This panel historicizes and theorizes the apocalyptic rhetoric that seems so germane to the Anthropocene. First, it links contemporary apocalypticism to an antecedent corridor in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century United States. During these decades, the failure of Reconstruction, which would have redistributed Southern property to freed bondspeople, and the state’s aggressive policy of Indian removal intensified the complicated dialectic of race and nature. By seeking to understand how discourses of apocalypticism functioned during this pivotal stage of settler capitalism in the US, the panel will shed light on the complicated roles apocalypse plays in contemporary discussions of the environment. Secondly, the panel considers the critical valences of apocalypse. Though current conditions may more than ever merit serious consideration of end times, we will raise questions about ways of thinking and responding that such consideration forecloses, as well the exclusions and shortcuts it enables. Asking what modes of intervention might be drowned out as the prophets of doom thunder, the panel aims to open a space for other modes of response ranging from Anne-Lise Francois’ “recessive action” on one end of the spectrum to decolonization on the other.
The panel thus contributes to an ongoing conversation in ecocriticism about the racial dimensions of environmental thought. It builds on the idea advanced by thinkers like Carolyn Merchant (2002), Paul Outka (2008), and Alexander Weheliye (2014) that imperial colonialism “invented” the categories of human/nonhuman, race, and nature as conceptual tools that facilitated resource extraction. By attending to the ways in which the discourse of apocalypse can reinforce racially partitioned distributions of access and risk through the specter of rapid, cataclysmic environmental change, the panel revisits and puts a new spin on the idea of a racially-charged and spatially- and temporally-dispersed environmental “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011).
April Anson proceeds from the claim that apocalyptic appeals’ capacity to challenge rather than reinforce the systems they aim to critique hinges on the extent to which they engage the problem of possession and dispossession. Anson approaches Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis and Simon Pokagon’s “Red Man’s Rebuke” as case studies in the ways the genre can be an oppressive tool of settler colonial hegemony or a radical means for communicating alternative histories and forwarding revolutionary futures. Paying special attention to the historical role of the American apocalyptic story tradition in perpetuating the apocalyptic realities attending settler colonialism, Anson argues that an analysis of the writing that emerged from the apocalyptic fervor of the 1890s can inform our own narrations of the catastrophes of climate change.
Sarah Ensor explores how literary form can make legible the ways in which socioecological disasters and modes of apocalyptic thought illegibly persist. Ensor’s paper queries the residual presence of queer intimacies and indigeneity in Cather’s 1925 book The Professor’s House. Focusing on Tom Outland’s story, Ensor asks how the mesa as a scene of indigenous extermination becomes central to Cather’s (a) model of intimacy with absence and (b) formal reckoning with persistence itself. Less interested in evaluating Cather’s engagement with questions of indigeneity than in asking after the relationship among intertwined forms of disappearance and persistence indexed in her text, Ensor’s paper asks how Cather might formalize the temporality of settler colonialism in this place, then and now.
Sharon Kunde argues that Frederick Douglass’s 1873 “Address to the Third Annual Fair of the Tennessee Colored Agricultural and Mechanical Association” advances a hopeful but fraught georgics in the face of an apocalyptic environmental racism predominant in the Jim Crow South that would “Let the Negro starve!” and that “consoles itself with the theory that the negroes – like the Indians – will ultimately die out” (9). While Douglass’s georgic vision advocates hard work and ambition in ways that accede to modes of property ownership of interest to this panel, it also draws attention to the violent environmental logistics of white supremacy. Thus, Douglass provides an example for thinking flexibly about the roles race can play in framing decolonizing responses to environmental apocalypse.
Peter Coviello places the genocidal anti-Mormon fervor of the 1880s and 1890s indicated in the sermons of DeWitt Talmadge alongside the U.S. government’s suppression of the Lakota adherents of the Ghost Dance religion. While the government’s extermination of the Lakota registered as a warning to Mormons who had fallen out of the charmed circle of secular legitimacy, Coviello parses the ways in which Mormons resisted their positioning as an apocalyptic threat to the nation’s biopolitical health by underlining their embrace of the patriarchal and colonial modes of ownership that drove US imperial expansion in the first place. With these volatile crosswirings as guide, Coviello argues that American biopolitics have long been concretized in the racialized rhetoric of apocalypse.
Together, these papers historicize and theorize present-day environmental apocalypticism in order to clarify the pitfalls and the potentials of the discourse. While the American apocalypse genre typically regards the unsettling end of a (white) world, the genre has the potential to rupture the exceptionalism inhering in its history to imagine futures outside the environmental and racial violences that attend our changing climate.
This panel presents four speakers and a presider. Each speaker will be asked to keep his or her prepared remarks to twelve minutes in order to reserve at least fifteen minutes of interaction with the audience.