In his essay “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau asserts, “...in Wildness is the preservation of the World.” Encounters with wildness remind us of the diversity of species that share the spaces around us, the vulnerability of life, and the limitations of anthropocentrism. They also, according to ornithologist J. Drew Lanham, model ways of “living in the unknown” (5). These and other forms of eco-knowledge can help us reduce our environmental impact and ensure the sustainability of our planet. According to William Cronon, “...wildness (as opposed to wilderness), can be found anywhere...[including] in the cracks of a Manhattan sidewalk” (89). As human and nonhuman populations across the globe continue to migrate into urban areas, it as important as ever to identify the diverse ways that humans experience nonhuman animals, plants, water, weather, and other forms of wildness in cities.

The papers in “The Wild City” make urban wildness visible by examining depictions of animals, plants, bacteria, and other forms of wildness in literature, film, painting, and maps. Moreover, the presenters demonstrate the prevalence of and interest in encounters with urban wildness among different historical time periods and geographies—from Revolutionary-era America to postcolonial Sri Lanka. While some presenters focus on attempts to contain or pacify wildness in cities, others emphasize ways that wild spaces, inhabitants, and processes co-constitute urban landscapes and provide opportunities to reassess the boundaries we impose between the human and natural world. Contemplating the entanglement of the human and nonhuman world in cities is essential, according to the panelists, in order to transform our understanding of, relationship to, and impact on nature.

The session will include four presentations. Each presenter will be strictly limited to twelve minutes so that we leave time for introductions and transitions as well as a fifteen-minute discussion period at the end of the session. Dr. Judith A Richardson will present the first paper, “Defending the Citizen Trees: Francis Hopkinson’s Revolutionary Plant-mindedness,” which focuses on an early defense of wildness in Revolutionary-era urban America. In his 1782 speech and article “Speech of a Standing Member, the Plea of a Citizen Tree,” Hopkinson—a Philadelphia author, merchant, lawyer, and signer of the Declaration of Independence—critiques an act passed by the Pennsylvania Assembly calling for the removal of all of the city’s street trees. According to Richardson, Hopkinson’s argument and rhetoric anticipate posthumanist ideas while endowing Revolutionary discourse with an unexpected and forward-looking defense of plants’ rights.

In the panel’s second paper, “‘Wildness, Aesthetics, and Reform in Antebellum New York City,” Dr. Evan Neely discusses ways that mid-nineteenth century genteel New York authors, artists, and mapmakers employed the panoramic, a style of pictorial representation most associated with the period’s wilderness landscape painting, to render wildness in the growing city as picturesque. But some social groups, Neely continues, resisted the structures imposed upon the city’s human and nonhuman “disorder” in ways that illustrate connections between social and environmental rights and model forms of human and nonhuman diversity in the city championed by later urban theorists.

The panel organizer and presider, Dr. Matthew Lambert, will present third. His essay, “Quarantine: Hidden Wildness in Elia Kazan’s New Orleans” identifies concealed forms of urban wildness in Kazan’s 1950 film noir Panic in the Streets. Shot on location in New Orleans, the film largely focuses on the subtropical city’s narrow and crowded streets, buildings, and warehouses as well as its highly manicured parks, gardens, and waterways. But wildness reasserts itself in the form of the pneumatic plague, only visible in the symptoms of its carriers, who are immigrants and criminals. As an early pandemic film, Lambert argues, Panic in the Streets calls attention to the vulnerability of human bodies, particularly bodies deemed less valuable due to ethnicity and class. The film also, he continues, emphasizes the precarity of the post-WWII socio-political order and its attempts to control wild spaces and inhabitants as well as marginalized human groups.

The last speaker, Thakshala Tissera, will shift the panel to consider urban wildness in a postcolonial context. Her paper, ‘No Life without Wildlife’: Wilderness and Changing Cityscapes in Romesh Gunesekera’s Suncatcher,” focuses on ways that Gunesekera’s adolescent characters in the 2019 novel attempt to protect wildlife from 1960s urban expansion in the newly independent Sri Lanka. As Tissera points out, the novel avoids romanticizing their conservationist efforts by making visible the violence that often accompanies human-animal encounters. In doing so, she continues, the novel challenges strict boundaries between the wild and the urban, envisioning ways that wild animals and spaces co-constitute urban landscapes.