How do scholars in the fields of literature, film, and cultural studies resituate their enterprise in the Anthropocene? This fourteen-chapter collection, edited by leading theorists in the growing subfield of ecocriticism, models an intentional shift, a greening, if you will, akin to the shift toward sustainability gaining traction among folklorists. Affective Ecocriticism offers front-row seating to the necessary dismantling of dualisms undergirding the production and theorizing of cultural texts. This project of dismantling illuminates what has languished on the shadow side of binaries: reason/emotion, subject/object, culture/nature, spirit/matter. Heightening attention to place and embodiment, the shifting of affect from the margins of cultural studies to the center will be of interest to environmentally minded folklorists.

As editors Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino explain in their introduction, the convergence of affect theory with ecocriticism opens the environmental humanities to new questions. Ecocriticism is interested in the effects of cultural productions on nature and environment. Affect theory accounts for the production and distribution of affect across bodies. While affect theory opens up a ground of co-constitution between Cartesian binaries, the critical theory informing ecocriticism tracks historical, material, and relational contingencies, without which “affect” becomes reified. The result is a kind of theme and variation on the effort to see holistically, repaid by attention to how affect emerges as an ephemeral effect of all sorts of bodies in communication. A host of provocative questions arises: What kinds of affect characterize the Anthropocene? How do cultural productions model and explore emerging affects such as climate grief, ecophobia, Anthropocene anxiety, and “psychoterratic disorders” such as nostalgia and solastalgia? What does the Anthropocene expose that the Holocene concealed? How are the desires of more-than-humans noticed and accounted for? Are new Anthropocenic genres emerging? How do global capitalist formations, from constant warfare to industrialized agriculture and food distribution, register affectively?

The fourteen chapters of this volume are organized into four parts. Part One, Theoretical Foundations, considers Anthropocenic impacts on writing practices. In “‘what can we do but keep breathing as best we can/this minute atmosphere’: Juliana Spahr and Anthropocene Anxiety,” Nicole Merola explores Juliana Spahr’s harrowing rendition of an Anthropocenic sound and breathscape. Emulating moments in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2009, Spahr’s poetry literally compresses the reader’s breathing into the distinctive bio-rhythms of petro-capitalism. Alexa Weik von Mossner uses Glenn Albrecht’s conceptualization of nostalgia and solastalgia as Anthropocenic psychoterratic disorders to frame her close reading of Love in the Anthropocene, a short story collection co-authored by Dale Jamieson and Bonnie Nadzam. What will it be like to live in an Anthropocenic future in which everything that happens is controlled by humans, when everything we are and have now has become an object of nostalgia? In “A New Gentleness: Affective Ficto-Regionality,” the section’s third and final chapter, Neil Campbell explores the writings of fictocritic Steven Muecke and anthropologist Kathleen Stewart as experiments in a new ecological writing, at once critical and creative, that allow the aliveness of language itself to conjure what is unforeseeable to writer and reader alike. Such writing, argues Campbell, models a strategy, envisioned by Felix Guattari in The Three Ecologies, for challenging capitalistic power formations and subjectivities.

The four chapters comprising Part Two, Affective Attachments: Land, Bodies, Justice, explore cultural/economic productions that reflect on and reproduce land-based affect. Each chapter examines encounters of local with larger-than-local imaginaries staged in cultural productions at the nexuses of bodies, affect, and environment. Jobb Arnold’s “Feeling the Fires of Climate Change: Land Affect in Canada’s Tar Sands” uses the text of the tar sands landscape itself to foreground a counter-narrative of ontological erasure, pitting indigenous land relations grounded in practices of “feeling with the land” against state-sanctioned bureaucratic texts that refuse those relations. Arnold argues that the state-sanctioned texts are supported by films that, like Peter Mettler’s Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on Alberta’s Tar Sands, use what Rey Chow calls “transmedial capture.” Affirming the government’s “a-relational landscape,” transmedial capture contains viewers within what Arnold calls “a state of affective unknowing” (108). In “Wendell Berry and the Affective Turn,” William Major critiques the text of Berry’s 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, “It all Turns on Affection,” questioning Berry’s call for an “affective economy” motivated by care for place. While Major is skeptical of the possibility that public policy can correct an affective deficit, he concedes that a politics grounded in affection and imagination may nurture local ties capable of resisting global allurements. Tom Hertweck’s essay, “A Hunger for Words: Food Affects and Embodied Ideology,” explores the impact of multinational capitalism’s global control of food production and distribution on food affect. He argues that the discursive worlds relating us to the food we eat comprise an ideological smorgasbord, from which we choose not only what we eat, but who we are, ideologically. Defined as an “affective oscillation between metabolic and cultural need,” hunger is thus appeased by consuming and embodying ideology. A chapter by Ryan Hediger, “Uncanny Homesickness and War: Loss of Affect, Loss of Place, and Reworlding in Redeployment,” addresses the impact of wars abroad on the places to which veterans return. Focusing on Iraq veteran Phil Klay’s collection of short stories about that war, Hediger analyses the profound dis-ease experienced by soldiers who, torn from affective comradely webs on which they came to rely under wartime conditions, could not be retrofitted into pre-wartime places.

Part Three, Animality: Feeling Species and Boundaries, takes up the implications of affect theory and the multi-species turn for cultural productions that probe the human and more-than-human interface. In “Desiring Species with Darwin and Freud,” Robert Azzarello parses the legacy of Darwin and Freud, key thinkers who distinguished humans from nonhumans according to the capacity for desire. That animals turn out in the thinking of both not to desire in the ways that humans do raises ethical questions, since diminishing an other’s capacity to desire is, as Azzarello observes, a way of diminishing one’s ethical responsibility to that other. In “Tragedy, Ecophobia, and Animality in the Anthropocene,” Brian Deyo combs Shakespeare and Descartes for the roots of ecophobia. The social and ontological unravelling of King Lear, argues Deyo, models conditions under which humans might concede a kinship with animals, and offers a parable for the disheveling of Western philosophy in the gathering storm of climate change. Deyo finds, in Amitav Ghosh’s call for closer identification with our animal kin, a way to overcome the zoophobic separation of Reason from the body (nature, animality, the passions) attributed to Descartes. In the section’s final chapter, “Futurity Without Optimism: Detaching from Anthropocentrism and Grieving our Fathers in Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Alysse Knox-Russell tackles issues of representation embedded in “closer identification” with animal kin under the sign of Descartes. Though she sides with critics of the film’s alignment of BIPOC hurricane victims along the Louisiana coast with “beasts,” she notes the film’s success at avoiding narrative containment, at “eluding audience mastery of the climate change threat.” And in the film’s portrayal of climate injustice, Knox-Russell finds a necessary opening onto an alternative future “radically open to difference and change.”

Chapters in Part Four, Environmentalist Killjoys: Politics and Pedagogy, invite us to linger with possibilities that, located between the poles of hope and despair, might better equip us for dwelling in the Anthropocene. Jane Seymour’s “The Queerness of Environmental Affect” argues for the study of how artists are invoking alternatives to melancholia, including camp, irony, and humor. Applying Judith Butler’s queer theory to the portrayal of environmental affect, she turns to the video projects of San Francisco-based artist Kim Anno. Depicting ordinary life as we’ll know it when the waters have fully risen, Anno provokes unease in viewers caught in a state between the normal and the unbearable. Citing Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 sci-fi classic “about human affective overinvestment in the nonhuman,” Seymour offers the possibility of holding utter sadness and deep joy together as a way for humans and non-humans to co-exist in a “social, political, and material context deeply hostile to both” (251). With Lisa Ottum’s essay, “Feeling Let Down: Affect, Environmentalism, and the Power of Negative Thinking,” this section’s exploration of bad affect moves from melancholy to disappointment, pre-figured in Wordsworth’s famous moment in “The Prelude.” Ottum retrieves the antidote in William Gilpin’s instructions for processing eighteenth-century aesthetic experience, on the premise that, through the habitual training of disappointment toward reflection, we might turn less-than-ideal encounters with nature into opportunities for personal growth. The travel writings of Geoff Dyer, for whom “storied places are almost always disappointing,” support Ottum’s case that deflecting bad affects like disappointment and melancholia is no substitute for pushing through them. Graig Uhlin’s “Feeling Depleted: Ecocinema and the Atmospherics of Affect” uses three films (Old Joy, Melancholia, and Gerry) to illuminate the connection between ecological and psychological depletion, a connection registered in the notion that affect is generated and shared between bodies, implicating more-than-human bodies as affective media. If, as a character in one of the films opines, “Melancholy is old joy,” feeling depleted happens when joy has become unreplenishable through ecological channels. With “Coming of Age at the End of the World: The Affective Arc of Undergraduate Environmental Studies Curricula,” Sarah Jacquette-Ray closes the section, and the book, with a hard look at the challenge of teaching environmental studies in the present time of climate crisis. Increasingly an emotionally-charged topic, environmental studies entails a good deal of emotional care-giving, a burden that lands disproportionately, Jacquette-Ray argues, on female faculty members. She proposes an environmental studies curriculum that brings underrepresented minority students into dialogue with privileged white students. Facilitating encounters across social and political difference allows students themselves to begin dismantling the reason/emotion dichotomy and its cognates. In the process students discover and name ways of knowing and being that drive the crisis while they acquire tools needed for dealing with consequences for relationships at home and in the workplace.

I recommend Affective Ecocriticism to colleagues interested in applying ecocritical and affective theory at the intersection of folklore and environmental studies. The eclecticism and omnivorous philosophical foraging that distinguish this collection are crucial to an ecological reframing of the humanities, including folklore. Ultimately, however, Affective Ecocriticism may be most interesting to folklorists because of what it misses: insights of the sort that folklore is uniquely positioned to offer. A discursive bridge is suggested by social psychologist Margaret Wetherill in an important article on the affective turn that is not cited in this volume. Naming an object of inquiry that lends itself to folklore, Wetherill’s term “affective practices” (2015, 166) enables a methodological move, in Wetherill’s words, “beyond the analysis of texts in cultural studies to social research on everyday life affective scenes, events, and episodes” (2015, 159). In the field of folklore, we find this move explicitly modelled, for example, in a recent chapter by Amy Shuman and Katharine Young, which describes and analyses the production of affect between bodies engaged in co-narration (2019). While it does not go there, Affective Ecocriticism exposes zones of articulation for folklorists interested in how bodies—human and more-than-human—reflexively generate affect and place through the social interactional routines and structures of feeling that subtend ordinary processes of living.

Works Cited

Shuman, Amy and Katharine Young. 2019. “The Body as Medium: a Phenomenological Approach to the Production of Affect in Narrative.” Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative, Ed. Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol, pp. 399-416.

Wetherell, Margaret. 2015. “Trends in the Turn to Affect: A Social Psychological Critique.” Body and Society 21: 139-166.

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[Review length: 1922 words • Review posted on November 19, 2021]