| Popis: |
Southern studies’ hesitancy to engage with conversations about the Anthropocene presents something of a paradox, Melanie Benson Taylor writes, given the region’s long heritage of both large-scale agribusiness and ecological stewardship, and especially given its deeply rooted, passionate investments in championing or descrying development and disaster in turn. Especially when we consider that the Anthropocene itself is, like any other scientific paradigm, a new narrative that simply recalibrates prevailing assumptions about geologic time, then few disciplines other than literary studies seem better suited to grapple with the imaginaries produced in the wake of anthropogenic crisis. And among the nation’s regions, the South is uniquely poised to offer a productive complication, not just an echoing, of Anthropocene discourse, as the work of Alabama Creek poet Janet McAdams suggests. In the South, the terrors of “slow violence”—a term coined by Rob Nixon to describe the accretive, invisible effects of climate change, man-made disasters, and “natural” catastrophes on the world’s poor and marginalized—have widespread applicability. In the startling interplay among the region’s polarized but analogous groups, the real complexities and challenges of the Anthropocene, and the future of southern thought, may well lie. |
