Stuckness might be the prevailing affect of late modernity. In contrast to the humanities’ valorization of sustained attention to the nuances of textuality, or to the accelerated demands on attention required by daily life in late capitalism, stuckness feels flat, hollowed-out, immobilizing. Intensified by the isolation entailed by the global pandemic, the feeling of being stuck is not simply about feeling trapped, nor simply a recognition of the limits of individual agency. It is a rational response to the evacuation of once-expected possibilities, an embodied stillness in the face of better futures that never seem to arrive.

Contemporary literature, this panel argues, pays close attention to stuckness, especially as it articulates the imbrication of global environmental crisis and economic precarity. Films and novels about environmental decline rely on formal devices related to stuckness – repetition and perseveration – and borrow from dystopian tropes once seen only in science fiction. This panel gathers four scholars, each of whom will speak for 15 minutes about how contemporary literature has figured the ambivalent temporalities – the stuckness -- of environmental decline, paying particular attention to race, gender, and class.

In “Stuck in Traffic,” Jeff Insko works at the intersection of the energy humanities and infrastructural studies, examining stuckness as both a material and an affective condition in the Anthropocene, focusing upon two works of contemporary multi-ethnic fiction. In Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997), characters find themselves stuck in and stuck in relation to traffic. Moving from micro- to macro-scale history, from the construction of the world’s first stack interchange in Los Angeles to the geological formation of petroleum, he argues that the distinction between finding oneself caught in a traffic jam, as in Tropic of Orange, and finding oneself stuck on the edge of a freeway as traffic passes, as in Under the Feet of Jesus, reveals the unevenness and injustice produced by petromodernity.

In “Severance, Stuckness, and the Hurricane Fix,” Pamela Thurschwell reads Severance’s multiple and clashing genres (satirical office drama, Chinese-American immigrant memoir, millennial anti-bildungsroman, zombie apocalypse) as part of its interest in mapping incompatible temporalities of our contemporary moment. The novel insists upon global capital’s stuckness and repetition, but the story is catalyzed by a violent and engulfing climate change apocalypse that doesn’t in fact happen. The Hurricane Sandy-like storm that begins the novel fizzles out, becoming instead a nostalgic or celebratory interlude; a way of experiencing a New York that is in the process of disappearing. Thurschwell uses Severance’s sidelong glance at climate change’s grand narrative to think about the way contemporary texts map the interpenetration of neo-capital stuckness and environmental devastation.

In “Unstaging Climate Grief,” Dana Luciano explores the promise and pitfalls of the recent turn to affect theory in the environmental humanities. She addresses the new visibility of “climate grief,” a concept that has gained prominence in the wake of the American Psychological Association’s 2017 report, “Mental Health and Our Changing Climate.” “Climate grief” indexes a range of depressive responses to the increasing precarity of life on a warming planet. Writing about this condition affirms the difficulty of negotiating psychic engagement that precarity without established social frameworks for recognizing and affirming the reality of such feelings. Yet responses to the concept too often fall prey to the long-established liberal-sentimental pattern of restaging encounters with loss as a means of capacitation. In place of complex formulations like Jennifer James’s “ecomelancholia,” “climate grief” seems to attract teleological or goal-oriented frameworks which seek to make it amenable to the time of progress. “Climate grief” turns cultural ambivalence about grief (as a feeling that is at once validating and intolerable) into a story of productivity, which is endemic to white sentimental culture.

Finally, Jennifer James’s paper “Captive Ecologies” takes up the issue of “stuckness” in relation to black environmental experiences of enclosure, whether it be the lives of the enslaved on the plantation or those of the Black residents of New Orleans trapped on rooftops during Katrina and warehoused in the Superdome. Both are what she calls captive ecologies, the word “captive” carrying several meanings: slavery itself, being imprisoned within the historical time of slavery’s afterlives, and how Black movement is foreclosed by the ways racial structures create physical, situational and geographical confinement. To think through this topic, she will use slave narratives, such as Henry Bibb and Solomon Northrup; and the literature of Katrina, including Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, and other works.