Steve Mentz

Though I’ve been beaten to the punch by Jeffrey Cohen, I wanted to post about the Sustainability cluster in PMLA. And maybe a little bit about the eco-issue more generally.

What strikes me most about reading this issue is how wide a range of meanings sustainabilty has.

There are three main modes in these essays: institutional (Alaimo, LeMeneger and Foote), literary (Brayton, Keller, and me), and critical (Nixon and Zimmerer). There’s some overlap in a few of the pieces, esp. in Keller’s which covers both institutional and literary material, but less than you might think.

There are three theorists who many of us invoke: Latour, master of assemblages, Tim Morton, ecologist without nature, and Ursula Heise, theorist of localized globalism.

Here’s what I think we think:

Stacy Alaimo: Writing out of her experience as academic cochair of the Sustainability Committee at UTA as well as posthumanist theorists of trans-coporality, Alaimo sees sustainability as a “sanitized” corporate term, “frequently invoked in economic and other news stories that do not in any way question capitalist ideals of unfettered expansion” (559). She wants humanities scholars and scholarship to displace this “technocratic, anthropocentric perspective” (562) — and she wants the new materialism about which she, and others, write so well.

Dan Brayton: One of several of us who explore sustainability through literary “narratives of…catastrophe,” Dan turns to Peter Mathiessen’s experimental novel Far Tortuga, an old favorite of mine as well. It’s a compelling, tragic, artistic response to “an apocalypse that [has] already happened” (370).

Stephanie LeMenager and Stephanie Foote: Turning back like Alaimo to practical and administrative questions — the cluster as a whole see-saws between poetics and administration as thematic cores — these authors ask that humanities scholars contribute to the dialogue, perhaps via a new term, “the sustainable humanities.” “At the risk of sounding grandiose,” they write, “Earth needs the humanities” (575). They also write movingly about classroom practice, that secret heart of activist pedagogy: “literature models new wells of collectively understanding the possible” (577).

Lynn Keller: While noting that “sustainability is everywhere these days” (579) — even in PMLA! — but it’s often subsumed by capitalist models of expansion, she asks humanities scholars to help reclaim the term from the “blurry, feel-good realm of corporate advertising” (581). Like Brayton, to some extent, she sees value in tragic forms, in this case “environmental apocalyptic writing” (581) like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Tim Morton’s “ecology without nature,” and the contemporary poetry and art of Ed Roberson, Angela Rawlings, Evelyn Reilly, and Juliana Spahr, none of whom I’d known before reading this article.

Steve Mentz: [I may come back to my article at the end — basically, I ask that we stop being boxed in by fantasies of sustainability: “It seemed like a good idea while it lasted, but we should have known it could not last.” I mostly talk about literary questions; perhaps showing my early modernist roots, I think sustainability is another version of pastoral.]

Rob Nixon: Doing a job that’s long needed doing, this article exposes the influential “tragedy of the commons” model for the neoliberal polemic that it is. Suggesting that Hardin’s thesis relies on literary forms — tragedy and parable — for its political force, Nixon suggests that rejecting this model for a more nuanced notion of governance of the commons, via Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, can reframe political notions of sustainability so that the villains are no longer old-fashioned collectivists but “unregulated, voracious emissaries who have no respect for limits and no sustainable, inclusive vision of what it means, long-term, to belong” (598).

Karl Zimmerer: Probably the most unusual article in the cluster, this article approaches sustainability through the untranslatable Native American term “kaway,” which might mean “established way of life” or “customary diversity” (601) or, perhaps, something better than what we now mean when we say “sustainability.” Arguing that Quechua philosophical frameworks lack the “separteness of nature and culture in classical traditions of modern Western thought” (603), Zimmerer suggests that kawsay can reeducate us, such that we see “an ideal of nature as humanized landscapes of indigenous food-producing environments and technologies” (604), rather than any full separation of nature from culture.

I’d add to the mix Tobias Menely’s great article on Cowper and “the Time of Climate Change,” because I think he comes at sustainability from the other end, by way of crisis. Like Brayton and Keller (and me), Menely juxtaposes catastrophe experience against fictions of sustainable stasis — and does not assume the latter must always win.

The question remains: what next? What happens “after sustainability,” to repurpose my own title? I certainly hope, like Alaimo and LeMeneger and Foote, that humanities scholars can reclaim eco-speak from capitalist and corporate lexicons — and I think that, esp. in our capacities as faculty, administrators, and organizers inside and outside academia, we can help move that needle, to some extent. I also think, like Brayton and Keller (and Menely), that tragedy speaks most richly to this project, though, like Nixon and Zimmerman, I agree that we should not accept existing economic/cultural  models, and we should not be shy about promoting non-traditional alternatives.

But still: what do you do inside an ecological catastrophe? That’s the question I think we need to work out, the question I’ve been burrowing into at least since “Strange Weather in King Lear.” How do you live inside the storm?

I don’t have a terribly good answer in the institutional or critical modes, at least not yet — though I think para-academic pressures and non-Western critiques can help a lot. But I have been looking for a while for a “swimmer poetics” to help on the literary side. A couple paragraphs of this appear in the PMLA essay. More to follow —

Last week I went to Jupiter Island, FL, where the Quaker merchant Jonathan Dickinson was shipwrecked in September 1696. After getting separated from her convoy near Cuba, the barkentine Reformation followed the Gulf Stream up the east coast of Florida into a northwest storm. During the night of the third day, the vessel struck sandy ground that, once the sun came up, looked something like this — 

 

Jupiter Island is a long flat barrier island, running from Jupiter Inlet north to the town of Stuart. at the St. Lucie inlet near when the Mets play in the spring. Public access to the beaches is now limited to a scattering of state parks, including the one at the town of Jupiter where I swam every morning during my visit. You walk through a dense, inhospitable patch of undergrowth to emerge onto a flat empty beach. We think of this land- and sea-scape as beautiful and relaxing, but for Dickinson’s party is was barren and inhospitable.

It’s hard to tell where exactly on Jupiter Island the ship wrecked — there’s nothing to see today — but it might have been on the rockier stretch of the coast, about 2-3 miles north of the town of Jupiter today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dickinson’s party was met by the Jobe (or Jeaga) Indians, who brought them south to their settlement in Jupiter before assisting them to travel north to St. Augustine. The shell-mounds from their settlement still exist, now occupied by an 18c pioneer cabin built on top, in the usual manner of European settlers building on former native sites.

Dickinson’s journal describes the English castaways’ attempts to deceive the Jobe Indians by pretending to be Spanish, with whom the Jobe were allied. The Jobe do not seem to have been very fooled by the one member of Dickinson’s group, a crewman named Soloman Cresson, who was “speaking the Spanish language well” (7). The Jobe called Dickinson’s group “Nickaleers,” which they pretended not to understand meant English.

Relations with the Jobe were ambivalent; Dickinson and his group lost most of their clothes and goods, but a Jobe woman suckled Dickinson’s four-month old son, who survived the voyage and went on to a prominent life in trade in Philadelphia. The modern edition of Dickinson’s journal that I have on my desk, published by Florida Classics Library, subtitles it

A true story of shipwreck and torture on the Florida coast in 1696

but the torture part seems exaggerated. The Jobe started Dickinson’s party in their journey north, which took them through several different Indian groups, to St Augustine by mid-November, where they were helped, not persecuted, by the Spanish governor, and eventually to Charles Town on Dec 26. From their they took sail to Philadelphia, their original destination, where Dickinson’s memoir was published in 1699.

Dickinson apparently wasn’t discouraged by his shipwreck, since he made several more sailing trips to Jamaica, where he was born, to tend to his expanding trade network. He was twice Mayor of Philadelphia, in 1712-13 and 1717-19, before dying in that city in 1722 at the age of 59.

Spending a couple days near the shipwreck site gave me a taste of the hot and inhospitable coast of south Florida. Dickinson’s party split up on the voyage north, with the weaker members in a small boat and the bulk of the party, including Dickinson’s slaves, trudging up the beach. The water is clear, warm, and full of light. Every time I swam I saw schools of bait fish, and the local pelicans clearly were getting bigger game. Plenty of seaweed, and the 20′ high oyster middens of the Jobe settlement testify to a wealth of seafood that’s not very visible on the bottom today.

It’s an empty, inhuman space, now occupied by mansions, air conditioning, and power boats. Hard to imagine a party of Quakers on that beach today.

 

A few minutes into the show, when Damian Hudson (above) started belting out “In fair Verona..,” my nine-year old daughter Olivia leaned over and whispered to me, “Is this a musical?” And truth to tell, it was — a R&J for the Glee generation.

They opened with a clever frame that accented the elaborate wooden set, built with ramps and slides like a cross between a skateboard park and a huge summer house deck. Tony Torn*, who would also play Capulet, came on stage to throw a big cocktail party, which naturally devolved — this happens all the time — into a reading of Romeo and Juliet. Some nice framing tension when it turns out that his wife cast herself as Juliet, her husband as Capulet, and an old flame as Romeo.

The best part was the music, produced by Stew who has worked with Shakespeare on the Sound for the past four years. A lively bass line choreographed almost every moment on stage, and many of the longer speeches — Queen Mab, etc. — were presented with full musical accompaniment. Given how hard it can be to freshen up lines we’ve all be reading since junior high, it was a great gambit.

The best vocal performance I saw was by David Cale as Friar Lawrence, who turned the Friar’s opening speech about the moral ambivalence of nature (“The earth’s that’s nature’s mother is her tomb”, 2.3.1-30), into a gorgeous fusion-backed song, turning the phrase, “Many for many virtues, excellent” into a refrain. Really great stuff, and that’s a speech I often teach: I wonder if they play to record or distribute any of the songs as songs.

(I remember, a few years back, a brilliant performance of Sonnet 129 done by the actor playing Othello just after the intermission: as good a rendition of the hero’s sexual anxieties as I’ve seen staged.)

I didn’t get all the way through this one — Olivia was tired by halftime — but I’ll be back with students later in July, and I’m looking forward to seeing if the frame recurs, and if the actors playing the leads are up to the second-half reversals. But I liked what I saw so far.

*Tony Torn, for all the STJ folks reading this blog, is married to my English dept colleague Lee Ann Brown, with whom Olivia & I sat last night. Olivia and their daughter Miranda also had some good mask-making and tree-climbing before the show started. They run a great family event at Shakespeare on the Sound!