth mass extinction that is currently killing fish, animals, and plant life in the oceans, in and on the ground, and in the sky at a rate not seen for hundreds of millions of years. Viewed in this way, the Anthropocene does not denote simply a present in which we recognize that humans have become “geological agents,” as proposed by Chakrabarty, but a time when the Anthropos must conduct the introspective, abject historical work in which gothic has always engaged its audience.
Genre and the Anthropocene
While the dangers to planetary life that anthropogenic climate change brings with it have been discussed in fiction for a long time, an increasing number of authors and filmmakers have turned their attention to the climate crisis since the beginning of the millennium. The work they have produced has been theorized by Adam Trexler, Adeline Johns-Putra, Timothy Clark, and Amitav Ghosh into the distinct genre of climate fiction (cli-fi).4 These critics point to the fact that conventional realism has struggled to imagine the crises of the Anthropocene. As Ghosh described, realism can be said to have grown out of the assumption “in both fiction and geology, that Nature was moderate and orderly.”5 Thus the realist novel “has never been forced to confront the centrality of the improbable.”6 Now when, as Ghosh argues, “the Anthropocene has already disrupted many assumptions that were founded on the relative stability of the Holocene . . . the very gestures with which it [realist fiction] conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real.”7 To properly represent the improbable catastrophes of the Anthropocene, authors have to inhabit what Ghosh calls “the humbler dwellings that surround the manor house—those generic out-houses that were once known by names such as the gothic, the romance or the melodrama, and have now come to be called fantasy, horror and science fiction.”8 Ghosh’s observation that it is primarily speculative genres that have investigated catastrophic climate change is important, as it suggests that gothic and horror are able to say things about the climate crisis that conventional, realistic modes cannot.9
Among speculative genres, we argue, gothic’s profound interest in “transgression, excess and monstrosity”10 makes it a supremely suitable chronicler of the violence of climate change and of the human being’s tentacular connection to all uncanny, damaged life on this planet. To live in the Anthropocene is to recognize that transgression, excess, and monstrosity are no longer anomalies in human life but inextricable parts of it.11 Gothic has the power to unsettle readers more than most other literary or cultural forms because it dwells on widespread anxieties, dread, the horrific, the repellent, and achieves a frisson that other mimetic modes of representation can barely render. Gothic is one of the most impulsive and adaptive of forms; it can split and reform the cells of texts in other categories, routinely combining with dystopias and apocalyptic narratives, science fiction and cli-fi, weird fiction and the new weird, noir and detective fiction, and so on. And gothic has no predictable setting or abode: it flourishes in the Arctic in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), in the tropics in the computer game Dead Island (2011), on the South Sea in Edgar Allan Poe’s novella Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), in the Global North in Bram Stokers’s Dracula (1897), in the Global South in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (2010), on the battlefields of the Middle East in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), and in outer space as in Ridley Scott’s film Alien (1979). It seeps into places where it ought not to be, and therein lies the vitality of gothic: it is malleable and unpredictable, refusing to be contained or clearly mapped.
This malleability allows gothic texts to merge with other forms. This should not be surprising, as gothic has a long history of hybridity, migration, cross-pollination infection, and contamination. In Gothic Science Fiction 1818 to the Present (2015), Sian MacArthur charts how two centuries of gothic, which is often read as reimagining the past, meshes with science fiction, a form celebrated for its futuristic imagination and its freedom to explore unique subjects and themes. Mad scientists, grotesque operations, chemical experiments, alien monsters, and other tropes speak to a form that MacArthur identifies as “Gothic science fiction.”12 Central to our discussion of the intersection of science fiction with gothic and the Anthropocene, as of the novel language we may hope to construct in the process, is the notion of the human itself. For, just as science fiction has provided us with a wide range of speculative scenarios in which the planet has either been nearly destroyed (as is typically the case in postapocalyptic fiction) or decimated in some form or other (as is typically the case in dystopian fiction and certainly so in climate fiction), science fiction has also provided us with an overabundance of ideas of how the human, the transhuman, the posthuman, and the nonhuman intersect, yet also of how they can abolish and haunt each other.
Questions of genre and form also relate to gothic and a genre that has been labeled the weird. In Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 (2018), James Machin charts a literary history in which the weird of Machen, Blackwood, M. R. James, and Onions merges with gothic, uncanny, supernatural, horror, strange, and so on. “Acknowledging that ‘weird’ is,” he writes, “a suggestive adjective and a mode rather than a genre also entails accepting that its subsequent slipperiness means that any attempt at rigidly differentiating it from what is now discussed as the Gothic would be both self-contradictory and counterproductive.”13 In a weird American context, Lovecraft owes much to gothic writers from England and Scotland—such as Horace Walpole and Walter Scott—who often invoke tropes of ancestral terror and anxieties about breakdowns in the borders that divide racial, national, and class differences. The fears of class upheavals in Walpole and Scott are replicated in Lovecraft’s white supremacist celebration of a primordial race purity and his anxieties about a racial mixing that would engender what he envisioned as an impure Anglo-American civilization.
Within the trajectory of this literary history, there are thus tentacular lines that connect the fiction of E. T. A. Hoffmann to Charles Brocken Brown to Edgar Allan Poe to Lovecraft to China Miéville to Jeff VanderMeer to Caitlín R. Kiernan to Lauren Beukes, even as later authors resist the racist undercurrent that informs many of the early weird writers. Since the 1980s, the expression “new weird” has been used to describe slipstream fiction that meshes gothic, horror, fantasy, and science fiction. For VanderMeer, a noteworthy author of new weird fiction, the gothic tropes of haunting and the uncanny are significant for any reflections on contemporary ecology: “in the Anthropocene,” he writes, “hauntings and similar manifestations become emissaries or transition points between the human sense of time and the geological sense of time.”14 Global warming is, he continues, an example of a “hyperobject”15 that haunts us every day through repetitions of cause and effect; it cannot always be seen, but it is always there in a liminal and uncanny presence. This haunting is conceptual and corporeal: it dislocates and relocates the mind and the body not through a scientific understanding of climate change but through a reimagining of an ecological condition that includes the totalities of breakdown and disintegration. The return of the environmentally repressed does not only have the potential to inspire fear and anxiety; the ecological uncanny can also be embraced to change the cultural practices that contribute to environmental crises.
While exciting work has been done on the role of speculative fiction in general and science fiction in particular, and in the representation of ecology and of nonhuman animals, the space that ecology fills in gothic warrants a thorough investigation in any reconfiguration of our relationship with the environment, albeit always with an eye on the future and not just the past, which is the usual terrain of the gothic. Indeed, while there is merit in the claim that “the Anthropocene itself can usefully be understood as a Science Fiction trope,”16 there is something inherently uncanny, dark, and haunting about an era defined by a “dark ecology”17 of rising temperatures and seas, microplastics and extreme weather, the decline of the Arctic and the spread of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and the sixth mass extinction. Formerly envisioned as a sublime entity that no one could hope to master, or that any words supposedly fully describe, nature in the Anthropocene is rapidly drifting beyond our control in ways that are far more complex—yet at the same time also frighteningly literal—than ever before. As former conceptions of the divide between human and environment, culture and nature, artificial and natural, local and global, and past, present, and future continue to erode, we are left in the paradoxical position of having a greater impact on nature than ever before, while at the same time experiencing a profound sense of loss and agency when it comes to its continued existence.
To date, the important research on gothic and ecology has been largely limited to thematic studies of “eco-gothic,” including Andrew Smith and William Hughes’s Ecogothic (2013), Katarina Gregersdotter, Johan Höglund, and Nicklas Hållén’s Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History, and Criticism (2015), Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga’s Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (2016), Keetley and Sivils’s Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2017), Elizabeth Parker’s The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination (2020), and Sladja Blazan’s Haunted Nature: The Cultural Work of Environmental Haunting (2021). These books are significant for reflecting on gothic and environmentalism, but overall, they do not consistently engage with the important work in the humanities and social sciences that has recently been done on the Anthropocene. The present study attempts to fill that gap and, we hope, inspire further research into the field.
Gothic Methodologies in the World of the (Post)Human
To realize that we live in the Anthropocene is to recognize that the border that has separated the Anthropos from nature was always an illusion. As a range of thinkers from Bruno Latour to Timothy Morton and Bill McKibben and on to Dipesh Chakrabarty have pointed out,18 it has become increasingly clear, as Jason W. Moore argues in Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015), that “the old language—Nature/Society—has become obsolete.”19 Accordingly, there is a need to develop “new methodological procedures, narrative strategies, and conceptual language” that will replace “the breakdown of the strategies and relationships that have sustained capital accumulation over the past five centuries.”20 It is the second of Moore’s three subjects that is the focus of this volume, namely, developing novel narrative strategies for the Anthropocene, strategies that are necessarily speculative, and often dark, in nature.
If the Anthropocene is a geohistorical event that can be understood only in relation to ancient and deep history, any meaningful conceptualization of the term must, however, also look to the future. As David Farrier remarks in Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Times, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction (2019), the Anthropocene
represents a quickening in deep time, an uncanny coincidence of ancient resources, rapid change, and long consequence. Our intervention in the carbon cycle, excavating vast quantities of geological material and displacing it into the atmosphere, shows how this newly apparent immediacy of deep time is evident both in the material and immaterial evidence we leave behind. . . . The peculiar intimacy of the Anthropocene is that, in this moment thickened by contradictory temporalities and velocities, the ground has shifted.21
On such shifting grounds, the Anthropocene therefore presents a special chapter in the history of humankind in that our former experiences, predictive models, and narratives are no longer effective because we are witnessing, as Moore argues, “not a crisis of capitalism and nature but of modernity-in-nature.”22 Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth thus interrogates preconceived notions not only of time but also of space and investigates the breaking down of the borders of human worlds and bodies. In the gothic horror film Crawl (2019), a category 5 hurricane lets Florida alligators invade human dwellings. Human spaces are suddenly haunted by monstrous creatures who insist, by their very presence inside human dwellings, that transgression is the new normal, that the very notion of a sacred human space is meaningless, and that hiding from nature is pointless.
As exemplified by the Covid-19 pandemic that began spreading across the world in 2019 and is now so thoroughly seared into almost everything we do, nature transgresses into the world of the Anthropos also in more subtle, but equally dramatic, ways. When Rachel Carson in her influential Silent Spring (1962) warned of the effects that pesticides may have on the (human) animal, she tacitly recognized that the Anthropos is not a being bounded by his or her inviolate individuality but a porous vessel into which metals, chemicals, and plastics can flow, changing and deteriorating the body from within.23 Since then, evolutionary microbiologists, such as Lynn Margulis and Margareth McFall-Ngai, have further revised our understanding of Homo sapiens, showing it to be a multispecies ecosystem that has coevolved with a host of other beings and that is inhabiting a fundamentally permeable body.24 Covid-19 is one of many viruses that first formed in nonhuman wild animals and spread into humans and then across the world due to human activity. As O’Callaghan-Gordo and Antó argued, viruses like Covid-19 “appear and spread in circumstances that denote the effects of an economic and commercial practices that destroys [sic] natural habitats and animal populations, including those of humans living there.”25 In this way, the Covid-19 pandemic must be understood as part of the Anthropocene era; it may not have been intentionally produced in a human lab, as some conspiracists claim, but it emerged out of regions where human activity has disrupted “earth’s natural habitats and ecosystems by intensely altering the patterns and mechanisms of interactions between species,”26 and it then took advantage of countless pandemic pathways constituted by, for instance, global air travel and human megacities.
Gothic has for a long time recognized this permeable state of the (human) animal body and, in countless narratives, speculated on the transformative and often, but not invariably, catastrophic effects that occur when it is entered and transformed by foreign species. In Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth, these species are frequently anthropogenic; viruses, bacteria, or fungi made in labs in the interest of the military–industrial complex. In the South Korean zombie film Train to Busan (2016) and in Ling Ma’s novel Severance (2018), (human) animal bodies are invaded and transformed by an anthropogenically engineered virus so that houses are haunted not by alligators but by humans transformed into carriers of Anthropocene plagues. Again, the separation between the Anthropos and nature was always an Enlightenment rhetoric. Hungry alligators in the flooded living room marks but one of the moments when this rhetoric collapses; anthropogenically engineered viruses turning humans into zombies is another.
This turn away from anthropocentrism has been critically examined by a range of recent theoretical formations, including animal studies, critical plant studies, new materialism, ecocriticism, object-oriented ontology, thing studies, and critical posthumanism. All these fields share a critical stance on “the human,” and on anthropocentric ways of knowing and ordering the world, instead advocating a nonhierarchical relationship to the (multispecies) beings that inhabit it. Such skeptical angles on the human and humanism are important in any approach to the Anthropocene, but are doubly so in an investigation of the gothic and the Anthropocene. For, just as we need to interrogate what is and is not in focus when we choose the “Anthropos” of the human over other competing terms, so we need to take care when defining “the human” in the first place. As an entity that has always been under threat, always questioned, by the gothic, the human takes up an endangered position in the Anthropocene too. “At the start of it all there is He: the classical ideal of ‘Man,’”27 Rosi Braidotti remarks, a supposedly universal ideal of “the human” that has time and again proven to be “in fact a historical construct and as such contingent as to values and locations.”28 Approaching the same Enlightenment epistemologies from the perspective of race, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson observes in Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (2020) that the exclusion of Black people from a humanity understood as white and male rendered the Black or Brown body into an “infinitely malleable and lexical and biological matter” for science, philosophy, and the arts.29
If it is true that “humanism is the idea by which constant identification with a quasi-mythical universal human ‘nature’ produces great cultural achievements,”30 we must also acknowledge how “humanism deconstructs itself whenever ‘the human’ is observed not as a unity but as an assemblage.”31 Indeed, Jackson poses African diasporic fiction as texts that “critique and depose prevailing conceptions of ‘the human’ found in Western science and philosophy.”32 We propose that gothic, some of it emerging precisely out of the key African American or African texts, similarly explores alternative and radical modes of humanity. Gothic constantly places the human in duress, either physically, as in horror movies; existentially, as in postapocalyptic fiction and extinction narratives; but also conceptually, as in the human–machine–animal assemblages that tend to populate the gothic science fiction of the new weird, biopunk, or steampunk. Contributions to this collection thus explore how a clinging to such ideals, as to the notion of the universal subject of “the human,” is at heart a nostalgic longing for a state of being that never was. At the same time, these chapters reveal how a critical posthumanism exemplified in a range of gothic texts dares point another way.
Transhumanist visions in particular, refusing “to see the human as a construct enmeshed with other forms of life and [seeing] technology as a means of ‘adding’ to already existing human qualities and of filling a lack in the human,”33 are invariably tied to science fiction tropes: whether they are of partial cyborg replacement parts, or of a full displacement of the original human form through robotic or organic physical forms, or of eschewing the physical altogether to become pure data, the utopian and techno-fetishistic beliefs of transhumanism in endless human progress sit squarely with science fiction rather than with the gothic. The posthuman and the nonhuman, in comparison, are more ambiguous, as are their allegiances in terms of genre. The transhuman may, like the posthuman, seem to indicate a willful distance from the human. But proponents of the transhuman in fact do the opposite in that they “rely on, and in fact reinforce, a humanist conception of the subject.”34 In this they “believe in the Enlightenment ideals of the human/animal divide,”35 a brightly optimistic and anthropocentric focus that looks solely to the (science fiction) future, while refusing to delve into the murkier, messier (gothic) territory of matter, the animal, and the nonhuman.
While gothic is thus a mode that takes up and turns into narrative the intellectual challenge that much new critical theory and methodology voice, it operates also through affect. Through affect, gothic is capable of informing and structuring a more general experience and understanding of the Anthropocene as it occurs in disparate social and geographical spaces. In one of the first attempts to define the affective impact of gothic, Ann Radcliff influentially argued that “Terror and Horror are so far opposite that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them.”36 Botting concurs, arguing that terror “marks the uplifting thrill” like “the dilation of the pupil in moments of excitement and fear,” while “horror distinguishes a contraction at the imminence and unavoidability of the threat.”37 Of course, gothic texts frequently treat audiences to both of these affects, where terror precedes horror. Before Alien (1979) becomes a vehicle of annihilating body horror, it is a classic gothic narrative of dread, excitement, and fear. Before the alien itself becomes a horrific physical monstrosity in front of the audience, it is a ghost haunting the foreign ship in which its primal larval form hides, then the human body this larval form has invaded, then the corridors of the human spaceship.
These two basic affects by which gothic and horror narratives operate also inform two very different relationships to the Anthropocene. The concepts of terror, haunting, horror, and monstrosity can thus be used to describe the crucial temporal, geographical, and financial displacement that creates two very different experiences of the Anthropocene. As Rob Nixon has observed, there is a tremendous difference between how poor communities and affluent communities experience the climate crisis. It can be argued that affluent communities, most located in the Global North, encounter the Anthropocene not as physical violence but as a haunting, uncanny presence, a ghost that rises out of the global landscape. The Anthropocene haunts everyday objects and practices: cars, air-conditioned houses, gardens, airplanes, dinners, trips to the beach. The moment when the (wealthy) Anthropos grasps first that the Anthropocene is real in the sense that it produces dramatic and catastrophic climate change, and that it is precisely the affluent section of humanity—the benefactors of capitalism—who have engineered this era through the mass production of these cars, houses, and holidays, is also the moment when these objects and practices become haunted and uncanny. The plastic bag drifting in the shallows on the beach is not simply a lost, single-use container but ghostly evidence of a global environmental problem, the haunting and menacing hyperobject of a collapsing climate. Leaving the beach, or picking up the bag, will not solve the problem. Similarly, to return to a point made earlier, the bodies of the affluent are also haunted through “radiological and chemical violence” that “is driven inward, somatized into cellular dramas of mutation.”38 As observed by a multitude of medical and microbiological research, this indirect violence causes a range of illnesses,39 but the medical complexes of the Global North can often eradicate or delay the effects of these, making their plight livable. Again, the suppressed presence of these ill effects makes the (human) animal body of the wealthy appear as uncanny and haunted, but not necessarily as monstrous. In this way, and in this moment in time, the Anthropocene remains a prophesy, a promise of future violence, and thus a ghostly, haunting presence, for most inhabiting the affluent Global North.
By contrast, to large communities of the world’s poor, most located in the Global South, the Anthropocene is not an uncanny, ghostly presence but already a horror: an immanent and unavoidable threat and a prophesy fulfilled. As Nixon notes, it is the world’s poor populations that are the principal casualties of the most direct and violent manifestations of the Anthropocene.40 The “thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes”41 that are some of the most adverse results of living in the Anthropocene have a direct and daily influence on the lives of the poor.42 Deforestation, desertification, flooding, overfishing, and pollution are making life impossible in places, causing death and destruction to communities that lack the financial means for escape or that are driven into diasporas just as monstrous and hopeless as the life from which they escaped. The radiological and chemical violences that haunt rather than destroy the affluent “remain largely unobserved, undiagnosed, and untreated” in “the bodies of the poor.”43 As Kathryn Yusoff argues in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018), this corporeal and geological violence is not new, as it may appear to wealthy communities decrying what they perceive as a coming crisis but has been practiced on Black and Brown bodies since the early days of extractive colonialism.44 In this way, the world’s poor, whether living in Indonesia or in New Orleans, have long experienced the various material consequences of the Anthropocene not as a ghostly haunting but as monstrous horror, as an inexorable, ongoing apocalypse. Today, this apocalypse rises out of land made unlivable by climate change–accelerated drought or flooding, out of the fallout from nuclear testing, out of precarious work conditions and wars fought over natural resources, and out of a global viral pandemic where those located outside of the privileging category of whiteness suffer both the medical and economic consequences of the plague much more severely than those placed inside. With this in mind, political movements like Black Lives Matter are reactions not just to the violent policing of Black and Brown bodies—although they are certainly this too—but to the centuries-long entangled colonial and environmental history that has produced the climate crisis.
When considering the uneven nature of the Anthropocene as apocalypse, it is necessary also to recognize the violence perpetrated on nonhuman lives. A general tendency accelerated enormously by industrialized human society is that nonhuman species are either domesticated by the meat and dairy industries or slowly being wiped out of existence in what has been termed the sixth mass extinction of species.45 Cows, elephants, tigers, and the northern bald ibis; insects like bees or bumblebees; marine invertebrates like coral; plants like the mountain lobelia; and microbes like the oxygen-producing phytoplankton suffer from anthropogenic change, many disappearing from the planet forever. As contributions to this collection show, gothic imaginaries investigate the industrialized slaughter of animals and the extinction of nondomesticated species. These investigations test the borders that liberal Enlightenment humanism has established between the human and the nonhuman, and some radical gothic is involved in a programmatic critique of the human–animal distinction and of the routine violence done to nonhuman animal bodies. Such texts participate in the furthering of what Braidotti has termed a material vitalism that dislocates “difference from binaries to rhizomatics, from sex-gender or nature-culture to processes of differing that take life itself, or the vitality of matter, as the main subject.”46 Even conservative gothic that insists on absolute borders between the human and an animality imagined as monstrous draw attention to the entwined nature of these categories and the porousness of this imagined border.
The Thousand Names of the Anthropocene
Noting that the concept Anthropocene vies with a number of other -cenes, McKenzie Wark exclaims that we should “have a thousand names for the Anthropocene. . . . Anything of this scale and complexity, not least emotional complexity, needs a whole poetics of its own.”47 As a term, the Anthropocene has been heavily critiqued and is contested by a great number of competing terms, such as Capitalocene, Plaintainocene, Gynecene, Homogenocene, and Plasticene. These alternative terms stress a variety of environmentally destructive phenomena, such as capital, colonization, slavery, and the plantation system; patriarchal domination; monoculture; or plastics, thus putting the focus on other contributing or perhaps even more dominant factors than “the human” in explaining the increasingly poor environmental state of the planet. Indeed, as T. J. Demos observes in Against the Anthropocene (2017), the concept of “the Anthropocene itself is far from neutral.”48 As Astrida Neimanis noted in Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017), this lack of neutrality arises from the concept’s inability to decentralize humanity, turning it into “less a plea for curbing the Human, and more an insistence that we do matter, and always will.”49 Ecosocialists Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg are similarly suspicious of the concept, arguing that it “occludes the historical origins of global warming and sinks the fossil economy into unalterable conditions.”50 In other words, by foregrounding the “anthropos” of our current “cene” (era), we are in danger of erasing and smoothing out not just important links between cause and effect but also responsibility and culpability. Indeed, letting capitalism (and by implication the Global North) off the hook by pointing to “the human”—and human history as a whole—can be disastrous in terms of future action, as in a reckoning of the mistakes of the past by pointing at the wrong culprit.
This book does not attempt to mediate in this particular debate. Instead, it recognizes that the many -cenes that have been proposed have merit and highlight particular histories and aspects that need to be considered. As Pieter Vermeulen has pointed out, “for the proponents of these alternative names, [the Anthropocene] is not only a misnomer, but also serves as a kind of disingenuous disclaimer that dissolves accountability,” something of which we must at all times be vigilant, but also perhaps the very infelicity of the term is useful precisely if “we accept that it is inevitably a misnomer [that] covers a makeshift assemblage of discourses, terms, protocols, and experiments that never fully hit home.”51 Thus we seek to open up various understandings of how gothic narrates the climate crisis in ways that are necessarily mushy, imprecise, and transgressive.
While it is impossible to give room to the thousand names envisioned by Wark, or indeed the billions demanded by Yusoff, we do however want to highlight four -cenes that are of particular importance to gothic: Anthropocene, Plantationocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene. Accordingly, this book consists of four parts that use these -cenes as titles. This structure, we hope, is an opportunity to explore four concepts central to the debate and to consider how gothic interrogates particular aspects of the geological age of man, of the warming climate, of extinction, and of the rethinking of the place of the Anthropos on this world. We do not mean to suggest that these particular -cenes are “better” than the other alternatives, yet we do believe they make for critically useful perspectives on gothic and anthropogenic planetary change. Moreover, and importantly, this structure is not an effort to compartmentalize the individual contributions that follow the part heading. Rather, the structure, and the contributions themselves, takes the opportunity to note how these four concepts connect and inform each other. The contributions, like gothic itself, and like the unequal ecological emergency that forms the starting point for the readings of the contributions, thus refuse simple categories. They move in and out of concepts and narratives; they are transgressive, excessive, and monstrous, and they mean to help change our understanding of this planet and of the Anthropos’s relationship to it. For a description of the contributions that the individual chapters make to this collection, the reader should turn to these parts.
Notes
Fred Botting, Limits of Horror (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2013), 5.
Chthonic coming from the Greek khthon, meaning “earth,” but often referring to the subterranean and often implying deities and spirits.
Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak, Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2017), 5.
See Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra, “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2, no. 2 (2011): 185–200; Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015); Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); and Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unknowable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Ghosh, Great Derangement, 22.
Ghosh, 23.
Ghosh, 21, 23.
Ghosh, 24.
A similar argument is forwarded in the Warwick Research Collective’s coauthored study Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2015). This publication emphasizes the potential of what the Collective terms “irrealism” to describe the lived experience of people marginalized by poverty and to challenge dominant systems of power.
Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), 8.
The metaphor that Ghosh employs to describe the inability of realism to address climate change is therefore very apt in a way that goes beyond the discussion of genre only. In a time of melting ice caps and floating islands of plastic waste, the citizens of the Global North can no longer afford the conspicuous consumption of the manor house. Displacements from home are inevitable: climate refugees from rising sea levels or migrants from increased desertification cannot be ignored.
Sian MacArthur, Gothic Science Fiction: 1818 to the Present (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 2.
James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 16.
Jeff VanderMeer, “Hauntings in the Anthropocene: An Initial Exploration,” Environmental Critique, July 7, 2016, https://environmentalcritique.wordpress.com/2016/07/07/hauntings-in-the-anthropocene/.
VanderMeer is here referring to Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 18.
Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Henry Holt, 2010); and on to Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Humanities in the Anthropocene: The Crisis of an Enduring Kantian Fable,” New Literary History 47, no. 2/3 (2016): 377–97.
Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015), 5.
Moore, 4–5, emphasis added.
David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Times, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 16.
Moore, Capitalism, 4.
See Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
See, e.g., Lynn Margulis, The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), and Margareth McFall-Ngai, Michael G. Hadfield, Thomas C. G. Bosch, Hannah V. Carey, Tomislav Domazet-Lošo, Angela E. Douglas, Nicole Dubilier et al., “Animals in a Bacterial World, a New Imperative for the Life Sciences,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110, no. 9 (2013): 3229–36.
Cristina O’Callaghan-Gordo and Josep M. Antó, “COVID-19: The Disease of the Anthropocene,” Environmental Research 187 (2020): 1.
O’Callaghan-Gordo and Antó.
Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 13.
Braidotti, 24.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 3.
Stefan Herbrechter, Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 12.
Bruce Clark, “The Nonhuman,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, ed. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 141.
Jackson, Becoming Human, 1.
Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 6.
R. L. Rutsky, “Technologies,” in Clark and Rossini, Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, 190.
Nayar, Posthumanism, 7.
Anne Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” New Monthly Magazine 16 (1826): 149.
Botting, Gothic, 10.
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 6.
See Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes within Us and a Grander View of Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), for a review of some of this research.
For a discussion of how horror and terror can be used to understand differences between how the Global South and the Global North experience the climate crisis, see Johan Höglund, “Alligators in the Living Room: Terror and Horror in the Capitalocene,” in Haunted Nature, ed. Sladja Blazan (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Nixon, Slow Violence, 2.
While most of the world’s poor are located in the Global South, most nations are today multiscalar so that the Global North contains regions and sections of cities inhabited by communities vulnerable to the (slow) violence of climate change. See Dorceta Taylor, Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residental Mobilities (New York: New York University Press, 2014), and Ingrid R. G. Waldron, There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities (Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 2018), for discussions of the impact of pollution and the climate crisis in the United States and Canada.
Nixon, Slow Violence, 6.
Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocene or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
See Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), for a discussion of the ongoing mass extinction of species.
Rosi Braidotti, “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism,” in Anthropocene Feminism, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 34.
Wark McKenzie, “On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene,” Verso (blog), August 16, 2017, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3356-on-the-obsolescence-of-the-bourgeois-novel-in-the-anthropocene.
T. J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017), 81.
Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2017), 11.
Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative,” Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 67.
Pieter Vermeulen, Literature and the Anthropocene (London: Routledge, 2020), 7–9.
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