eBooks

The Genres of Genre: Form, Formats, and Cultural Formations

1014
2019
978-3-8233-9327-6
978-3-8233-8327-7
Gunter Narr Verlag 
Cécile Heim
Boris Vejdovsky
Benjamin Pickford
10.24053/9783823393276
CC BY-SA 4.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.de

The 38th volume of SPELL is dedicated to the discussion and analysis of the concept of genre. Terms such as "the political unconscious" (Jameson), "cultural work" (Tompkins), "narrative mode" (Williams) and "performative" (Austin, Turner) have been centrally determining, over the years, to help us understand how genres work and what they do. This collection seeks to further explore what roles genre plays in past and contemporary American national narratives and counter-narratives. While the first three essays of the volume attempt to tackle the difficult task of defining genre and its affordances, the following three essays discuss specific genres, namely, the office novel, the political TV show, and science-fiction. Finally, the last three essays explore how genre can be a valuable concept for the analysis of larger issues, such as the representation of race in American cultural productions. This collection of essays therefore offers a variety of approaches to the literary device of genre, reflecting ongoing research in the Swiss community of American studies, in order to underline the productive potential of genre analysis.

<?page no="0"?> SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature The 38th volume of SPELL is dedicated to the discussion and analysis of the concept of genre. Terms such as “the political unconscious” (Jameson), “cultural work” (Tompkins), “narrative mode” (Williams) and “performative” (Austin, Turner) have been centrally determining, over the years, to help us understand how genres work and what they do. This collection seeks to further explore what roles genre plays in past and contemporary American national narratives and counter-narratives. While the first three essays of the volume attempt to tackle the difficult task of defining genre and its affordances, the following three essays discuss specific genres, namely, the office novel, the political TV show, and science-fiction. Finally, the last three essays explore how genre can be a valuable concept for the analysis of larger issues, such as the representation of race in American cultural productions. This collection of essays therefore offers a variety of approaches to the literary device of genre, reflecting ongoing research in the Swiss community of American studies, in order to underline the productive potential of genre analysis. ISBN 978-3-8233-8327-7 38 Heim / Vejdovsky / Pickford (eds.) The Genres of Genre The Genres of Genre: Forms, Formats, and Cultural Formations Edited by Cécile Heim, Boris Vejdovsky and Benjamin Pickford 38 18327_Umschlag.indd Alle Seiten 25.09.2019 12: 40: 36 <?page no="1"?> SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature Edited by The Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (SAUTE) General Editor: Ina Habermann Volume 38 Editorial Board (2016-19): Rachel Falconer (University of Lausanne) Indira Ghose (University of Fribourg) Martin Hilpert (University of Neuchâtel) John E. Joseph (University of Edinburgh) Annette Kern-Stähler (University of Bern) Martin Leer (University of Geneva) Jennifer Richards (University of Newcastle) Philipp Schweighauser (University of Basel) Olga Timofeeva (University of Zurich) <?page no="2"?> The Genres of Genre: Forms, Formats, and Cultural Formations Edited by Cécile Heim, Boris Vejdovsky and Benjamin Pickford <?page no="3"?> Umschlagabbildung und Einbandgestaltung: Martin Heusser, Zürich Zeichnung: Leila Benallal, Lausanne Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.dnb.de abrufbar Publiziert mit Unterstützung der Schweizerischen Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. © 2019 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Internet: www.narr.de eMail: info@narr.de CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 0940-0478 ISBN 978-3-8233-8327-7 (Print) ISBN 978-3-8233-9327-6 (ePDF) www.fsc.org MIX Papier aus verantwortungsvollen Quellen FSC ® C083411 ® <?page no="4"?> Table of Contents Introduction 11 Form and Genre James Dorson (Freie Universität Berlin) Unformed Forms: Genre Theory and the Trouble with Caroline Levine’s Forms 23 Audrey Loetscher (Lausanne) Taking Carbon Culture to Court: Civil Lawsuits as Political Manifestoes in US Climate Change Litigation 43 Analyzing Genres Sixta Quassdorf (St Gallen) “I would prefer not to”: Routine and Agency in Office Fiction 65 Bryan Banker (Munich) “The Modality in Which Class is ‘Lived’”: Literalizing Race and Class in The Expanse 85 Olga Thierbach-McLean (Independent scholar) A Familiar Otherness: The Trope of Asia in Cyberpunk Movies since the 1980s 105 Affordances of Genre J. Jesse Ramírez (St Gallen) Are Orcs Racist? Genre, Racecraft, and Bright 125 <?page no="5"?> Courtney Jacobs and Ronald Schleifer (University of Oklahoma, Norman) Literary Genre and Affective Experience: Intergenerational Trauma in the Neo-Slave Narrative of Toni Morrison’s Beloved 145 Notes on Contributors 167 Index of Names 171 <?page no="6"?> General Editor’s Preface SPELL (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature) is a publication of SAUTE , the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English. Established in 1984, it first appeared every second year, was published annually from 1994 to 2008, and now appears three times every two years. Every second year, SPELL publishes a selection of papers given at the biennial symposia organized by SAUTE . Non-symposium volumes usually have as their starting point papers given at other conferences organized by members of SAUTE , in particular conferences of SANAS , the Swiss Association for North American Studies and SAMEMES , the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies. However, other proposals are also welcome. Decisions concerning topics and editors are made by the Annual General Meeting of SAUTE two years before the year of publication. Volumes of SPELL contain carefully selected and edited papers devoted to a topic of literary, linguistic and - broadly - cultural interest. All contributions are original and are subjected to external evaluation by means of a full peer review process. Contributions are usually by participants at the conferences mentioned, but volume editors are free to solicit further contributions. Papers published in SPELL are documented in the MLA International Bibliography. SPELL is published with the financial support of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. Information on all aspects of SPELL , including volumes planned for the future, is available from the General Editor, Professor Ina Habermann, University of Basel, Department of English, CH-4051 Basel, Switzerland; e-mail: ina.habermann@unibas.ch. Information about past volumes of SPELL and about SAUTE , in particular about how to become a member of the association, can be obtained from the SAUTE website at http: / / www. saute.ch. Ina Habermann <?page no="8"?> Acknowledgements This volume developed from the biennial meeting of the Swiss Association for North American Studies (SANAS), which took place on 2-3 November 2018 at the University of Lausanne. We wish to express our gratitude for her support and confidence to Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, conference co-organizer, esteemed colleague, and dear friend. This volume is dedicated to her. We are grateful to the following sponsors and partners of the conference for making the event possible: the University of Lausanne, SANAS, the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English, the European Association for American Studies, the Embassy of Canada to Switzerland, and the US Embassy in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. We extend our gratitude to our keynote speakers Deborah Madsen, Ronald Schleifer, and Linda Williams for their stimulating talks and scholarly direction. We also warmly thank all the conference participants and the contributors to the volume; their scholarship and friendly help made it all happen. Finally, we thank all the volunteers who helped us run a smooth and enjoyable event. Special thanks to Leila Benallal for the creation of the conference poster and the elegant artwork for this volume’s cover. In addition to the authors whose inspired work appears in this volume, we wish to thank all the gracious individuals without whom it could not have seen the light of day: Alexandre Fachard, our copyeditor, for his invaluable work; our colleagues who participated in the peerreview process; Martin Heusser for the cover design; and our General Editors Ina Habermann and Lukas Erne for their support. <?page no="10"?> The Genres of Genre: Form, Formats, and Cultural Formations Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a breakdown of meaning. Those categories which were meant to define and control the world for us have boomeranged us into chaos, in which limbo we whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions. - James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” Thus, as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity. - Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre” Genre is a Janus-faced theoretical genre. To examine the genres of genre in our time leads us to wonder about the foundation of critical theory from its recorded inception in classical antiquity and ponder the future of our academic and political practices. Not only does genre have the capacity to participate in the construction of communities through its reiteration of formulas and their corresponding values, but it also has the potential to transgress and transform the conventions of these communities. Contemporary examples of the establishment of conventions in genres and their use as counter-cultural “war machines,” to borrow Monique Wittig’s term (45), abound. As a powerful and flexible critical device, genre reveals the past and present relations and patterns of fiction and community-building processes. As Linda Williams suggests, “Genres thrive, after all, on the persistence of the problems they address; but genres thrive also in their ability to recast the nature of these problems” (“Film Bodies” 12). To offer what Jacques Derrida calls “a critical history of the concept of genre from Plato to the present” (59) is therefore crucial to evidence the interactions between genre and the issues with which it engages. While the essays in this volume consider the The Genres of Genre: Form, Formats, and Cultural Formations. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 38. Ed. Cécile Heim, Boris Vejdovsky and Benjamin Pickford. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 11-21. <?page no="11"?> Introduction 12 historical depth of genre, they also address the political effects of genre as its predication on conventions enables communities to negotiate its exclusive and inclusive dimensions. Given the importance of historical and conventional aspects of genre, it is to be expected that genre operates in specific contexts. This volume addresses genre in the contemporary United States. In their recent volume on the adventure narrative, Johan Höglund and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet point out that “One could define a ‘genre’ as belonging to a specific historical and cultural moment and agree that a ‘mode’ or ‘form’ can refer to a larger pattern that operates across a wider historical and cultural field” (1302). 1 John Frow, on the other hand, contends that genres transform their contexts: Genre, we might say, is a set of conventional and highly organized constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning [. . .] That is why genre matters: it is central to human meaning-making and to the social struggle over meanings. (10) If genre can be understood as a way of symbolically organizing meaning, it also reveals the context in which it operates: in the contemporary United States, climate change, gender politics, neoliberalism, intersectional representations of race and class, and the circulation of affect are all generic matters. Genre organizes the conventions that delimit these matters and stages their performance. Reflecting on genre consists in reflecting on the political significance of critical theory when the latter leaves the ivory tower of academia. In The Republic already, Plato insists upon this political aspect. His exclusion of the poets from the polis is generic: it is the genre of poetry they write that turns “the imitative tribe” into individuals that need to be “rejected” from his idealized political space. In a daring analogy with the body, Socrates argues that the genre of imitative poetry “wastes and reduces and annihilates” the souls of the citizens of the Republic. In the Poetics, Aristotle counters this Platonic argument of the degenerative character of mimesis and proposes a theory of genre that would prove formative for literary studies: 1 This distinction between genre and form is also found in Caroline Levine’s recent Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, although - as James Dorson’s essay in this volume reveals - it is a distinction that is liable to push this definition of form into absurdity. 12 effects of genre enables communities to negotiate its Given the importance of historical and conventional aspects of genre, in specific contexts. This volume In their recent volume on the adventure narrative, Johan Höglund and Agnieszka Soltysik as belonging to a spemode’ or ‘form’ can operates across a wider historical and culturcontends that genres Genre, we might say, is a set of conventional and highly organized con- [. . .] That is why making and to the social If genre can be understood as a way of symbolically organizing meaning, the contemporary neoliberalism, intersecand the circulation of affect are hat delimit these Reflecting on genre consists in reflecting on the political significance of critical theory when the latter leaves the ivory tower of academia. In political aspect. His exclusion : it is the genre of poetry they write into individuals that need to be “rejected” idealized political space. In a daring analogy with the body, Socwastes and reduces and of the Republic. In the Poetics, Aris- Platonic argument of the degenerative character of prove formative for distinction between genre and form is also found in Caroline Levine’s recent as James Dorson’s essay in this it is a distinction that is liable to push this definition of form into ab- <?page no="12"?> Introduction 13 The graver spirits imitated noble actions, and the actions of good men. The more trivial sort imitated the actions of meaner persons, at first composing satires, as the former did hymns to the gods and the praises of famous men [. . .] The appropriate meter was also here introduced; hence the measure is still called the iambic or lampooning measure, being that in which people lampooned one another. Thus the older poets were distinguished as writers of heroic or of lampooning verse. (IV, 1448b) Aristotle creates a poetic nomenclature that we still use today, and he establishes genre as a critical category: the genre of criticism. In the Renaissance the criticism generated by Aristotle would flourish and give to writers such as Dante Alighieri in his De Vulgari Eloquentia or his Convivio the basis of their definition of Western modernity. In these treatises, Dante ponders the relations between language and the advent of a new political community, that community we would call “modern” or “Renaissance.” If for Aristotle genre is a question of literary convention as well as aesthetic and ethical appropriateness, with Dante it is a question of epochal change. Modern humanity in search of its “scented panther” (panthera redolens) (I, XVI, 1), that is, the very language of “modernity,” is characterized by the linguistic and poetic genres it adopts. With the ever-expanding horizon of Eurocentric metaphysics that would characterize the Renaissance, genre is no longer a question of taste, but rather an ethical and political performance. Genre is formative and constitutive: it brings together the new civitas that Dante is seeking to delineate. We see that in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, whose white, virile, and Christian figure embodies that modernity at the center of the orb and the castrum of our modern world. The eighteenth-century aesthetic turn endowed genres with kinds and degrees of beauty while further confirming their politically performative character. In a notorious passage from Notes on the State of Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson elaborates on how “the first difference” between human bodies “which strikes us is that of color” (264), he speculates about scientific possibilities that we now accept as specious and unequivocally racist to apply generic distinctions based on aesthetics to people. For Jefferson, beauty has generic standards, and the determining consciousness of those standards is a white and male one that wishes to dispose of black bodies and, albeit differently, of Native bodies. These bodies are to be “rejected,” for they do not belong in the ideal pastoral republic for which Virginia stands as an aesthetic model and a political experiment. Jefferson is an example of the profound consequences of generic categorization; he shows that when we deal with genre we are not merely disposing books on some imaginary shelf, but we are really dealing with the 13 The graver spirits imitated noble actions, and the actions of good men. The more trivial sort imitated the actions satires, as the former did hymns to the gods and the praises of famous men [. . .] The appropriate meter was also here introduced; hence the measure is still called the iambic or lampooning measure, being that in which lampooned one another. Thus the older poets were distinguished as writers of heroic or of lampooning verse. (IV, 1448b) Aristotle creates establishes genre as a critical In the Renaissance the criticism generated and give to writers such as Dante Alighieri in his his Convivio the basis of their definition of treatises, Dante ponders of a new political community, that community we would call or “Renaissance. tion as well as question of epochal change panther” (panthera redolens dernity,” is characterized by the linguistic and poe With the ever-expanding horizon of Eurocentric metaphysics characterize the Renaissance rather an ethical and political performance. Genre is formative and co stitutive: it bring ate. We see that ile, and Christian and the castrum The eighteenth degrees of beauty while further confirming the character. In a notorious passage from Thomas Jefferson elaborates on how man bodies “which strikes us is that of color scientific possibilities that we now accept as specious and unequivocally racist to apply generic distinctions based on aesthetics Jefferson, beauty ness of those standards black bodies and, albeit differently, of Native bodies. These bodies are to be “rejected,” which Virginia stands as an aesthetic model and a political experiment Jefferson is an example of the profound consequences of generic categ rization; he shows posing books on some imaginary shelf, but we are really dealing with the <?page no="13"?> Introduction 14 semiotics that weaves the fabric of our cultures and societies. Aesthetic taxonomies determine not only what belongs to a given genre and should find a place in our libraries, museums, and syllabi: more importantly, it adjudicates on who is entitled to live in the space of the polis. This is confirmed by Jefferson’s commentary on Phillis Wheatley and his contempt for the genre of - what we would call - African American poetry, which he finds “below the dignity of criticism” (267; emphasis added). These shocking words of the future third president of the United States show the performative power of genre that reinforces and legitimizes individual speech acts. Jefferson’s words echo the etymology of “genre”: the word comes from the French genre, meaning “kind” and “class,” and from Latin genus, meaning “birth,” “origin,” “race.” Derrida notes, One need not mobilize etymology to [. . .] equate genos with birth, and birth in turn with the generous force of engenderment or generation - physis, in fact - as with race, familial membership, classificatory genealogy or class, age class (generation), or social class (61). The Greek source of the word, γένος (genos), thus further confirms what we read in Jefferson, namely that genre also defines social and political class, and that the question of kind is also - if not primarily - a question of kin. Precisely because Jefferson’s remarks are so problematically racist to us, they point to the historical condition of genre. Genre does not stand as a preexisting category, but results rather from inclusive and exclusive strategies and from the tacit consensus of an audience. This last remark is harmless enough if we consider that most audiences can recognize a genre - the gothic or the western, for instance - without necessarily being able to trace its theoretical contours. On the other hand, this tacit historical consensus becomes alarming when we think of the generic exclusion exemplified by Plato, Jefferson, or some of the contemporary examples the present volume discusses. This also means that an active and discerning understanding of genre is essential to raise our awareness of the consequences of the tacit agreement on which many exclusions are based. Genre theory, as Aristotelian categories suggest, aims at organizing and making sense of otherwise unwieldy material. Literature, film, painting and artistic productions are thus grouped in genres where these productions can be located. The inclusion of any new element into a genre modifies it; far from being a natural given, genre is a place of permanent negotiation and reconfiguration. This is, for instance, what Paul Alpers 14 ures and societies. Aesthetic taxonomies determine not only what belongs to a given genre and , museums, and syllabi: more imwho is entitled to live in the space of the pos commentary on Phillis Wheatley and African American (267; emphasis addshocking words of the future third president of the United that reinforces and legitis words echo the etymology of , meaning “kind” and “race.” Derrida with birth, and birth in turn with the generous force of engenderment or generation - physis, in with race, familial membership, classificatory genealogy or class, age thus further confirms what we read in Jefferson, namely that genre also defines social and political if not primarily - a question s remarks are so problematically racist preexisting category, but results rather from inclusive and exclusive strategies and from the tacit consensus of harmless enough if we consider that the gothic or the western, for without necessarily being able to trace its theoretical contours. becomes alarming Plato, Jefferson, or some of the contemporary examples the present volume discusses. understanding of genre is the tacit agree- Genre theory, as Aristotelian categories suggest, aims at organizing and making sense of otherwise unwieldy material. Literature, film, paintare thus grouped in genres where these pron be located. The inclusion of any new element into a genre modifies it; far from being a natural given, genre is a place of permanent what Paul Alpers <?page no="14"?> Introduction 15 writes when he responds - twenty-five years after the fact - to a reading of John Milton’s Lycidas by M. H. Abrams. Alpers comments on how “Virgil’s shepherds come together to entertain each other, in friendship and in friendly rivalry” and he insists on the sense of community created by readers who are like the Virgilian shepherds: The word “convention” comes from [. . .] convenire, come together [. . .] [P]astoral conventions are not fixed procedures imposed by impersonal tradition, but are the usages of other poets - a community of past singers [. . .] Poetic convention in this sense - the shared practice of those who come together to sing - can enable individual expression, because the poet is seen as responsive to, even when challenging, his predecessors and fellows. (470; emphasis added) Alpers emphasizes the ethical and communal quality of genre that not only provides a frame of reference for readers and helps them make sense of texts, but also helps them to realize the conditions of an interpretive community. The transformations of genre, or the development of a new genre, can thus be read as a response to changing social and political conditions, but also as an influence on these conditions. An example of how genre can work to create consensus in the US national context is the development of crime fiction. As a genre, crime fiction polices its own territory while it is also about the policing of the legality and morality of the US community. Edgar Allan Poe is credited with generating American crime fiction with his three Auguste Dupin stories. 2 These stories and the genre they determine coincided with demographic, economic, and technological transformations in the United States. The genre crossed the ocean to be further developed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie before returning to the United States in the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who pioneered the hard-boiled detective novel. In its transformations, the genre privileged and promoted an image of the ideal citizen reminiscent of Plato’s, Dante’s, and Jefferson’s, in detective figures such as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. However, as several authors have shown since the Civil Rights Movement, crime fiction can be an inclusive genre. Beginning in the 1950s, it became a platform for critiquing and subverting the stereotypical values promoted by the genre. This was done by activists and innova- 2 This is suggested by specialists of crime fiction such as Stephen Knight, Catherine Ross-Nickerson, and John Scaggs; see References below. The three Auguste Dupin short stories include “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844). 15 writes when he responds of John Milton’s “Virgil’s shepherds come together to entertain each other, in friendship and in friendly rivalry by readers who are like the Virgilian shepherds: The word “ [P]astoral conventions are not fixed procedures imposed by impersonal tr dition, but are convention in this sense enable individual expression, because the poet is seen as responsive to, even when challenging, his predecessors and fellows. (470; emphasis added) Alpers emphasizes the ethical and communal quality of genre that not only provides a frame of reference for readers and helps them make sense of texts, but also helps them to realize the conditions of an pretive community. The transformations of genre, or the development of a new genre, can cal conditions, but also as an influence on these conditions. An example of tional context is tion polices its own gality and morality of the with generating stories. 2 These stories and the genre they determine coincided with d mographic, economic, and technological transformations in the United States. The genre crossed the ocean to be further developed by Si thur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie before returning States in the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler pioneered the hard genre privileged of Plato’s, Dante Spade or Philip Marlowe. However, as several Movement, crime fiction 1950s, it became cal values promoted by 2 This is suggested by specialists of crime fiction such as Stephen Knight, Catherine Ross-Nickerson, and John stories include “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844). <?page no="15"?> Introduction 16 tors such as African American Chester Himes and feminist Sara Paretsky. 3 For example, Himes famously complicated the question of blame, of who the criminal is: “I had started out to write a detective story [. . .] but I couldn’t name the white man who was guilty because all white men are guilty” (qtd in Reddy 140; emphasis added). Himes’s point alerts us to the role of genre in stabilizing the ascription of blame to individual agents (a conservative position), rather than to the structural conditions which we now understand to be the cause of social injustice. 4 Adapting the mechanism of a genre, making it inclusive rather than exclusive, can consequently come to stand as a form of political engagement and judicial redress. Yet even at its most inclusive, instead of policing the world and ensuring everybody’s rightful place in the community, the stereotypes of genre have become exclusionary strategies. As James Baldwin writes in the first epigraph to this introduction, the “limbo” (19) between exclusion and inclusion in which genre dwells is also pointed out by scholars from communities who have been and still are neither within nor without the American community. As Chickasaw scholar, Jodi A. Byrd, states, “[t]hat genre [. . .] demands affiliation at the same time that it marks differentiation is one of the primary reasons that it enacts colonialist discourse at the site of imagination” (346). This bargaining affiliation and differentiation reflects the status of Native Americans in the United States because it echoes the legal status of their nations as “domestic dependent nations” (Deloria and Lytle 4). The generic negotiation between exclusion and inclusion is not only an artistic practice, but also a lived experience for Indigenous peoples. While Byrd shows how Indigenous authors such as Blackfeet writer Stephen Graham Jones take the in-betweenness of genres as their creative site, Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice coins the term “wonderworks” (152) to prevent the works of Indigenous authors from being constrained by the conventions of fantasy fiction: 3 Post-Civil Rights innovators of crime fiction being too numerous to list here, these are only two of the most famous innovators of the genre. These examples also omit intersectional takes on crime fiction, which, of course, also exist. It is also important to note that earlier crime fiction could also be inclusive (Dashiell Hammett, for example, embedded his communist sympathies into his writing); just as countercultural crime fiction could also display exclusive dimensions (Himes’s writing is as unconcerned with feminist criticism of crime fiction as Paretsky’s early novels are silent on the issue of race). 4 For more on how race relations in the United States are negotiated through genre and mode, see Linda Williams’s seminal study Playing the Race Card. 16 feminist Sara Pausly complicated the question of I had started out to write a detective story white man who was guilty because all white Himes’s point alerts us to the role of genre in stabilizing the ascription of blame to individual agents (a conservative position), rather than to the structural conditions which we now understand to be the cause of social injustice. 4 Adapting making it inclusive rather than exclusive, can consequently come to stand as a form of political engagement and judinstead of policing the world and ens rightful place in the community, the stereotypes of genre have become exclusionary strategies. As James Baldwin writes in between exclupointed out by scholars from communities who have been and still are neither within nor with- . As Chickasaw scholar, Jodi A. Byrd, demands affiliation at the same time that it marks differentiation is one of the primary reasons that it enacts colonibargaining affiliation and differentiation reflects the status of Native Americans in the United of their nations as “domestic negotiation benot only an artistic practice, but also a such as Blackfeet writer betweenness of genres as their crea- Daniel Heath Justice coins the term “wonthe works of Indigenous authors from being Civil Rights innovators of crime fiction being too numerous to list here, these are only two of the most famous innovators of the genre. These examples also omit inter- It is also important to note that earlier crime fiction could also be inclusive (Dashiell Hammett, for example, embedded his communist sympathies into his writing); just as countercultural crime fiction could also display exclusive dimensions (Himes’s writing is as unconcerned with femithe issue of race). through genre and <?page no="16"?> Introduction 17 “Wonder,” on the other hand, is a word rooted in meaningful uncertainty, curiosity, humility; it places unsolvable mystery, not fixed insistence, at the heart of engagement [. . .] Wondrous things are other and otherwise [. . .] They remind us that other worlds exist; other realities abide alongside and within our own. Wonderworks, then, are those works of art - literary, filmic, etc. - that center this possibility within Indigenous values and toward Indigenous, decolonial purposes. (153) Justice suggests that it is impossible to live otherwise and be part of other realities within Eurocentric, generic conventions, a claim that leads him to create the theoretical and artistic space of wonderworks. Including non-Eurocentric perspectives on the critical concept of genre might well consist in innovating the discussion of belonging to the American community and, thus, transform the question of kin. This collection of essays explores contemporary understandings and examples of genres as well as the circulation of values or affect through genre. The essays are organized into three parts: “Form and Genre,” “Analyzing Genres,” and “Affordances of Genre.” James Dorson opens the first part with a reconsideration of a central distinction in genre theory - the distinction between form and genre - in a critique of one of the most celebrated works of new formalism, Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015). Dorson turns the constitutive dismissal of genre that structures Levine’s theory of form back against her thesis, revealing the critical absence in Levine’s book of a constructive engagement with “the process theory of genre” that recognizes its “softness” (as opposed to Levine’s “hardness” of form) and its consequences for the interaction and development of the determinative forms of social, political, and cultural life. Continuing the theme of what genre can (or cannot) do in terms of social and political work, Audrey Loetscher offers an unorthodox perspective which employs the rubric of genre theory, and particularly the genre of the manifesto, to interpret the methodologies of climate change litigation in the United States. Loetscher’s essay circumscribes the criteria that are needed for the development of an effective strategy to counter the climate crisis, but - in her analysis of the ongoing Juliana v. United States case in Eugene, Oregon - she identifies the persistence of tropes in key examples of the genre of the manifesto that ensure that such generically defined forms of resistance are doomed to ineffectiveness. The second part of the volume, “Analyzing Genres,” features several essays which reflect further on genres (extant or nascent) that are relevant for the study of topical issues in the contemporary United States. In an essay that links Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) to 17 “Wonder,” on the other hand, is a word rooted in meaningful uncertainty, curiosity, humility; it places unsolvable mystery, not fixed insistence, at the heart of engagement remind us that other worlds exist; other realities abide alongside and within our own. Wonderworks, then, are those works of art that center this possibility within Indigenous values and toward Indigenous, decolonial purpos Justice suggests that it er realities within him to create the theoretical and artistic space of wonderworks. ing non-Eurocentric perspe well consist in community and, thus, This collection of essays explores contemporary understandings and examples of genres as well as the circulation of values or affect through genre. The essays are organized “Analyzing Genres,” and “Af the first part with a reconsideration of a central distinction in genre the ry - the distinction between form and genre most celebrated works of new formalism, Caroline Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network of genre that structures Levine revealing the critical absence in Levine ment with “the process theory of genre (as opposed to Levine the interaction and development of the determinative forms of social, political, and cultural life. Continuing the theme of what genre can (or cannot) do in terms of an unorthodox perspective which employs the rubric of genre theory, and particularly the genre of the manifesto, to interpret the methodol gies of climate change litigation in the United States. Loetscher circumscribes the criteria that are needed for the development of an e fective strategy to counter the climate crisis, but ongoing Juliana v. the persistence of tropes that ensure that such generically defined forms of resistance are doomed to ineffectiveness. The second part essays which reflect further on genres (extant o vant for the study of topical issues in an essay that links Herman Melville <?page no="17"?> Introduction 18 David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), Sixta Quassdorf proposes the emergence of the genre of the “office novel” as a manifestation of anxieties that are symptoms of bureaucratic and technocratic late capitalism. Rather than dismissing representations of office work in popular genre fiction as merely coincidental and insignificant, Quassdorf argues that literary representations of clerical work illustrate transformations of social life in the United States, and that adopting a generic approach allows for a more analytical appraisal of “the materiality of the individual in socioeconomic structures.” Bryan Banker’s essay examines how the genre of science fiction is particularly well suited to the analysis of social relations under capitalism. Banker argues that the imbrication of class and race described in contemporary Marxist social theory is rendered starkly visible in The Expanse (2015present), a television series produced by the Syfy network that portrays the peripheralization of industrial labor to the asteroid belt as well as the “racialization” of its laborers that is the consequence of physical transformations caused by industrial labor in a zero-gravity environment. Olga Thierbach-McLean provides a counterpart to Banker that also examines science fiction; specifically, the subgenre of cyberpunk and its “aesthetic standstill” that makes this subgenre potentially problematic in terms of race relations in the US. Thierbach-McLean describes Hollywood cyberpunk, from the 1980s to the present, as “dynamic and static at the same time,” reflecting shifts in geopolitics, but nonetheless maintaining a problematic socio-cultural continuity in terms of its depictions of “Asianness” to visualize dystopia. Consequently, Thierbach-McLean reflects on how the tropological fixtures of genre can, when left unchecked, turn manifestations of sociocultural anxieties into shorthand for generic belonging, and from there potentially into aesthetic fixtures that renew the same sociocultural anxieties for the following generation. The final part of this collection, “Affordances of Genre,” offers insights into affordances of genre. J. Jesse Ramírez examines genre as a means of “organizing belief [. . .] in a nonor extra-empirical reality” that has concrete sociopolitical valences insofar as race itself is structured on the same terms. Using the Netflix movie Bright (2018) as his focal point, Ramirez dismantles the cyclical logic by which “racecraft” emerges in social contexts, is then manifested (and exploited) as a recognizable social structure in major cultural texts (in this case, the Lord of the Rings trilogy), and thereafter is turned back onto society again as a means of interpreting the structure of its ailments. The overall consequence, Ramirez notes, is that this sociocultural reflexivity stabilizes the apparently “natural” distinction of racial difference, and hence the program of 18 (2011) and Ling Ma’s Severance proposes the emergence of the genre of the “ofas a manifestation of anxieties that are symptoms of bureaudismissing representacoincidental and insignificant, Quassdorf argues that literary representations of clerical United States, and that adopting a generic approach allows for a more analytical appraisal of of the individual in socioeconomic structures.” Bryan essay examines how the genre of science fiction is particularly suited to the analysis of social relations under capitalism. Banker argues that the imbrication of class and race described in contemporary The Expanse (2015y network that portrays the peripheralization of industrial labor to the asteroid belt as well as the of its laborers that is the consequence of physical transgravity environment. Olprovides a counterpart to Banker that also examines science fiction; specifically, the subgenre of cyberpunk and its “aesthat makes this subgenre potentially problematic in n describes Hollydynamic and static reflecting shifts in geopolitics, but nonetheless maincultural continuity in terms of its depictions ualize dystopia. Consequently, Thierbach-McLean reflects on how the tropological fixtures of genre can, when left unchecked, turn manifestations of sociocultural anxieties into shorthand for generic belonging, and from there potentially into aesthetic fixtures that renew the same sociocultural anxieties for the following generation. , “Affordances of Genre,” offers inexamines genre as a empirical reality” that has concrete sociopolitical valences insofar as race itself is structured on (2018) as his focal point, racecraft” emerges in social contexts, is then manifested (and exploited) as a recognizable so- Lord of the Rings tril- ), and thereafter is turned back onto society again as a means of inof its ailments. The overall consequence, Ramirez notes, is that this sociocultural reflexivity stabilizes the appardistinction of racial difference, and hence the program of <?page no="18"?> Introduction 19 racecraft continues in a single, unabated trajectory that reifies and fixes the “everyday epistemology of race” in a way that will remain unaffected by the traditional call for mutual “tolerance” to ease sociopolitical tensions. In the concluding essay, Courtney Jacobs and Ronald Schleifer take up slightly different issues of “self-evident” aspects of social life that are uniquely mediated by genre; specifically, the issue of whether genre might be capable of manifesting impersonal, collective, or trans-historical abstractions of “feeling.” Jacobs and Schleifer do not regard genre as a means of apprehending emotional experience according to extant, “selfevident” affective structures; instead, using the genre of the slave narrative as their example, Jacobs and Schleifer argue that the legibility of the suffering invariably foregrounded by such narratives is produced by their authors’ metaleptic concession to the generic conventions that make such suffering legible. In the nineteenth century, this generic instrumentalism was imperative, but in reality authentic empathy from American readers for the suffering of chattel slaves was and remains impossible due to the scale and illegibility of that suffering. Consequently, Jacobs and Schleifer engage with the most prominent of neo-slave narratives, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), to explore how this modern development on the genre of the slave narrative seeks to address the limits of the slave narrative’s purpose and “accommodate an illegible narrative void” in the collective memory of the US. Cécile Heim, Boris Vejdovsky and Benjamin Pickford 19 racecraft continues in a single, unabated trajectory that reifies and fixes the “everyday epistemology by the traditional call for mutual sions. In the concluding essay, Courtney Jacobs and Ronald Schleifer take up slightly different issues of are uniquely mediated by genre; specifically, the issue of whether genre might be capable of manifesting impersonal, collective, or trans abstractions of means of apprehending evident” affective structures; instead, using the genre of the slave narr tive as their example, Jacobs and Schleifer argue that the legibility of the suffering invariably authors’ metaleptic concession to the generic conventions that make such suffering legible. In the nineteenth talism was imperative, but in reality authentic empathy from American readers for the suffering due to the scale and illegibility of that suffering. Consequently, Jacobs and Schleifer engage with the most prominent of neo Toni Morrison’ on the genre of the slave narrative seeks to address the limits of the slave narrative’s purpose and collective memory of the US. <?page no="19"?> Introduction 20 References Alpers, Paul. “Lycidas and Modern Criticism.” English Literary History 49.2 (1982): 468-92. Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. S. H. Butcher. Fairhope: Mockingbird Publishing, 2017. Baldwin, James. “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Notes of a Native Son. London: Penguin, 1984. 13-23. Byrd, Jodi A. “Read Dead Conventions: American Indian Transgeneric Fictions.” The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature. Ed. James H. Cox and Daniel Heath Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 344-58. Alighieri, Dante. De Vulgari Eloquentia. Ed. Mirko Tavoni. Milan: Mondadori, 2017. Deloria, Vine and Clifford Lytle. American Indians, American Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980): 55-81. Frow, John. Genre. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Höglund, Johan and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet. “Revisiting Adventure: Special Issue Introduction.” The Journal of Popular Culture 51.6 (2018): 1299-1311. Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Thomas Jefferson: Writings. New York: The Library of America, 1984. 123-326. Justice, Daniel Heath. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier Press, 2018. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Plato. The Republic and Other Works. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. New York: Random House, 1973. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Tales of Mystery and Imagination. London: Collector’s Library, 2003. 107-52. ---. “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” Tales of Mystery and Imagination. London: Collector’s Library, 2003. 153-219. ---. “The Purloined Letter.” Tales of Mystery and Imagination. London: Collector’s Library, 2003. 220-44. Reddy, Maureen. “Race and American Crime Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction. Ed. Catherine Ross-Nickerson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 135-47. Ross-Nickerson, Catherine, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 20 English Literary History 49.2 Butcher. Fairhope: Mockingbird Publish- Notes of a Native Son. Lon- Read Dead Conventions: American Indian Transgeneric The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature. Ed. Cox and Daniel Heath Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Mirko Tavoni. Milan: Mon- American Indians, American Justice. Austin: 7.1 (1980): 55-81. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Revisiting Adventure: The Journal of Popular Culture 51.6 (2018): Thomas Jefferson: Writings. . Waterloo: Wilfried Crime Fiction since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity. New Benjamin Jowett. New York: Tales of Mystery and 52. Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Lon- Tales of Mystery and Imagination. London: ” The Cambridge . Ed. Catherine Ross-Nickerson. 47. The Cambridge Companion to American Crime . London and New York: Routledge, 2005. <?page no="20"?> Introduction 21 Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44.4 (1991): 2-13. ---. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. Wittig, Monique. “The Trojan Horse.” Feminist Issues 4.2 (fall 1984): 45- 49. 21 Williams, Linda. terly 44.4 (1991): 2 ---. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson 2001. Wittig, Monique. 49. <?page no="22"?> Unformed Forms: Genre Theory and the Trouble with Caroline Levine’s Forms James Dorson This essay reconsiders the distinction between form and genre that undergirds Caroline Levine’s recuperation of formalism in her influential book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network from 2015. My aim is to show that while Levine’s new formalism takes literary studies in productive new directions, it also needs to provide a better account of the relationship between forms. A closer examination of how forms interact in turn raises a question about the viability of Levine’s generalization of form in terms of “affordances” based on design theory. To better account for the relationality of forms, I propose to distinguish between different kinds of forms, particularly between what I call “hard” and “soft” forms. By first comparing Levine’s theory of form with recent genre theory, and then by taking two examples, one from society and the other from literature, I argue that Levine’s new formalism would benefit from a more process-oriented, reflexive account of formal differentiation. Keywords: New formalism, New Historicism, genre theory, Caroline Levine, McTeague, Herland The Genres of Genre: Form, Formats, and Cultural Formations. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 38. Ed. Cécile Heim, Boris Vejdovsky and Benjamin Pickford. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 23-41. <?page no="23"?> James Dorson 24 It is as if there was something unfinished, even unformed, about forms. - Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word In a review essay in PMLA from 2007, Marjorie Levinson asks, “What Is New Formalism? ” While she identifies a range of new approaches seeking to make formal analysis the centerpiece of literary and cultural studies again, she also notes the wide disparity among emerging formalist approaches. More like a scattered movement, new formalism, she argues, “does not advocate for any particular theory, method, or scholarly practice” (562). The publication of Caroline Levine’s book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network in 2015 changed this. Widely discussed in the humanities, including sparking a PMLA issue responding to the book, Levine’s approach is by far the most influential variant of new formalism in the marketplace of ideas today. Her book not only programmatically lays out a formalist approach based on a new expansive definition of form. Part of the reason for the popularity of the book is no doubt also that it synthesizes a number of different formalist approaches, providing a toolkit for aspiring formalists, and that it seeks to bridge the tribal divide between formalism and historicism. Moreover, it advocates the “uses of literature,” to borrow Rita Felski’s phrase (7), at a time when the legitimacy of literary studies has been called into question. In sum, throughout Forms Levine develops a methodology that answers the question “What Is New Formalism? ,” and shows how the skills of the literary critic may be employed broadly to describe the interaction of different forms in society. But even as the interaction of forms is central to Levine’s argument, I would like to suggest here that her theory of formal interaction is precisely where her formalism falters. Two of the key claims of Levine’s book are that societies as well as texts consist of multiple forms - i.e., that no form reigns absolute (moving away from the monocausal explanations that have dominated New Historicism) - and that different forms overlap and interact in ways that have the potential to redirect or undercut each other (moving away from complicity critique). By emphasizing the constantly shifting constellations of different forms of organization, both of these interventions seek to provide a more dynamic model of social change than (New Historicist) accounts of the social in terms of a totalizing and determining power. Nevertheless, I argue that Levine’s initial abstraction of forms from historical processes in order to define them in terms of essential qualities works against this goal - and ultimately, in spite of her emphasis on <?page no="24"?> Unformed Forms 25 change, provides a rather static model of social and aesthetic forms. The aim of this essay, then, is to show that while Levine’s interventions may take literary criticism in productive new directions, new formalism also needs to provide a better explanation of the relationship between forms - one that, I suggest, genre theory can point us in the direction of. By first comparing Levine’s theory of form with recent genre theory, and then by taking two examples, one from society (seen through the lens of organizational sociology) and the other from literature (using Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Frank Norris’s McTeague as case studies), I argue that Levine’s new formalism would benefit from a more process-oriented, reflexive account of formal differentiation - in other words, to paraphrase Angela Leighton, that there is always something unformed about forms. New Formalism and Genre Theory Although Levinson notes the wide disparity among emerging formalist approaches, she nevertheless distinguishes between two overarching strains of new formalism. On the one hand, there is what she calls “activist formalism”: largely a formalist turn within New Historicism, which seeks “to restore to today’s reductive reinscription of historical reading its original focus on form” (559). Activist formalism thus foregrounds “the dialectical model of the artwork,” and it draws on “sources foundational for materialist critique - e.g., Hegel, Marx, Freud, Adorno, Althusser, Jameson” (559). On the other hand, Levinson identifies a “normative formalism,” a reaction against New Historicism, whose account of form is derived from “the Aristotelian model (stable and generically expressive self-identity),” and which seeks rather “to bring back a sharp demarcation between history and art, discourse and literature” (559). Levine’s new formalism clearly identifies with activist formalism. She expressly states that “the primary goal of this formalism is radical social change” (18). What makes her formalism activist is what one reviewer describes as her “awesomely broad” (Alworth) definition of form as “all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference” (Levine 3). This expansive definition entails that form is inherently political, since politics, too, “involves activities of ordering, patterning, and shaping” (3). In other words, form is not a symptom of the <?page no="25"?> James Dorson 26 political, but is itself the political. The goal of the critic, therefore, cannot be to dig beneath the surface of a text in order to reveal the political unconscious structuring it. As such, if Levine’s politicized understanding of form places her in the activist camp of new formalists, her formalism is also aligned with the surface reading that has recently challenged the symptomatic approach characteristic of New Historicism. 1 Borrowing Heather Love’s formulation, “close but not deep,” Levine holds that the task of the formalist critic is to seek “out pattern over meaning, the intricacy of relations over interpretive depth” (23). Another tenet of New Historicism that she rejects is the search for a single predominant framework determining a text - such as capitalism, racism, nationalism, etc. - because everyday life, as well as texts, for Levine, consists not of “a single hegemonic system or dominant ideology but many forms, all trying to organize us at once” (22). Thus, instead of looking for the underlying cause of something, we should look for how different forms “collide” - a key term for Levine, which she understands as “the strange encounter between two or more forms that sometimes reroutes intention and ideology” (18). In order to trace these collisions, the critic must attend to the different principles of organization found in any text. Rather than the heroic disclosure of a text’s unconscious by the New Historicist critic, then, the aim of new formalism, even as it aspires to “radical social change,” is more modest: “a careful, nuanced understanding of the many different and often disconnected arrangements that govern social experience” (18). So far so good. The trouble with Levine’s theory of form arises when she seeks to account for the relationship among forms. One of her opening moves is to distinguish form from genre. Form and genre, she argues, “can be differentiated precisely by the different ways in which they traverse time and space” (13). The crucial difference, she observes, is that while genre is “a historically specific and interpretive act” (13), forms are not: “More stable than genre, configurations and arrangements organize materials in distinct and iterable ways no matter what their context or audience. Forms thus migrate across contexts in a way that genres cannot” (13). In other words, while genres change as they move from one context to another, and from one audience to another, forms do not. This definition of forms as “porta- 1 See especially Best and Marcus. Levine notes that she builds on their argument (154, n. 42). <?page no="26"?> Unformed Forms 27 ble” (7), to use Levine’s term for how forms move without changing, has implications for how forms interact with one another. If we turn to recent genre theory, the contrast becomes clearer between the different ways that genres and forms interact. Ralph Cohen, in his influential 1986 essay “History and Genre,” stresses that genres can only be understood in terms of their interrelation: A genre does not exist independently; it arises to compete or to contrast with other genres, to complement, augment, interrelate with other genres. Genres do not exist by themselves; they are named and placed within hierarchies or systems of genres, and each is defined by reference to the system and its members. A genre, therefore, is to be understood in relation to other genres, so that its aims and purposes at a particular time are defined by its interrelation with and differentiation from others. (207) This relational view of genre departs radically from the classical model of genre as a category that contains texts sharing the same features. John Frow describes this change as “a shift away from an ‘Aristotelian’ model of taxonomy in which a relationship of hierarchical belonging between a class and its members predominates, to a more reflexive model in which texts are thought to use or to perform the genres by which they are shaped” (25). Instead of fixed categories, the “reflexive model” implies that genres should rather be understood as historically contingent formations that change with every new reading or addition to the overall system of genres. “Genre systems,” Frow writes, form a shifting hierarchy, made up of tensions between “higher” and “lower” genres, a constant alternation of the dominant form, and a constant renewal of genres through processes of specialization and recombination. Genres, it follows, are neither self-identical nor self-contained. (71) Wai Chee Dimock, too, in her 2007 introduction to a special issue of PMLA on genre, underlines the porousness of genre implied in Cohen’s process theory. Genres for Dimock are “open sets endlessly dissolved by their openness [. . .] not taxonomic classes of equal solidity but fields at once emerging and ephemeral, defined over and over again by new entries that are still being reproduced” (1379). Perhaps a bit carried away by the metaphorical fluidity of genre, she writes that we should think of genres <?page no="27"?> James Dorson 28 as swimming in a pool, a kind of generic wateriness. This medium not only allows for capillary action of various sorts, it also suggests that the concept of genre has meaning only in the plural, only when that pool is seen as occupied by more than one swimmer. (1380) Put in this way, the contrast between genre, understood as an open-ended process, and Levine’s definition of form is striking. While forms for Levine are likewise plural, they are neither open nor fluid. Her choice term “collision” to describe the interaction of forms suggests their essential hardness. When forms collide in her book, they may “disrupt,” “unsettle,” or “reroute” one another, but they are never constituted by their interaction. To use Levine’s own formal categories, Dimock’s description of genre as “a kinship network [. . .] resting always on some kind of fluid continuum” (1380) makes clear that the form of genre for recent genre theorists is a network. In contrast, the form of form for Levine is a bounded whole - i.e., perpetually colliding with other forms, but nevertheless strictly demarcated from them. Levine’s “hard” definition of form is the result of her generalized understanding of form from design theory. Here different materials and forms have different “affordances”: “A fork affords stabbing and scooping,” Levine notes. “A doorknob affords not only hardness and durability, but also turning, pushing, and pulling” (6). Forms are therefore not a matter of context or interpretation; they have inherent qualities that offer themselves to distinct uses. This has significant consequences for how we read. “Rather than asking what artists intend or even what forms do,” she writes, “we can ask instead what potentialities lie latent - though not always obvious - in aesthetic and social arrangements” (6-7). Levine’s understanding of form in terms of affordances is meant to counter the tendency in literary and cultural studies to emphasize how forms impose limitations rather than to explain what they enable, and therefore to prioritize that which breaks with form. 2 But translating the concept of form from design theory to culture and society in general effaces any distinction between different kinds of forms. Taking issue with this idea, Langdon Hammer insists in his critique of Levine’s book that “not all forms are equivalent” (1202). Drawing on 2 Cf. Levine: “the field has been so concerned with breaking forms apart that we have neglected to analyze the major work that forms do in our world” (9). <?page no="28"?> Unformed Forms 29 Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, he argues that forms are conceived and interact in very different ways depending on whether they are determined by their use value, their labor value, or their exchange value. “Wood is one thing,” he writes, “a table another, and the commodity yet another” (1202). The social relations of forms, their deep ties with history and entanglement with other forms that give them meaning, are not only important for understanding how forms interact, but also what they are, given that they cannot be understood apart from how they move in the world. To be sure, social context for Levine is important - but only after the fact. “We can understand forms as abstract and portable organizing principles,” she writes, “but we also need to attend to the specificity of particular historical situations to understand the range of ways in which forms overlap and collide” (7-8). In other words, Levine first defines forms in terms of their affordances, their latent potentialities, and only then does she set them in motion to observe how their collide with other forms. Which is to say that Levine’s theory of formal interaction assumes that forms exist prior to their encounters with other forms. Methodologically, then, her theory of forms is less a reconciliation of formalism and historicism than a mandate to first be formalist, and then historicist - instead of both at once. As Hammer’s critique suggests, this introduces a dualism between what forms are (their essential qualities) and how they function (their social behavior). The idealization of forms that Levine’s theory implies shows its close affinity with normative formalism in spite of the activist commitment that Levine announces. It also makes her new formalism look very much like old genre theory: instead of a reflexive model of form as process, Levine’s account of form is essentially taxonomic. Forms in Society: The Case of Organizational Sociology Levine’s premise that forms are portable - i.e., that forms “are not outgrowths of social conditions; they do not belong to certain times and places” (12) - takes organizational sociology as a case in point. 3 Specifically, 3 See Hoyt for a critique of Levine’s use of sociology. The focus of Hoyt’s criticism is different from mine in what follows. While Hoyt criticizes Levine for not embracing the <?page no="29"?> James Dorson 30 she draws on an article by Marc Schneiberg from 2007, which argues that even as the corporation became the dominant form of economic organization during the Progressive Era, it was rivaled by other forms - municipals and cooperatives - which stemmed from earlier social struggles, but which continued to exist and provide sustenance for alternative models of organization. Schneiberg thus departs from the “organizational synthesis” in business history and organizational studies, which mapped the historical ascendancy of a single form, the corporation, in the twentieth century. While the appeal for Levine of Schneiberg’s argument that society contains several economic forms contending with one another is obvious, it should be noted that Schneiberg also stresses the historical struggles among organizational forms that account for their rise during one period and their reemergence during another. The municipal and cooperative forms that he examines are not self-contained, but “were rooted historically and geographically in those times and places where the fights against the corporations were most intense” (66). Unlike the material objects of design theory, such as forks and doorknobs, economic forms are inherently relational: corporations, municipals, and cooperatives are shaped and reshaped by mutual struggle as they move across time and space. Moreover, forms are impure and unstable in Schneiberg’s account. His “internal structuralist approach” (51) emphasizes the development of alternative forms of organization from within a given system, in contrast to the “external structuralist approach” (51), which regards organizational change as the result of outside pressure. From this perspective, Schneiberg writes, institutional paths are not as uniform, complementary or pure as some analyses would have it. To the contrary, they often, if not inevitably, contain within them ambiguities, multiple layers, potentially decomposable components or competing logics which actors can use as vehicles for experimentation, conversion, recombination and transformation. (51-52) Similarly, the goal of an article from 2003 written by Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin is to challenge the purity of economic forms long taken for granted in organization studies. According to the “organizational synthesis,” corporate hierarchies replaced quantitative methods of sociology, my point is rather that her use of organizational sociology disregards its insights about the reflexivity of social forms. <?page no="30"?> Unformed Forms 31 decentralized markets as the primary form of organization during the Progressive Era. But the aim of Lamoreaux and her coauthors is to account for economic organization “beyond the simple markets versus hierarchies dichotomy” (405). While they argue, like Schneiberg, that “there is likely to be a diversity of coordination mechanisms at work in the economy at any given time” (409), they also underline the gradability between these different forms. Rather than dichotomous forms that exclude one another, they argue that businesses are organized along a spectrum from one organizational extreme to another: At the left-hand extreme of the scale is pure market exchange - one-shot transactions based on price in which there is no ongoing connection between the parties. At the right-hand extreme is pure hierarchy - a permanent, or at least very long-lived, command relationship in which superiors issue orders to subordinates. (407) It goes without saying that “pure” forms of economic organization are rare, and that there are a number of intermediate forms located along the organizational spectrum. Other historians and sociologists of capitalism have further argued that the relation between markets and hierarchies is not only gradable but also inherently recursive. Giovanni Arrighi, for one, describes the historical shifts since the fourteenth century between the free-market system and regulatory forms of capitalism as a “pendulum-like movement” (251). Regulatory forms develop in response to market forms, and vice versa. “An organizational thrust in one direction,” he writes, “called forth an organizational thrust in the opposite direction” (340). Another notable example is Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), which demonstrates how the post-Fordist turn to flexible, decentralized forms of organization was partly a reaction against the hierarchical corporatist forms of Fordist capitalism. Like Arrighi, Boltanski and Chiapello are interested in accounting for how the organization of accumulation changes over time. While Arrighi’s metaphor of the pendulum suggests that the movement between free markets and regulatory capitalism is somewhat automatic, Boltanski and Chiapello rather stress the role that critique plays in the transition from one organizational form to another. Their Weberian premise is that forms of capitalist organization need to be perceived as legitimate by those participating in and perpetuating them. This renders economic forms <?page no="31"?> James Dorson 32 receptive to criticism that questions their legitimacy. Organizational change within capitalism is therefore a result of actors seeking to reestablish the legitimacy of a given form of accumulation by entering into compromises with other forms - just as economists and managers during the 1970s began to emphasize the possibilities of personal fulfillment within more flexible, networked forms of organization in response to the critique that corporate structures are alienating and oppressive. 4 In all of these examples from sociology and the history of capitalism, then, forms of socioeconomic organization are conceived as interdependent, and their interaction as recursive. Forms move through time and space in relation to one another and enter into compromises as the result of internal or external pressures. And while they may be categorized as different forms, like markets and hierarchies, this difference is gradable, not exclusive. Forms in Literature: The Cases of Herland and McTeague Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist utopia Herland (1915) is a particularly lucid example of how forms interact in literature because, typical of the Progressive Era, the novel is obsessed with organization. The fictional country of Herland, which, as the title suggests, is inhabited only by women who have been isolated from the rest of the world for 2,000 years, is depicted as a highly ordered space. Reflecting the enthusiasm for bureaucratic organization at the time, Herland is organized like a hierarchical corporation with a strict division of labor and a centralized planning committee calling the shots. Interestingly, like Levine’s account of form, Gilman’s novel also idealizes form as something that exists prior to its interaction with other forms. The complete isolation of Herland for two millennia means that its corporate form developed in a historical vacuum independent from the pressure of other forms. Because the Herlanders have lived without men for thousands of years, their identity is similarly represented in non-binary terms. The effect of presenting both the identity and society of these women as having evolved in isolation is clearly a narrative choice that naturalizes them. Gilman wanted to show her contemporaries how a society 4 The methodological implications of this are more fully developed in Boltanski and Thévenot, who theorize social change as a “cycle of critique and justification” (347). <?page no="32"?> Unformed Forms 33 would look if women were left to organize for themselves without the interference of masculinist competition and the imposition of gender norms. In reality, of course, the idealized corporate form as well as the nonbinary gender of Herlanders are mobilized by Gilman against what she considered the male-skewed organization of markets and the artificial gender binary in society at the time. The efficient organization of Herland is contrasted with the chaotic disorganization of the world outside, the dogeat-dog world of market capitalism represented by the three male protagonists who accidentally come across Herland. The difference between corporate and market forms is therefore also gendered. The rational organization of the Herlanders presents a sharp contrast to the most impetuous of the visiting men, who is described as embodying the “masculine spirit of enterprise” (111). And the novel reads as a refutation of his comment, “We all know women can’t organize” (59). In short, what looks like formal isolation in Gilman’s novel is, in fact, formal differentiation. The forms of corporations and markets, and binary and non-binary gender, crisscross one another in a literary mesh where each is inextricable from and shapes the other. Finally, it is also evident that the formal contrasts played out in the novel are related to genre. Utopias by definition contrast the actual with the imagined. But the utopian genre in Herland and the notorious uneventfulness of the utopian plot is at the same time aligned with both the lack of gender antagonism in the Herlanders and the smooth operations of the corporate form, where all friction has been eliminated. In contrast, both the market and masculinity are aligned with the headlong action of the adventure genre. As the character embodying the “masculine spirit of enterprise” again notes: “Can’t expect stirring romance and wild adventure without men, can you? ” (46). The differentiation between rational female utopia and wild male adventure thus proceeds in the same way that forms are differentiated in Herland. Which is to say that forms and genres in the novel behave identically. And both the use of forms and genres in Gilman’s novel suggests not only that they are mutually differentiated - that forms react to forms and genres react to genres - but also that forms and genres give shape to each other. Another example from the period, which at first glance appears to lend itself well to a new formalist reading on the terms that Levine sets out, is Frank Norris’s 1899 naturalist novel McTeague. The novel reveals a reflexive awareness about the multiplicity of organizational forms in social life. The <?page no="33"?> James Dorson 34 preparations leading up to a wedding scene between the main characters, McTeague and Trina, are particularly chaotic because the regimented military organization of Trina’s father collides with the domestic organization of family rituals. “The two systems of operation often clashed and tangled” (111), the narrator explains. Such a clash between different forms of organization structures the novel throughout. Examples include the daily rhythm of life in San Francisco organized around clock and calendar as well as the natural diurnal rhythm; the stroke of chance represented by Trina’s winning the lottery, which upsets this rhythm; the machine politics that one character becomes involved with; the laws of supply and demand that structure economic exchanges - as well as romantic relationships - in the novel; and the bureaucratic form of professionalism that impinges on McTeague when he is prohibited from practicing dentistry because he has not attended a dental college. These forms are played out in various encounters throughout the novel’s plot in ways that a new formalist account à la Levine could trace. As they collide, they could be said to redirect or unsettle one another. Yet, at the same time as these forms unfold in the course of the narrative, the narrative itself takes on different forms of representation. One of the defining aspects of literary naturalism for most critics is the relentless determinism of its narratives. This is typically traced back to the influence of Émile Zola, who borrowed his understanding of cause and effect from the experimental medicine of Claude Bernard. Translating Bernard’s experimental model from medicine to literature introduced a hierarchical divide between narrator and character resembling that between doctor and patient. Like patients who experience symptoms without knowing their causes, characters in Zola’s novels, as well as in Norris’s, are blind to the hereditary and environmental forces that determine them. In contrast, the narrator (and therefore also the reader) sees clearly the reasons for their inevitable decline. For Zola, thus, the role of the narrator is diagnostic - the aim of naturalist literature is to “experiment on man [and] dissect piece by piece this human machinery” (25) in order to reveal “the laws of thought and passion” (17). If this medical model for literature geared toward determining causal chains gives the form of naturalist narrative a hierarchical structure, however, this is not the only form that shapes naturalist narratives. Particularly its American variant was equally informed by evolutionary discourse. Unlike <?page no="34"?> Unformed Forms 35 Zola, who had not yet absorbed Darwinian theory, and whose ideas about natural heredity were Lamarckian, the concept of nature that US naturalist writers drew on was derived partly from post-Darwinian evolutionary theory and partly from the Transcendentalist movement. 5 Both of these understood nature as a complex web of relations and emphasized mobility and adaptation as the organizing principle of life. While hierarchical relationships were implied in evolutionary science’s notion of progressive stages of development superimposed on the kinship networks of nature, lending itself to theories of racial hierarchization, as well as in Transcendentalism’s version of nature as organized by a “transparent eyeball,” the view of nature as an interconnected and constantly shifting web undercut the mapping of direct causal relationships that Zola identified as the primary goal of the naturalist novel. In McTeague, both of these ways of structuring the narrative are evident. On the one hand, the novel is clearly invested in diagnosing the causes for McTeague’s and Trina’s characteristic - for naturalist plots - descent into the gutter. McTeague’s hereditary dipsomania and Trina’s avarice, compounded by environmental circumstances, are not only demonstrated throughout the plot as leading to their downfall, but underlined through frequent narratorial intrusions. McTeague is repeatedly referred to as “stupid” and “blind,” 6 while the narrator is able to see clearly to the bottom of what ails him: “Below the fine fabric of all that was good in him ran the foul stream of hereditary evil, like a sewer” (25). On the other hand, this hierarchical form of the narrative comes into tension with the sublime form of representation that the narrator resorts to whenever depicting the massive scale of natural forces. Here the narrative switches from the hierarchical form of the medical model penetrating beneath surfaces to a cumulative form used to represent macroscale phenomena. Thus, once McTeague sets foot in the mountains, we find a distinctly Darwinian representation of nature: As far as one could look, uncounted multitudes of trees and manzanita bushes were quietly and motionlessly growing, growing, growing. A tremendous, 5 See Walcutt for the influence of Transcendentalism on American literary naturalism. 6 Mitchell aptly describes this as “narrative bullying” (69). <?page no="35"?> James Dorson 36 immeasurable Life pushed steadily heavenward without a sound, without a motion. (298-99) Here the sublime scale of nature (“uncounted multitudes [. . .] immeasurable”) defined by a paradoxical movement without motion (“motionlessly growing”) reflects the constant but gradual change of Darwinian evolution. In order to represent something as expansive as evolutionary processes, Norris adopts a form, often paratactic, that extends itself in long sentences through the accumulation of similar terms, such as “vast,” “gigantic,” “colossal,” “Titanic,” etc. 7 Unlike the closure that the narrative intrusions impose on events and characters by diagnosing them, the description of natural forces is potentially endless, confined only by the limits of representation. Instead of the epistemological hubris of the diagnostic form, these passages convey rather an epistemological humility. Unlike the numerous other forms that play out in McTeague, these two forms are not so much evident in the plot as they inform the novel’s strategies of representation. As such, they might be said to function on a higher level than the other forms, as they are superimposed upon them and shape their conditions of expression. In this sense also, then, Levine’s insistence that all forms are equal means that it is impossible to account for differences between forms that inform what is represented and forms that structure how it is represented. Moreover, while it is beyond the scope of this essay to show how the many forms on the level of the novel’s plot are mutually differentiated, the case can easily be made that the dominant forms of representation in the novel - the hierarchical form of the medical experiment and the network form of Darwinian evolution - exist in dialectical tension with each other, frequently merging in Norris’s style to produce mixed effects of depth and breadth, hierarchy and network. The reason for this is that Norris’s aesthetic project is divided by two goals that often work at cross purposes: on the one hand, a commitment to diagnosing the social 7 Norris’s 1901 novel, The Octopus, takes this form of representation to an extreme. Here the sprawling sentences and stacking of words that all mean more or less the same is not meant to further understanding - as when the novel famously describes a locomotive as “a vast power, huge, terrible [. . .] the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus” (51). The point of such passages is not their semantic meaning but their cumulative effect and the patterns they establish by their repetition throughout the text. <?page no="36"?> Unformed Forms 37 ills of industrial capitalism, to which the medical model of representation lends itself well; on the other, a commitment to providing a more inclusive portrayal of the varieties of social and natural life than Norris felt the realism of William Dean Howells and others could offer - a goal that the evolutionary model helped him realize. The disciplinary history of the two sciences, too, medicine and evolution, while they have often collided, is rather a story of differentiation and compromise: Bernard defining the experimental method against the emerging statistical sciences that would later be used to solve problems in evolutionary theory; Darwin showing the limits of the experimental method in face of the large-scale complexity of natural selection; 8 and the two forms combining in recent advances in evolutionary medicine. In sum, then, the interaction of the two major forms of representation in McTeague, as well as the disciplinary genealogies of the methods they draw on, is less a question of collision than of differentiation and intersecting genealogies. Conclusion One of the ways that Levine distinguishes new formalism from New Historicism is by how the former scales up: Most accounts of social relationships in literary and cultural studies encourage us to focus our attention on the ways that a couple of formations intersect at any given moment: imperialism and the novel, for example, or the law and print culture. But what happens if we change the scale of our formal perspective and begin with many forms? (132) What happens is that the form of the theory changes. The goal of reading for multiple colliding forms is to trace the network of formal relations in a text or society. If Levine conceptualizes forms as bounded wholes, her theory of form takes the shape of a network. In contrast, the most frequent criticism of New Historicism is the hierarchical divide it presupposes between a text, regarded as unwittingly complicit with the power structures determining it, and the discerning critic able to see through the surface of a 8 For an insightful discussion of the experimental method in Bernard, see Schiller. For a discussion of Darwin’s methods in relation to statistics, see Ariew. <?page no="37"?> James Dorson 38 text to its underlying structure - a divide between critic and text which replicates the divide between narrator and character in naturalism (because symptomatic reading draws on the same medical model as naturalism does). 9 To understand Levine’s prioritization of formal networks without the context of the hierarchical form of New Historicist criticism that she argues against is simply to miss an important dimension of her argument. Even the form of Levine’s own theory, then, cannot be properly understood apart from the theoretical form it defines itself against. To understand such processes of formal differentiation better, my argument here has been that new formalism, rather than distancing itself from the process theory of genre, could learn something about how forms interact. While form and genre often function differently, the ways that they differ depend on their context. As Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian write, form “is not a word without content but a notion bound pragmatically to its instances” (661). To derive a general theory of form based on the forms found in design theory may work for certain forms and their interactions, but not for others. Not all forms are as “hard” as forks and doorknobs, and therefore they also interact differently. The examples of forms in society, in literature, and even in theory that I have discussed here are all examples of “soft” forms - i.e., forms that are always in a process of being formed. For Kramnick and Nersessian, “formalism need not, indeed cannot provide a single definition of form because form is an entity known by occasion, through encounters with its subsidiary phenomena” (664). This pragmatic dimension of form resembles that of genre, which can also only be known through its instances. To distinguish between the hardness of form and the softness of genre is to misrepresent both what form is and 9 See, for instance, Geertz on the similarity between theory and the practice of medicine in his essay on “Thick Description,” which has influenced New Historicists such as Stephen Greenblatt: “To generalize within cases is usually called, at least in medicine and depth psychology, clinical inference. Rather than beginning with a set of observations and attempting to subsume them under a governing law, such inference begins with a set of (presumptive) signifiers and attempts to place them within an intelligible frame. Measures are matched to theoretical predictions, but symptoms (even when they are measured) are scanned for theoretical peculiarities - that is, they are diagnosed. In the study of culture the signifiers are not symptoms or clusters of symptoms, but symbolic acts or clusters of symbolic acts, and the aim is not therapy but the analysis of social discourse. But the way in which theory is used - to ferret out the unapparent import of things - is the same” (26). <?page no="38"?> Unformed Forms 39 how it works in the world. In her book On Form (2007), Leighton defines form by its porosity: Although it looks like a fixed shape, a permanent configuration or ideal whether in eternity, in the mind, or on the page, in fact form is mobile, versatile. It remains open to distant senses, distortions, to the push-and-pull of opposites or cognates. While most abstract nouns lend themselves to philosophical whittling, to definitions which reduce their sense for clarity and use, form makes mischief and keeps its signification open. (3) As I have argued here, this open, unformed quality of social and aesthetic forms can only be understood in terms of reflexive processes. Levine’s Forms is part of an important debate in the humanities today that has forced us to reexamine New Historicist orthodoxies in the field. But while new formalism rejects the subordination of form to history, of text to context, the solution is not to reverse the relationship between form and history, which Levine’s understanding of form as preexisting history does. Before new formalism settles into a new orthodoxy, we can only hope that it finds ways to deal with history that do not reduce it to a stage on which preformed forms enact their dramatic collisions, but which understand history as inherently part and parcel of how forms become what they are. <?page no="39"?> James Dorson 40 References Alworth, David. “Form’s Function.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 20 March 2015. lareviewofbooks.org/ article/ forms-function/ . Accessed 5 June 2019. Ariew, André. “Under the influence of Malthus’s law of population growth: Darwin eschews the statistical techniques of Aldolphe Quetelet.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Sciences 38 (2007): 1-19. Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. 1994. London and New York: Verso, 2010. Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108.1 (fall 2009): 1-21. Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. 1999. Trans. Gregory Elliott. New York: Verso, 2007. --- and Laurent Thévenot. On Justification: Economies of Worth. 1991. Trans. Catherine Porter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Cohen, Ralph. “History and Genre.” New Literary History 17.2 (winter 1986): 203-18. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge.” PMLA 122.5 (2007): 1317-87. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. Frow, John. Genre. The New Critical Idiom Series. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. 1973. London: Fontana Press, 1993. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. 1915. Herland, The Yellow Wall-Paper, and Selected Writings. Ed. Denise D. Knight. New York: Penguin, 1999. 1-143. Hammer, Langdon. “Fantastic Forms.” PMLA 132.5 (2017): 1200-05. Hoyt, Long. “The Sociology of Forms.” PMLA 132.5 (2017): 1206-13. Kramnick, Jonathan and Anahid Nersessian. “Form and Explanation.” Critical Inquiry 43 (spring 2017), 650-69. Lamoreaux, Naomi R., Daniel M. G. Raff and Peter Temin. “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History.” American Historical Review 108 (April 2003): 404-33. Leighton, Angela. On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. <?page no="40"?> Unformed Forms 41 Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015. Levinson, Marjorie. “What Is New Formalism? ” PMLA 122.2 (2007): 558- 69. Mitchell, Lee Clark. Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Norris, Frank. McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. 1899. New York: The Library of America, 1990. ---. The Octopus: A Story of California. 1901. New York: Penguin, 1994. Schiller, Joseph. “Claude Bernard and Vivisection.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 22.3 (July 1967): 246-60. Schneiberg, Marc. “What’s on the path? Path dependence, organizational diversity and the problem of institutional change in the US economy, 1900-1950.” Socio-Economic Review 5 (2007): 47-80. Walcutt, Charles Child. American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956. Zola, Émile. “The Experimental Novel.” 1880. The Experimental Novel and Other Essays. Trans. Belle M. Sherman. New York: The Cassell Publishing Co., 1893. 1-54. <?page no="42"?> Taking Carbon Culture to Court: Civil Lawsuits as Political Manifestoes in US Climate Change Litigation Audrey Loetscher Faced with a government chiefly preoccupied by environmental deregulation, citizens and local governments across the US are increasingly resorting to the judiciary in an effort to respond to the challenges brought by environmental disruptions. While climate change litigation has become a worldwide phenomenon in the past half-decade, the number of cases has particularly soared in the US. This paper examines two types of climate change cases, proposing to read them as political manifestoes. The first is a series of claims filed by cities and counties, while the second is a lawsuit brought by twenty-one youths. In order to convince judges, but also citizen voters at large, of the merits of their claim, both types of lawsuit mobilize what are deemed constitutive traits of US national identity and its political and economic ethos. As a result, and while undergirded by environmentalist principles, the rhetoric of these cases fosters a national culture of unsustainability, or a system fueled by a growing ecological debt. This study contends that a change in the dominant reading of US national identity is required for the country to transition toward a sustainable mode of existence. Keywords: Political manifesto, US climate change litigation, Juliana v. United States, unsustainability, ecological debt The Genres of Genre: Form, Formats, and Cultural Formations. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 38. Ed. Cécile Heim, Boris Vejdovsky and Benjamin Pickford. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 43-63. <?page no="43"?> Audrey Loetscher 44 The recurring trail of floods, storms, and wildfires across the US and the rising costs borne by citizens whose lives are impacted, sometimes dramatically, by these weather disasters, has fueled a sense of urgency among some sectors of civil society regarding the need to address climate change. 1 The political and legislative climate brought forth by the incumbent administration’s dismantling of environmental regulation at the national and international levels has incited citizens to turn to the judiciary to meet their concerns, and climate change litigation has grown steadily, as evidenced by the rising number of cases brought to courts by citizens and local governments (see Sabin Center for Climate Change Law). Among these are two types of lawsuit I will examine more closely in this essay. The first is a series of claims filed by cities and counties across the country against major oil corporations, from which these local governments seek damages for the costs they have incurred in the wake of climate destabilization. The second, Juliana v. United States, a lawsuit filed in Oregon against the US government by twenty-one youths, argues that the federal government’s actions have exacerbated climate change and hence violated some of their basic rights. Beyond the judicial aspects, I propose to read these cases as political manifestoes by focusing on the generic expectations on which they draw and the ideological framework within which their legal argument inscribes itself. My analysis of these cases-as-manifestoes builds on theories of genre as social action. The “functional, rhetorical, and social view of genre,” as Amy J. Devitt explains (698), developed in composition and rhetoric studies in the 1980s, following Carolyn R. Miller’s definition of genre as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (159). While this approach has been amplified and complicated since then, as Devitt underlines, the core idea of rhetorical genre theory is that “genres are defined less by their formal conventions than by their purposes, participants, and subjects: by their rhetorical actions. Genre [. . .] is defined by its situation and function in a social context” (698). Moving away from the classification of texts into types on the basis of their formal qualities, rhetorical genre theorists argue that genres are “ways of being. They are frames for social action” (Bazerman 19). If “the term manifesto, strictly speaking, applies to (often short) texts published in a brochure, in a journal or a review, in the name of a po- 1 I would like to thank my colleague Benjamin Pickford and the two reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. <?page no="44"?> US Climate Change Lawsuits as Political Manifestoes 45 litical, philosophical, literary or artistic movement” (Abastado 3), the social action that guides these cases − an effort to reformat the public’s understanding of, and approach to, the issue of climate change − resonates with the conception of manifestoes as “programmatic texts [written] in times of crisis or change” (Yanoshevsky 263). While these lawsuits seek to reform US climate change litigation and amend the country’s climate policy, from an environmentalist stance these texts fail on a discursive level. Far from publicizing innovative ways for the nation to reassess its relationship with the environment, these texts enshrine in the collective consciousness beliefs that played a role in leading the US into the current ecological impasse. In their effort to garner support from civil society and elected officials, these cases exploit what are deemed constitutive traits of US national identity and its political and economic ethos, enclosing their claims in an ideology that, for Juliana at least, undermines the lawsuit’s avowed purpose. Their tactical use of the manifesto’s generic formulas is meant to help these cases convince citizens, if not win at trial. But in their attempt to rally support, these lawsuits harm the environmental cause by advancing ideas incompatible with a sustainable agenda, and by capitalizing on the dominant ideology of neoliberal capitalism in spite of that system’s role in climate disruption. As anti-revolutionary manifestoes, these lawsuits therefore contribute to reinforcing, rather than unmaking, a national culture of unsustainability entrenched in notions of boundless expansion and infinite growth sustained by a seemingly inexhaustible natural abundance. Civil Lawsuits Brought by Local Governments In a concerted effort to circumvent the government’s climate-changedenying agenda, a number of states have vowed to reduce their carbon emissions and commit to the Paris Agreement, in spite of Donald Trump’s resolve to pull the US out of the international treaty. But while some local governments have decided to embrace a political program designed to reduce their carbon footprint, they also find themselves on the frontline of the destructive effects of climate change. While the costliest repercussions may only be felt at the close of the century, un/ natural disasters are to be reckoned with in the present, and municipalities and cities across the coun- <?page no="45"?> Audrey Loetscher 46 try are compelled to handle the aftermath of extreme weather events, for which no federal budget or comprehensive set of legal instruments have been provisioned. In the recent past, the economic burden of local governments has increased as a result of rising sea levels, wildfires, cataclysmic rainfalls, hurricanes and ensuing floods, as well as heat waves and droughts: “2017 was the most expensive year for natural disasters in U.S. history, costing a total of USD 306 billion” (Mark, “The Case for Climate Reparations”). Faced with growing responsibilities, New York City, Baltimore, eight cities and counties in California, municipalities in Colorado and Washington, as well as the state of Rhode Island have turned to courts to invoke tort claims and to seek financial reparation from the conglomerates they hold responsible for the high concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. While the monetary compensation could potentially include hefty sums for oil and gas corporations, especially if the number of litigations increases, these lawsuits remain modest in their political intent. Citing the oil industry as the main culprit, the suing governments do not call for a solution to climate change that would include a fundamental shift in environmental policy, but only seek to retrieve money so as to cover the costs of repairing damaged infrastructure and making necessary adjustments in view of the new climatic reality. For instance, the city of Baltimore “seeks to ensure that the parties who have profited from externalizing the responsibility [. . .] of those physical and environmental changes, bear the costs of those impacts on the city” (Green). Because they are based on the “polluter pays” principle - i.e., a person or organization is financially liable for the pollution his/ its industry or activity has caused (Boyle) - financial redresses are thus merely a compensation for mitigation measures enabling cities and counties to confront the effects of rising temperatures resulting from higher concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Just as they have a modest political scope, these cases rest on a restrained legal basis, casting carbon dioxide and methane as a public nuisance, or an activity causing inconvenience or damage to the general public (Legal Information Institute). Although the connection between the nuisance caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the source of that nuisance may appear rather straightforward, the question of liability forms a central point of contention in climate change litigation, rendering the recourse to genre all the more expedient. Environmental damages are especially difficult to adjudicate, as blame cannot be easily ascribed to one specific offender. <?page no="46"?> US Climate Change Lawsuits as Political Manifestoes 47 This inherent weakness has offered oil-corporations’ attorneys the breach required for the cases to be dismissed. While the New York City lawsuit and other plaintiffs have hammered on the idea that “a corporation that makes a product causing severe harm when used exactly as intended should shoulder the costs of abating that harm” (City of New York v. BP PLC, “Complaint” 3), defendants have attempted to dilute responsibility. When R. Hewitt Pate, the vice president of and general counsel for Chevron, declared that “reliable, affordable energy is not a public nuisance but a public necessity” (Schwarz) after the lawsuits brought by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland were dismissed, he exemplified the argument typically employed by oil empires; namely, that they merely provided a resource in high demand, that Western society developed and prospered thanks to an oilfueled economy, and that they consequently decline responsibility for consumers’ choice to burn fossil fuels. This argument is spurious. Research in the recently established field of attribution studies has shown that a relatively small number of Big Oil stakeholders - ninety corporations exactly - have played a significant role in global carbon emissions, accounting for twothirds of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere since 1751 (Heede 234). If the field of attribution studies has emerged recently, the science behind climate change dates back to the nineteenth century. French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier first established a correlation between carbon-dioxide buildup and warmer climate in 1824. Thirty-five years later, Irish scientist John Tyndall discovered that changes in the concentration of gases blocking solar radiation could alter the climate system. In 1898, Swedish scientist Svente Arrhenius introduced the term “greenhouse effect” and offered the first calculation of anthropogenic global warming (Cumo and Herrera). Even oil-company scientists, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, had arrived at the conclusion that their products were responsible for the greenhouse effect and global warming. Numerous internal memos warned that the “use of fossil fuels [. . .] should not be encouraged” and that computer models predicted “effects which [would] indeed be catastrophic” (Mark, “The Case for Climate Reparations”). That knowledge did not encourage oil companies to shift their core business; on the contrary, as Jason Mark notes, they chose to launch a massive disinformation campaign designed to cast doubt on climate change science in 1988, the same year that NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the Senate about the dangers <?page no="47"?> Audrey Loetscher 48 of global warming. In the 1990s, after two decades of rising public awareness in the US, the media started giving equal coverage to climate change skeptics and “the public was thereby given the impression that a considerable scientific controversy still existed” (Ross and Allmon 831). This changed again in the mid-2000s, around the time that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released, at which point “U.S. public opinion [swung] from simple awareness of the issue to greater acceptance that global warming was happening” (831). While US public opinion and recognition of the reality of climate change has greatly fluctuated in the past decades, the question of oil companies’ responsibility in fostering climate change has been settled. Yet their argument, centered on their role as a commodity provider, remains seemingly forceful, for it draws on a neoliberal assumption that consumers were and remain wholly responsible for their conscious decision to burn fossil fuels. However, even though the link between climate change and the steady buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached circles outside the scientific community three decades ago, the vast majority of citizens since then have not been able to put an end to their oil consumption. Recalling Margaret Thatcher’s motto “There Is No Alternative,” by which she meant to underscore neoliberalism’s ineluctable grip on the political economy of Western societies, pulling out of the oil system did not appear conceivable for many American citizens who were bound to burn fossil fuels to live, feed themselves, and go to work. The choice to quit oil simply did not exist for a vast majority of individuals, since there was no plausible alternative in a society where everything, from earning a living to having a social life, revolved around the sacrosanct ownership of an automobile. As Mark Fiege remarks, “from the B-52 bombers that patrolled the skies to the grass on which children played, twentieth-century America became a fully petroleumpowered, automobilized society” (374) and US culture had virtually merged with oil. The role of the oil industry in fashioning a socioeconomic petroleum complex did not arise against the will of civil society but with its tacit consent. Consequently, the government, and by extension citizens who elect and re-elect representatives who have bowed down to the hegemonic reign of Big Oil, also deserve their share of responsibility. Successive administrations have allowed the rise and consolidation of a culture and economy “addicted” to oil, and they have emerge as the enablers, if not the architects, of <?page no="48"?> US Climate Change Lawsuits as Political Manifestoes 49 the petro-Leviathan. Oil corporations undeniably fed this Leviathan billions to ensure its growth, but in so doing, they merely took advantage of a gigantic political loophole. Pointing to the government’s own role in allowing the carbon economy and culture to grow does not invalidate the cities and counties’ claims, but it shows how difficult it will be for local authorities to obtain compensation. Unsurprisingly, two of these lawsuits, those brought by local authorities in San Francisco and Oakland, were struck down in June 2018. The judge recognized the legitimacy of climate change, but refuted the legal admissibility of these claims, declaring that climate change was an issue best left to the other branches of government because “the problem deserve[d] a solution on a more vast scale than [could] be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case” (City of Oakland v. BP PLC, “Order” 15). A month later, a federal judge dismissed New York City’s lawsuit. Predictably, the question of ascribing the bulk of responsibility to the oil industry proved problematic in all these rulings. In the California cases, the judge wrote that “all of us have benefited. Having reaped the benefit of that historic progress, would it really be fair to now ignore our own responsibility in the use of fossil fuels and place the blame for global warming on those who supplied what we demanded? ” (City of Oakland v. BP PLC, “Order” 8). While the reality of a supposedly shared responsibility in the continued burning of fossil fuels is more complex than the judge’s rhetorical question may suggest, this line of defense will undoubtedly prove successful in future cases as well. These civil lawsuits, centered around the notion of financial compensation, may fail to yield the plaintiffs’ desired outcome because of the intrinsic limits of public-nuisance claims. However, these cases are bound to have a significant impact far outside the courtrooms through the cultural work of the genre on which they rely. As Devitt notes, rhetorical genres “strive for transcendence of their local situation [. . .] speak[ing] to human issues, striv[ing] to inspire actions beyond their local circumstances, and speak[ing] to future generations” (710-11). While the liability of private oil companies may not be recognized by judges, it may still be acknowledged by citizens calling for the implementation of a carbon tax. By articulating and publicizing a set of grievances, such as those arising from the extensive damage to Baltimore’s infrastructure after the city “experienced two separate 1,000year storms that brought torrential rain and flooding [in which] businesses and homeowners suffer[ed] tens of millions of dollars’ worth of damages” <?page no="49"?> Audrey Loetscher 50 (Mark, “Baltimore Becomes Latest Local Government”), these cases constitute citizens into a homogenous group, giving them visibility while underlining the despoilment of natural resources held in common by a powerful minority of polluting corporations. Indeed, one of the great strengths of these lawsuits-as-manifestoes lies in their being “set up like a battlefield” (Caws xx), delineating a united “we” against a perceived oppressor: the oil industry. The rising number of climate change cases of the same caliber is not a coincidence. On the contrary, it speaks to the protagonists’ awareness of the momentum and their ability to rewrite an aspect of the cultural world, for “genres enable their users to carry out situated symbolic actions rhetorically and linguistically, and in so doing, to [. . .] frame social realities” (Bawarshi and Reiff 59). Indeed, these lawsuits demonstrate a certain form of resistance and a rejection of the norm by enabling people to realize the true costs of their overreliance on oil. In throwing light on the US’s oildependent lifestyle and energy system, these cases may potentially reshape the national conversation as citizens come to understand that, far from being mere customers and users, they are harmed by a system in which they are trapped, and for which they are to bear the human costs against which oil billionaires are safeguarded. “Begin[ning] with the de-familiarization of the daily - the making strange of the habitual and the accustomed” (Ebert 560), these lawsuits reveal the faulty nature of a logic advocating private profits and public costs, allowing for a significant change of perspective to emerge. Yet for all their potential benefit in recalibrating people’s perceptions, and unlike traditional manifestoes which emerge as “the privileged discourses of all social and cultural contestations” (553), these cases ground their claim in the dominant ideology of neoliberal capitalism. This move is calculated to convince the judge presiding at the trial, but also to appeal to a much greater audience with legislative power of their own, namely members of civil society. However, the ideology mobilized by these lawsuits goes against an environmentalist agenda. Written in times of crisis, these “conservative” manifestoes do not seek, as manifestoes typically do, to revolutionize the current form of the socioeconomic system, but rather to amend it slightly. In doing so, these cases validate the system in spite of its acute role in fostering climate change, while cementing its apparently ineluctable character. Aimed primarily at making their claim legible and admissible to most (be they legal authorities or mere citizens), these lawsuits-as- <?page no="50"?> US Climate Change Lawsuits as Political Manifestoes 51 manifestoes draw on the tenets of neoliberal capitalism and more specifically on its vigorous defense of property. In framing the issue as a conventional matter of property damage, these cases pit the use of one type of property against another (oil vs. public infrastructure), depicting them as equivalent entities that can be substituted through an economic transaction. To a public won over to neoliberal ideals of the free market and private ownership, the strength of such rhetoric lies in the minimal change required for business to carry on unobstructed, as opposed to a heavy structural reform involving “big government.” Instead, from a capitalist perspective, environmental damage is considered nothing more than a degradation of natural capital which can be precisely assessed and redressed. Yet climate destabilization does not merely translate to damaged infrastructure, but triggers a series of changes in ecosystems, including irreparable losses that do not come with a price tag. Instead of calling the government to action, the plaintiffs simply react to a problem without seeking to address its underlying features, as if resilience, or adaptation to the new climate reality, were a good enough − and indeed the only possible − response. Miller and her coauthors note that “as an apparently immaterial phenomenon [. . .] genre has been theorized as symbolic action; but generic action is materialized in practices and has empirical consequences (273-74). The dissemination of the liberal capitalist creed advocating for the status quo comes at a great ecological cost. Juliana v. United States In 2015, backed by the environmental non-profit organization Our Children’s Trust, twenty-one youths filed a constitutional climate lawsuit against the US government in the Oregon District Court. Their complaint asserts that, through its actions and policies, the government has contributed to exacerbating climate change, thereby violating some of the youngest generation’s constitutional rights, and that it has failed to protect critical publictrust resources. Fifty similar claims have been filed in state courts, two of which, the Alaska and the Washington cases, were dismissed in 2018. A federal case, Juliana v. United States, gained prominence in November 2016, two days after Trump’s election, when the Oregon district court ruled that it could proceed to trial. Many challenges stand in its way, however, and the <?page no="51"?> Audrey Loetscher 52 current government has worked hard to obtain a dismissal of the case, successfully preventing it from reaching trial twice. Originally scheduled for February 2018 at the Oregon District Court in Eugene, the trial date for Juliana was postponed until October 29, before being halted at the last minute as a result of the current administration’s latest attempt at delaying proceedings (Our Children’s Trust). The young plaintiffs already had to prove that their claim was not based on generalized grievances, which by their very nature cannot be addressed in a court of law. They also had to convince the judge that they had legal standing, namely that the government, through its climate policy, was harming them specifically and in a concrete, demonstrable way. They also succeeded in getting climate change recognized as a legal matter, as opposed to a nonjusticiable political question. As Melissa Powers explains, “the plaintiffs’ success in getting the court to accept jurisdiction over the case was itself an important achievement in the case and potentially for climate change law itself” (202). Should Juliana reach the trial phase of litigation, the court could deliver a powerful order that, if reiterated by the Supreme Court, would confirm the constitutional right to a safe climate. Prevailing in court would indeed compel the government to craft and implement an ambitious climate policy framework aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, an important step in climate change mitigation efforts. As with the cities’ and counties’ lawsuits, the question of responsibility once more proves a thorny point, underlining the importance for the plaintiffs of resorting to generic conventions to secure public approval. Without being explicitly mentioned in the complaint, this lawsuit draws on an important concept of environmental justice: ecological debt. What is specifically invoked by the plaintiffs is the harm caused to present and future generations by the US government in allowing practices leading to climate disruption. This harm, however, is a direct consequence of the ever-growing ecological debt on which the US and other industrialized nations’ socieconomic systems rest. There are two types of ecological debts or, seen the other way around, ecological credits. The horizontal credit symbolizes the fact that the excessive consumption of developed economies is offset by the much lower consumption of developing countries. Vertical credit, on the other hand, refers to the “grab” of current generations on the theoretical right of younger and future generations to access the same natural resources. If sustained over the next decades, current levels of extraction and consumption could <?page no="52"?> US Climate Change Lawsuits as Political Manifestoes 53 result in depletion or outright extinction, thus depriving future generations of basic needs. This environmental credit system enables advanced economies to consume more than they would be allowed to in a system privileging a fair allocation of resources, both horizontally and vertically. Responsible for a quarter of all CO 2 emissions since the beginning of the second Industrial Revolution, and the second largest annual emitter after China (Union of Concerned Scientists), the US would occupy a prominent seat in an international courtroom ruling on climate change responsibility. At the national level, the plaintiffs’ claim implicitly relies on this notion of vertical ecological debt to argue that the US government has wronged the young and unborn generations. But as Andrea Rogers, one of the Juliana lawyers, explained, the government cannot be sued for failing to do something such as implementing a sustainable energy system. Rather, the plaintiffs must demonstrate that the government had a long-standing knowledge of climate danger and that it violated the constitution through its affirmative actions. And indeed, the US government has long known of the dangers associated with a warmer planet, for it received numerous scientific reports in the decades following the end of the Second World War (Weart 206-12). Emphasizing the role of successive administrations in heightening the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the claim asks for the implementation of a national climate-recovery plan. This plan, the plaintiffs argue, would ensure that the concentration of carbon dioxide, expressed in parts per million (ppm), be lowered from its current 400 ppm to 350 ppm by the end of this century, a level which would ensure that temperatures at the surface of the earth do not skyrocket (Estrin 19). Researchers have calculated that, based on the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) the US pledged to respect at the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference held in Paris, its carbon emissions budget, if taken as a reference for the world’s total budget, would lead to a 4 °C warming - significantly higher than the upper limit set by climate scientists at 2 °C above preindustrial levels (Robiou Du Pont and Meinshausen 5). The plaintiffs reckon that the United States needs to reduce its CO 2 emissions by about ten percent each year beginning in 2018 in order to stay within a safe threshold. The case is thus a call to phase out fossil-fuel emissions, with the aim of stabilizing the climate system by lowering the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Let us now turn to the judicial framework in which this lawsuit inscribes itself, and the two main legal arguments developed by the plaintiffs. The <?page no="53"?> Audrey Loetscher 54 first of these emanates from common law and appeals to what is known as the public trust doctrine. Originally granting the government “title to submerged land under navigable waters in trust for the benefit of the public” (The People’s Law Dictionary), the doctrine holds that the government acts as a trustee of water resources, limiting its own authority to develop the resources it must preserve for the public, including future generations. In recent legal developments, the doctrine has been invoked to include a broader set of environmental resources. Juliana, for instance, argues that the notion of public trust applies to the atmosphere, a claim resting on the concept of Atmospheric Trust Litigation developed by Mary Wood, a law professor at the University of Oregon. Wood contends that a representative government has a duty to protect the natural systems required for its people’s survival, for citizens would not give power to their government to eradicate resources such as a stable climate system (Mukherjee). The youths’ lawyers assert that the national climate policy violates the public trust doctrine, by allowing industrial and business practices that generate carbon emissions destabilizing the climate system and by “support[ing] fossil fuel development through federal permits, leases, subsidies, and approvals for fossil fuel exports” (Powers 201). While this doctrine represents the collective aspect of Juliana’s legal argument, the core of the plaintiffs’ claim lies in the violation that derives from it, and which pertains to their constitutional rights to “life, liberty and property” (Juliana v. United States, “First Amended Complaint” 2). Arguing that these rights cannot be safeguarded as carbon accumulation continues to increase in the atmosphere, the plaintiffs assert that the government’s energy policy violates two amendments to the Constitution, one of which is the due-process component of the Fifth Amendment, which holds that the “no person shall be [. . .] deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” (Comparative Constitutions Project). As Sabrina McCormick and her coauthors explain, Juliana “seeks to extend due process beyond limiting government infringement on substantive rights to impose an affirmative obligation on government to take action to prevent climate change” (832-33). As with the cities and counties lawsuits, the communication campaign around Juliana and the promotion of its legal argument allow for a symbolic reading of this case as a political manifesto. The nonprofit representing the youths has worked hard to ensure that, should the lawsuit not make it to trial, its main ideas would still reach a large audience, with the hope that it <?page no="54"?> US Climate Change Lawsuits as Political Manifestoes 55 might initiate change in the ballot boxes. Indeed, “the manifesto has a particular performativity: it does not ‘merely describe a history of rupture, but produces such a history, seeking to create this rupture actively through its own intervention’” (Puchner, “Manifesto = Theatre” 450). More than winning at trial, Juliana aims at propelling its environmental ideas onto a wider arena. “A programmatic discourse of power [that] aspires to change reality with words” (Yanoshevsky 264), Juliana-as-manifesto is aimed at altering people’s understanding of climate change and the ways to mitigate its consequences. In order to convince a substantial audience, the case takes advantage of a recognizable repertoire, grounding its legal argument in the most famous US manifesto: the Declaration of Independence. In asserting that “new insights reveal discord between the Constitution’s central protections [of the rights to life, liberty, and property] and the conduct of government” (Juliana v. United States, “First Amended Complaint” 84), Juliana inscribes its claim in constitutional law, but it also echoes, significantly, the Declaration of Independence’s preamble, which established as “self-evident truths” that men were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” such as “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” As Martin Puchner rightly points out, these rights, no matter how radical, are not presented as being created, enacted, constituted, or made, and consequently their declaration is not something that is in need of a poesis. All that is required is an innocuous mention of rights whose natural authority rests solely in themselves. (“The Formation of a Genre” 19) Similarly, Juliana attempts to define the right to a healthy climate as a selfevident truth. Puchner further observes that “these rights, laws, and truths [. . .] do not need to be declared at all; they are self-evident. What is being declared instead [. . .] are the violations of these laws and truths, violations that alone become ‘the causes which impel them [the authors] to the separation’” (18-19). While their aim is not to create their own republic − at least not yet − the young plaintiffs seek to highlight the just and legitimate character of their case by aligning their claim with the most renowned episodes in US history depicting a government violating its own citizens’ natural rights. By invoking fundamental rights and depicting them as quintessentially American, Juliana also draws a parallel between the adoption of a more sustainable lifestyle and the pursuit of these rights, refuting the claim, often <?page no="55"?> Audrey Loetscher 56 voiced, that environmental regulation and a more sustainable lifestyle would impinge on individuals’ freedom by restraining their rights and access to liberty and property, hence proving somewhat un-American. “Originally [. . .] envisioned as a ‘credo,’ a collection of articles of faith in the form of a catechism” (Puchner, “The Formation of a Genre” 20), the manifesto seeks to convert its audience by appealing to values immune to disagreement. Stated otherwise, in order to convince a greater number of people, Juliana tones down the environmentalist quality of its claim, stressing instead that ecological issues and solutions lie at the heart of national identity, a form of civil credo. To constitute itself as a legitimate group whose rights have been flouted, a manifesto needs to identify an oppressor and to develop a “confrontational delivery and insistence on dividing its audience into ‘us’ and ‘them’” (Weeks 221). In the same way that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s emblematic “Manifesto of the Communist Party” leveled charges against the bourgeoisie, the Juliana plaintiffs reproach the government for its apathy and its complicity in not taking “necessary steps to address and ameliorate the known, serious risk to which they have exposed Plaintiffs” (Juliana v. United States 86), using a string of statements reminiscent of the long list of grievances against King George. While the Second Continental Congress sought to justify to the Crown itself the colonies’ right to secede from the British Empire, its members also strived to convince colonists of the legitimacy of their state as a sovereign one. Beyond proving the validity of their claims, or the government’s role as the custodian of these natural rights, including the right to a healthy climate, the plaintiffs also seek to convince people of the desirability of the alternative society they envision, namely a post-carbon one. Indeed, as “exercises in thinking collective life and imagining futurity, manifestos can be understood as a species of utopianism” (Weeks 217). As such, these texts “enabl[e] us to detach cognitively and affectively from the present so as to produce some critical leverage vis-à-vis the status quo” and to “encourag[e] the production of political desire for a better possible future” (218). The rhetoric developed by Juliana seeks to convey the idea that living sustainably would in fact align with fundamental American rights and values. In framing their claim in this manner, the plaintiffs hope to initiate a change of perception and behaviors and set off a series of reforms in Americans’ representations and daily practices of sustainability that would undermine unsustainable patterns of behavior and thoughts. <?page no="56"?> US Climate Change Lawsuits as Political Manifestoes 57 Resorting to the manifesto’s generic conventions is a strategic move to impress the court in a favorable manner and rally more people to the plaintiffs’ cause, in order to prompt the government to offer a true response to the challenge posed by climate change. But as Mary Ann Caws notes, “the manifesto was from the beginning, and has remained, a deliberate manipulation of the public view [. . .] a document of an ideology, crafted to convince and convert” (xix). For all its positive impacts on environmental policy and its attempt to persuade people to adopt ecologically informed practices, at a more fundamental level, the ideology advanced by this lawsuit-as-manifesto proves problematic, for reasons informed not by some eco-phobic position but rather by an ecological ethos. Instead of fostering actual change, the youths’ lawsuit reinforces ideas undergirding the unsustainable socioeconomic system of the US by reinstating a problematic cultural reading of national identity. In referring to the Constitution, Juliana directly connects governmental harm to the violation of rights that are natural and basic, but also private, attached to the individual. In the words of one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, Juliana “is fundamentally a conservative case [aimed at] protecting individual liberties from government abuses of power” (Gustin). By departing from the level of collective rights and benefits resulting from a healthy climate, placing the accent on individual rights instead, the plaintiffs strengthen the appeal of their claim by tying it to the American individualistic ethos. By insisting on the private pursuit of these rights, as opposed to the public enjoyment of a healthy environment, this lawsuit sanctifies a certain conception of national identity and its coterminous myths, such as the notion of infinite prosperity underlying the American dream, or the insistence on the necessity of unrestrained freedom for personal selfaccomplishment, that have fueled the nation’s unsustainable practices. “Identif[ying] with extant myths, beliefs, folk tales, and the like” enables the manifesto to “successfully strik[e] a responsive chord” (Stewart, Smith and Denton 95), making it palatable to a majority, but the national myths that Juliana invokes enclose its claim in an environmentally unsustainable ideological framework. Stressing the American ideal of ever-expanding personal growth also entrenches and validates the imperial and expansionist character of the nation, while the emphasis on the right to private property, as opposed to a common, public heritage of natural resources, fosters a culture of division whereby individuals seek to maximize their supply of resources regardless of others’ access to these same resources. <?page no="57"?> Audrey Loetscher 58 Sustainability, of which unity and a communal spirit are fundamental traits, requires on the contrary a culture of consensus and a shared commitment by current generations to act as trustees of the planet for future generations. A sustainable mode of existence necessarily implies notions of self-restraint, as opposed to the unbridled freedom and unaccountable behavior characteristic of the private pursuit of individuals’ right to life, liberty and property. If citizens are free, they are also part of a community that transcends their individual existence, both from a geographical and a temporal point of view. Individual rights encounter boundaries in the existence of others, whether they be citizens of other nations or unborn members of the human community. Miller and her coauthors write that “genre holds in balance fundamental tensions along multiple dimensions: between innovation and conformity, stability and change [. . .] intention-exigence (or agency-structure, to put it in sociological terms)” (273). In this delicate exercise, the Juliana plaintiffs fail to strike a balance between deriving benefits from their adhering to “socially objectified exigences,” such as unconditional personal freedom and access to property, and their “individual intentions” (273), which are to advance the fight against climate change. Aimed at swaying public opinions ranging from denial to outright indifference, this lawsuit taps into the rhetorical ploys offered by the genre of the manifesto in order to persuade, both in the courtroom and in the legislative arena. While this strategy may prove successful, the ideology undergirding its legal argument ultimately proves detrimental to the environmental cause which, in this case, is the cause defended by the plaintiffs themselves. Instead of using genre for its creative power and profiting from its “multiple capacities for invention and transformation,” Juliana solely relies on its “stabilizing function” (274), invoking some of the unsustainable values that have brought forth the climate predicament even as it strives to appeal to a refractory or unconcerned audience. Regardless of their numerous merits, including the validation by courts of scientific conclusions regarding global warming, both types of lawsuit fail to reshape the national debate on climate change. The cities’ and counties’ lawsuits contribute to a rhetoric suggesting that resilience, or adaptation to a modified climate system, should prevail over attempts at regulating the carbon buildup in the atmosphere, a conception promulgated by international economic institutions (Felli). In this logic, compensation suffices to counteract the harmful aspects of climate change. For all its appeal in maintain- <?page no="58"?> US Climate Change Lawsuits as Political Manifestoes 59 ing the status quo and averting costly radical changes and possible losses of profits, resilience is a flawed policy tool, for the disappearance of a coral reef or a glacier, or the extinction of a species, can never be compensated for. Natural and cultural heritages are not akin to portions of the infrastructure whose damage can be assessed and which can be repaired; their value is inestimable, and their recovery, exceedingly complex, if possible at all. As for Juliana, although it calls for a substantial amendment of the US climate policy, its legal argument revives some of the poisonous conceptions that have led to environmental destabilization. Instead of proposing a radical revision reframing the issue, Juliana encloses its ecological call in a set of values that are at odds with sustainability. A genuinely transformative lawsuit-as-manifesto would probably integrate indigenous perspectives. In emphasizing the interrelatedness between the natural world and humankind, as well as the importance of building a strong community and cultivating a close, spiritual relationship with the land, Native American writings and beliefs point to a sustainable mode of existence modeled on, and respectful of, the natural world. While Western societies’ ideas of nature unmistakably lead to a bleak future, they continue to enjoy a central position within the national conversation, relegating the native ecological ethos to the margins. Yet the fact that language defines our mental world and our response to societal issues such as climate change makes the question of citizenship all the more central, highlighting how environmental questions are intimately connected to issues of national identity and citizenship, or who gets to write national self-representations and define the nation’s relationship to nature. <?page no="59"?> Audrey Loetscher 60 References Abastado, Claude. “Introduction à l’Analyse des Manifestes.” Littérature 39 (1980): 3-11. Bawarshi, Anis S. and Mary Jo Reiff. Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy. West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2010. Bazerman, Charles. “The Life of Genre, the Life in the Classroom.” Genre and Writing: Issues, Arguments, Alternatives. Ed. Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom. Portsmouth: Boynton/ Cook, 1997. 19-26. Boyle, Alan. “Polluter Pays.” Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law. http: / / opil.ouplaw.com/ view/ 10.1093/ law: epil/ 9780199231690/ law-9780199231690-e1602. Accessed 26 May 2019. Caws, Mary Ann, ed. Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. City of New York v. BP PLC. “Complaint.” U.S. Climate Change Litigation Database. Columbia Law School, Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. http: / / climatecasechart.com/ case/ city-new-york-v-bp-plc/ . Accessed 26 May 2019. City of Oakland v. BP PLC. “Order Granting Motion to Dismiss Amended Complaints.” U.S. Climate Change Litigation Database. Columbia Law School, Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. climatecasechart.com/ case/ people-state-california-v-bp-plc-oakland/ . Accessed 26 May 2019. Comparative Constitutions Project. “U.S. Constitution.” University of Texas at Austin. https: / / www.constituteproject.org/ constitution/ United_ States_of_America_1992. Accessed 26 May 2019. Cumo, Christopher and Fernando Herrera. “Chronology.” Encyclopedia of Global Warming and Climate Change. Ed. S. George Philander. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2008. xlvii-liii. Devitt, Amy J. “Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of Genre.” College English 62 (2000): 696-718. Ebert, Teresa L. “Manifesto as Theory and Theory as Material Force: Toward a Red Polemic.” JAC 23 (2003): 553-62. Estrin, David. “Limiting Dangerous Climate Change: the Critical Role of Citizen Suits and Domestic Courts - Despite the Paris Agreement.” CI- GI Papers No. 101, 11 May 2016. www.cigionline.org/ publications/ <?page no="60"?> US Climate Change Lawsuits as Political Manifestoes 61 limiting-dangerous-climate-change-critical-role-citizen-suits-anddomestic-courts. Accessed 16 May 2019. Felli, Romain. “The World Bank’s Neoliberal Language of Resilience.” Research in Political Economy 31 (2016): 267-95. Fiege, Mark. The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States. Seattle: Washington University Press, 2012. Green, Miranda. “Baltimore Joins Cities Filing Climate Change Lawsuits against Fossil Fuel Companies.” The Hill, 20 July 2018. www.thehill.com/ policy/ energy-environment/ 398064-baltimore-latestcity-to-file-lawsuit-against-fossil-fuel-company. Accessed 5 October 2018. Gustin, Georgina. “Nobel-Winning Economist to Testify in Children’s Climate Lawsuit.” Inside Climate News, 11 July 2018. insideclimatenews.org/ news/ 11072018/ joseph-stiglitz-kids-climate-change-lawsuitglobal-warming-costs-economic-impact. Accessed 18 November 2018. Heede, Richard. “Tracing Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide and Methane Emissions to Fossil Fuel and Cement Producers, 1854-2010.” Climatic Change 122 (2014): 229-41. Juliana v. United States. “First Amended Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief.” U.S. Climate Change Litigation Database. Columbia Law School, Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. climatecasechart.com/ case/ juliana-v-united-states/ . Accessed 26 May 2019. Legal Information Institute. “Public Nuisance.” Cornell Law School. https: / / www.law.cornell.edu/ wex/ public_nuisance. Accessed 26 May 2019. Mark, Jason. “Baltimore Becomes Latest Local Government to Sue Big Oil for Climate Change.” Sierra Magazine, 20 July 2018. www.sierraclub.org/ sierra/ baltimore-becomes-latest-local-governmentsue-big-oil-for-climate-change. Accessed 18 November 2018. ---. “The Case for Climate Reparations: Who Should Pay the Costs for Climate-Change-related Disasters? ” Sierra Magazine, 23 April 2018. https: / / www.sierraclub.org/ sierra/ 2018-3-may-june/ feature/ the-casefor-climate-reparations. Accessed 18 November 2018. McCormick, Sabrina et al. “Strategies in and Outcomes of Climate Change Litigation in the United States.” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018): 829-33. Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151-67. <?page no="61"?> Audrey Loetscher 62 Miller, Carolyn R., Amy J. Devitt and Victoria J. Gallagher. “Genre: Permanence and Change.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48 (2018): 269-77. Mukherjee, Ipshita. “Atmospheric Trust Litigation - Paving the Way for a Fossil-Fuel Free World.” Stanford Law School: Environmental and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program Blog, 5 July 2017. law.stanford.edu/ 2017/ 07/ 05/ atmospheric-trust-litigation-paving-theway-for-a-fossil-fuel-free-world. Accessed 12 October 2018. Our Children’s Trust. “Details of Proceedings.” https: / / www. ourchildrenstrust.org/ federal-proceedings/ . Accessed 26 May 2019. The People’s Law Dictionary. “Public Trust Doctrine.” https: / / dictionary.law.com/ Default.aspx? selected=1685. Accessed 26 May 2019. Powers, Melissa. “Juliana v United States: The Next Frontier in U.S. Climate Mitigation? ” Reciel 27 (2018): 199-204. Puchner, Martin. “The Formation of a Genre.” Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 11-22. ---. “Manifesto = Theatre.” Theatre Journal 54 (2002): 449-65. Robiou du Pont, Yann and Malte Meinshausen. “Warming Assessment of the Bottom-Up Paris Agreement Emissions Pledges.” Nature Communications 9 (2018): 1-10. Rogers, Andrea. “Climate Science for the People: From the Courthouse to the Statehouse.” 27 February 2019. Optimism Brewery Company: Seattle. Panel discussion. Ross, Robert M. and Warren D. Allmon. “Public Awareness.” Encyclopedia of Global Warming and Climate Change. Ed. S. George Philander. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2008. 831-32. Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “U.S. Climate Change Litigation Database.” Columbia Law School. climatecasechart.com/ casecategory/ actions-seeking-money-damages-for-losses/ . Accessed 26 May 2019. Schwarz, John. “Judge Dismisses Suit Against Oil Companies Over Climate Change Costs.” New York Times, 25 June 2018. www.nytimes. com/ 2018/ 06/ 25/ climate/ climate-change-lawsuit-san-franciscooakland.html. Accessed 15 November 2018. Stewart, Charles J., Craig Allen Smith and Robert E. Denton. Persuasion and Social Movements. 6th ed. Longrove: Waveland, 2012. <?page no="62"?> US Climate Change Lawsuits as Political Manifestoes 63 Union of Concerned Scientists. “Each Country’s Share of CO2 Emissions.” https: / / www.ucsusa.org/ global-warming/ science-and-impacts/ science/ each-countrys-share-of-co2.html. Accessed 26 May 2019. Weart, Spencer R. The Discovery of Global Warming. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2008. Weeks, Kathi. “The Critical Manifesto: Marx and Engels, Haraway, and Utopian Politics.” Utopian Studies 24 (2013): 216-31. Yanoshevsky, Galia. “Three Decades of Writing on Manifesto: The Making of a Genre.” Poetics Today 30 (2009): 257-86. <?page no="64"?> “I would prefer not to”: Routine and Agency in Office Fiction Sixta Quassdorf In recent years, fiction writers have been increasingly interested in the office as a revealing symbolic setting with which to address the individual’s embeddedness in socio-economic structures. This article focuses on two recurrent motifs in recent office fiction - routine and agency - which are already anticipated in one of the earliest examples of American office fiction: Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). Routine, as a result of doctrines of rational efficiency, highlights the “mechanical,” boring, and repetitive nature of office work and its consequences on human beings. The question of agency and resistance implied in Bartleby’s famous formula, “I would prefer not to,” becomes pressing in a neoliberal context where the transformation of political and social organization according to the logic of corporate business generates a totalitarian system. The present essay discusses these generic issues - agency and resistance - with particular reference to David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018). Keywords: Contemporary American fiction, office fiction, working conditions, agency, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” David Foster Wallace, Ling Ma The Genres of Genre: Form, Formats, and Cultural Formations. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 38. Ed. Cécile Heim, Boris Vejdovsky and Benjamin Pickford. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 65-83. <?page no="65"?> Sixta Quassdorf 66 By examining white-collar life, it is possible to learn something about what is becoming more typically “American” than the frontier character probably ever was. - C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes When the sociologist C. Wright Mills observed the typicality of “whitecollar life” in the early 1950s, he was referring to a socioeconomic development that had begun to take shape at least a century earlier. In the mid-nineteenth-century, office work found its first canonical portrayal in American literature in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) which drew attention to that “interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing [. . .] has ever been written” (635). Melville had apparently recognized the significant role that office workers would play in the future, despite their then lowly status and their engagement in an occupation that clashed with nineteenth-century conceptions of masculinity. Nevertheless, the following generations of writers have only reluctantly acknowledged the office as a promising setting for their literary works, leading Bryan Burrough and others 1 to pose the question: “where is the office in American fiction? ” 2 On an international scale, however, Anne Mulhall notices that the last two decades have been especially productive and contends that “the office novel has become a genre in its own right.” Lydia Kiesling concurs with respect to the United States, so long as female writers are taken into account, and Michael Lindgren even maintains that the genre “belongs to our time just as the comedy of marriage belongs to the late 18th century and the social-realist novel to the late 19th.” Even though the latter claim may seem exaggerated, the office features in a number of recent literary works by Helen DeWitt, Dave Eggers, Joshua Ferris, Ling Ma, Ed Park, Amy Rowland, David Foster Wallace, and others. 3 1 See Ferris; Flanders; Lanchester; and Saval, “Bartlebys All! ” and Cubed. 2 The office appears, however, in office romance, which developed as a genre in the late nineteenth century when women were admitted to office work (Berebitsky 10, passim). What distinguishes office novels from the schema-based mass production of office romances is their literary intention and reception (see Dobson 264). As to literary office fiction, only a handful of twentieth-century novels, such as Sinclair Lewis’s The Job (1917), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961), Don DeLillo’s Americana (1971), Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974), and Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs (1995) come to mind. 3 Examples of recent office novels include Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007), Ed Park’s Personal Days (2008), Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask (2010), Matthew Norman’s Domestic Violets (2011), Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods (2011), David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011), Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013), Amy Rowland’s The Transcriptionist (2014), Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members (2014), Helen Philipps’s The Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015), Elisabeth Egan’s A Window Opens (2015), Halle Butler’s Jillian <?page no="66"?> Routine and Agency in Office Fiction 67 Despite the disagreement about “paucity” (Burrough) vs. “boom” (Kiesling) in office fiction, it seems clear that the office as the typical American workplace can be turned into a fruitful synecdoche for American life itself (Biederman). It constitutes an ideal place for addressing “the crossovers between work and affect” (Mulhall) and the individual’s role within organizational superstructures. These superstructures are typically depicted as machine-like and inhuman, indifferent to individuals’ needs. Or, in Melville’s terms, the office novel explores the consequences of having to work “silently, palely, mechanically” (642) and the persistence of the human as expressed in Bartleby’s phrase “I would prefer not to” (643, passim). Characteristics of the Genre When Mulhall and other critics speak of a “genre in its own right,” they are not primarily referring to the quantity of recent novels set in offices. Instead, as products of their time, genres can turn into prolific means of literary and cultural analysis (see Lanzendörfer 3). The cultural contingency of Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” has already been mentioned: the white-collar worker heralding a new era of business organization. Bartlebyan motifs, such as routine work and resistant agency, are recurrently alluded to, modified, reversed, and commented on in later office fiction so that Melville’s short story counts as a foundational narrative for the genre. 4 As will be shown in more detail below, twentieth-century office novels tend to thematize the individual’s restricted place within a totalizing bureaucracy; that is, the “incorporation” of the individual. While incorporation remains a pressing subject, twenty-first-century office novels, in the wake of severe economic recessions, also address tendencies towards ex-corporation in the shape of impending lay-offs (see Ferris; Norman; Park) or dystopian scenarios (Eggers; Ma; Philipps). Agency now seems to be threatened from both inside and outside the socioeconomic system. Consequently, the office novel not only serves as a diagnostic tool with regard to shifts within the socioeconomic structure, but if understood as “social action” (Miller), it also helps discuss, under- (2015), Anna Yen’s Sophia of Silicon Valley (2018), Elizabeth Cohen’s The Glitch (2018), and Ling Ma’s dystopian Severance (2018). 4 See Acree; Biederman; Kiesling; Lindner; Mulhall; Saval, “Bartlebys.” <?page no="67"?> Sixta Quassdorf 68 stand and tackle the “specific problem or anxiety in the world” (Bedore) of office life and beyond. According to Jonathan Culler, genres also need to prove “functional in the process of reading and writing” (136). Hence, in addition to the diagnostic and the rhetorical functions of “social action,” they also operate “as norm or expectation to guide the reader in his encounter with the text” (136). Kiesling’s observation about office novels being partly “disguised as ‘chick lit,’ ‘girlfriend literature,’ or even ‘erotica’” makes the effect of perspectivizations through genre clear. The genre “chick lit” not only suggests derogatory connotations for literature written by and for women but also implies a “kind of light commercial fiction” (Baldick) about the romantic whims and sorrows of a modern professional woman, while also targeting a (youngish) female audience. If the same novels are approached as examples of the office novel, they not only potentially de-gender their audience but also more clearly invite a transposition from a fictional, purely personal account to a material socioeconomic context, where the private and the public interact. Moreover, as the workplace setting implies income, an essential precondition for living a self-determined life in a moneyed society, an individual’s dependence on their job and thus the overarching socioeconomic structure comes into perspective. Because individuals’ economic well-being typically lies beyond their power, the genre of the office novel invites a critique of the neoliberal idealization of individualism and personal responsibility for one’s life, and calls for a materialist critical approach. The genre of the office novel has been disguised and misidentified in other ways. Its concealment behind “chick lit” and other forms of genre fiction may be the accidental consequence of patriarchal indifference within the publishing industry or the effect of marketing policies, but it is a genre that also deliberately fuses with, for instance, office romance (DeWitt; Ferris; Yen), erotica (DeWitt), gothic fiction (Philipps) or even the zombie novel (Ma). Hence, the office novel can be seen as another instance of the “genre turn” that tends to obliterate dichotomies between “high” and “popular” fiction (see Dorson). This blurring of boundaries, seen as a phenomenon parallel to the general neoliberal demand for flexibility and fungibility, may, however, further the totalizing tendencies of late capitalism and end in perfect incorporation. At the same time, genre may offer a counterstrategy. Modern genre theory (see Culler; Fowler; Schaeffer) has abandoned the taxonomic top-down organization of genres that relied on reproductive conformity to conventions. Rather, literary genres are now understood as offering “possibilities of meaning” (Culler 137) which emerge within a dialectic <?page no="68"?> Routine and Agency in Office Fiction 69 of bounded freedom, with the boundaries of the genre being malleable. “The real definiens is always the text, the definiendum, always provisional, being the genre” (Schaeffer 177). Accordingly, genres exist by virtue of differentiation, variation, and metamorphosis and merely form “networks of partial resemblances” (177) in a dialectical process. In other words, individuals are given priority while their embeddedness is accommodated - abstract meaning outside structuring conventions does not exist (Culler 116 ff.). Genre, thus understood, can represent an alternative model to top-down organization, a model which might help mend the failures of present-day socioeconomic and sociopolitical hierarchical structures. Since its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, the genre of the office novel has reflected changes within socioeconomic reality and has shaped reading expectations towards a materialist critical approach. As will be shown in the rest of this essay, the office novel also suggests ways of reacting to, and dealing with, the specific problems and anxieties of office life, and perhaps of life itself in view of the office’s pervasiveness in late-capitalist US society. The Incorporation of the Clerk The historical developments that led Mills to maintain that “white-collar life” was becoming “typically ‘American’” deserve attention in view of the generic function of the office novel. When “business became big business” (Saval, Cubed 34), administration became more complex. Activities like accounting, sales, shipping, marketing, PR, advertising, and legal advising needed to be professionalized and thus have led to countless new white-collar occupations (Saval, Cubed 34; Trachtenberg 84). However, the outnumbering of blue-collar workers by white-collar ones was only a minor part of Mills’s concerns. For much as the high-rise office building shaped American cityscapes, the logic of corporate business administration shaped the entire country, including its politics, its culture, and the private lives of its citizens (Trachtenberg 5). In short, the capitalist economy had advanced from being one realm among others within the sociopolitical spectrum to the all-encompassing paradigm - America has become “incorporated” (Trachtenberg passim). Sam Biederman thus identifies the office as a synecdoche for corporate America; that is, an America that had shifted its connotations from the republican ideals of a Jefferson or Whitman to an “alliance and incorporation of business, politics, industry, and culture” (Trachtenberg 230). <?page no="69"?> Sixta Quassdorf 70 Being a direct product of the business corporations, white-collar workers became integral to the dissemination of corporate ideology. Compared to blue-collar workers, office workers enjoyed higher social prestige, secure jobs, and better pay. They could cherish hopes of promotion and thus have faith in the American dream (Saval, Cubed 169; Trachtenberg 211; Williams 575 ff.). White-collar workers, therefore, adopted and disseminated a conformist acceptance of mainstream ideologies much more markedly than any other social group. With the growth of the middle classes, Herbert Marcuse saw this uncritical attitude as a generalizable phenomenon of “one-dimensional thought” in modern capitalist societies (1). The generic topos of boring office routine seems to relate directly to the kind of “one-dimensional thought” which values the rationale of machine-like efficiency above everything. Boredom reflects the stale routine of a bureaucracy which “develops the more perfectly the more it is ‘de-humanized’” (Weber 216). The machine logic of business organization aiming at the utmost efficiency through smooth and frictionless processes does not accommodate human “affect” (Mulhall; Berebitsky 6), creative thinking (Arendt 473), or conscious action (Horkheimer and Adorno 30). The logic of the system demands rules and laws to be followed, not autonomous thought and action. Male characters in particular are caught in modern versions of Bartleby’s working “silently, palely, mechanically” (Melville 642). The seemingly “pale” masculinity of a white-collar worker clashes with the archetypal image of Mills’s “frontier type.” Instead of self-reliant virility, independence, and an exploratory spirit, they have to submit to “unmanly,” dull work, and the power of bureaucracy. 5 Even well-paid managers like Joseph Heller’s Robert Slocum lack self-efficacy in the face of intricate hierarchical structures and have to grapple with work routine. Boredom and depression follow, revealing the inadequacy of what has long been criticized as the dominance of instrumental rationality in modern societies. The process of incorporation under instrumental rationality has continued into neoliberalism. While professionals like lawyers and doctors have given up independent practice and joined larger law firms and health corporations, universities are being restructured according to business principles. Nevertheless, the past few decades have also seen the opposite: a process of ex-corporation in times of recession. With the threat of expulsion from the system into the void, the office begins to 5 See also William H. Whyte’s influential study The Organization Man (1956). <?page no="70"?> Routine and Agency in Office Fiction 71 display greater potential for a personal drama of “life and death,” which for Burrough is the prerogative of the novel. These twenty-first-century office novels address the repercussions of economic crises with the threat of redundancy and the imperative to work tirelessly like a machine to avoid redundancy. The farcical and satirical tone that, for instance, Elizabeth Cohen, Helen DeWitt, Elisabeth Egan, Joshua Ferris, Sam Lipsyte, Matthew Norman, Ed Park, and Anna Yen adopt seems to betray disbelief in the ridiculously inhuman strains of modern (office) life. The office novel seems to convey that much of the malaise of American experience is linked to the totalizing tendencies of capitalism, for which the office serves as a synecdoche. By pointing out the culprit, the genre refutes the prevalent euphemisms of “corporate politesse” (Biederman) and questions the rhetoric of strong individualism by emphasizing individuals’ dependence on forces beyond their control. Furthermore, in view of the increased and all-pervasive commodification which does not even stop before our “public personas” (Pham), the office novel explores both the boundaries and the potentialities of agency in today’s socioeconomic reality. Routine and Agency in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King and Ling Ma’s Severance Wallace’s The Pale King and Ling Ma’s Severance have been chosen for detailed analyses as they are exemplary of the genre. Wallace excels at describing the confining routine at work, while Ma highlights the contingencies of human agency, which is in keeping with the perceived tendency that gender identity affects which Bartlebyan motifs are foregrounded - routine work or resistant agency. For women, the office has had an entirely different connotation historically from what it has had for men. The admission of women to “decent” and prestigious whitecollar jobs meant a major step towards opening the limiting “frontier” of the home to the public space and thus a major step towards gender equality (Berebitsky; Saval, Cubed). Not surprisingly then, many female characters in office fiction are more energetic and enthusiastic about their jobs than their male counterparts. When the women collide with the instrumental logic of corporate rule, their active response, their “refusal and resistance” (Mulhall), is regularly highlighted. Nevertheless, as the analyses of Wallace’s and Ma’s novels will show, both topoi are ultimately interrelated and defy simple schematization. <?page no="71"?> Sixta Quassdorf 72 Routine at Work in Wallace’s The Pale King According to Marshall Boswell, Wallace’s novels assume an “omnivorous, culture-consuming ‘encyclopedic’” dimension (vii). In The Pale King (hereafter TPK), the “omnivorous” dimension surfaces through the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as “a synecdoche for a wide range of urgent issues, including the ethics of citizenship, the concrete effects of supply-side economics, US tax policy, and post-Reagan political history, just to name a few” (Boswell viii). Boswell thus also recognizes the synecdochic role of the office. Furthermore, Wallace’s notes explicitly state that the question of “human examiners or machines” is the “Big issue” in TPK including “Paying attention, boredom, ADD, Machines vs. people at performing mindless jobs” (545), which recalls Bartleby’s writing “silently, palely, mechanically” (Melville 642). In contrast to other office fiction, which typically centers on “the feelings around work” (Saval, “Bartlebys” 22; Mulhall), Wallace’s TPK also excels at the minute description of both the actual office work and the clerk’s immediate affective responses. Passages like the following abound: Then three more, including one 1040A, where the deductions for A.G.I. were added wrong and the Martinsburg printout hadn’t caught it and had to be amended on one of the Form 020-Cs in the lower left tray, and then a lot of the same information filled out on the regular 20, which you still had to do even if it was just a correspondence audit and the file going to Joliet instead of the District, each code for which had to be looked up on the pullout thing he had to scoot the chair awkwardly over to pull out all the way. Then another one, then a plummeting inside of him as the wall clock showed that what he’d thought was another hour had not been. Not even close. (376-77) The rote tasks described seem curiously opaque to both the fictional character and the reader. However, the fictional character is told to “avoid the temptation to think that you [. . .] need more information” (342). Just as the copyist Bartleby does not need to understand what he copies, so the clerks at the IRS do not need to understand the myriad sections and subsections of the tax returns that they receive - each employee processing only one or, at most, a few, of these sections - nor does the reader. Like factory work according to Taylorist ideals, office work, <?page no="72"?> Routine and Agency in Office Fiction 73 too, is divided into tiny segments; it thus appears to be purely mechanical, meaningless, and constitutes a testimony to “white-collar alienation” (Saval, “Bartlebys” 22). The clerk becomes a “dronelike cog in an immense federal bureaucracy” with “inflexible rules of operation” (Wallace 79). Clerks are pressed to “maximize efficiency in spotting which returns might need auditing and will produce revenue” (546). No wonder the examiners are called “data processors” (340) and, as a matter of defense, begin to ask, “What am I, a machine? ” (370). While Mulhall diagnoses an increasing penetration of the economic into private life in her general analysis of contemporary office fiction, critics observe with respect to Wallace’s novel a growing penetration of machine logic into human thinking (Giles; Wouters). The “incorporation” of the human being becomes manifest. Like the tax examiners facing an overabundance of apparently unintelligible data to be processed according to machine logic, the reader also struggles when confronted with a plot which consists of “a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens” (Wallace 546). This “series of set-ups” is perceived as a plethora of mere text data that, at first, do not seem to form a comprehensible whole. Saval’s “feelings around work” (“Bartlebys” 22) thus transfer themselves directly to the work of reading - Wallace does not merely narrate, but also demonstrates. As a result, the reading process is not unlike the clerks’ work. Among many other things, this parallelism between the clerks’ fictional work and the reader’s actual involvement evokes an implicit understanding of the daily heroism in boring routine and mindless drudgery: 6 Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he’d ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind’s own devices. (379) Wallace reveals the seemingly unspectacular, hidden issues of “life and death” in seemingly meaningless, compartmentalized, and alienating work. When the context of their work is kept from the clerks and pushing papers appears as an end in itself (cf. Chapter 25, where twenty-eight characters are shown “turning a page” over and over, 310-13), they feel reduced to senseless data-processing machines. Their struggle against the resulting meaninglessness of existence becomes, at least allegorically, 6 Of course, the tax examiner’s work is essential for the material common good of society, and that of the reader is potentially beneficial to the immaterial common good. <?page no="73"?> Sixta Quassdorf 74 a matter of “life and death.” In other words, clerks also run the risk of losing what remains of their “humanity”: that limited residual freedom and potential inherent in Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to.” Still, Wallace insists that “[f]iction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being” (qtd in den Dulk 43), even in the most dystopian scenarios. Human beings require meaning; they construct meaning wherever possible and thus generate coping strategies against deadly routine. Wallace’s clerks, many of whom remind one of Bartleby’s “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn” appearance (Melville 642), develop a peculiar strength. If, according to a hypothesis offered in the novel, neoliberal America aims at manipulating its citizens through steady and stultifying distraction (293), then the capacity for concentration and tenacity which Wallace’s characters develop, and which the author apparently also demands of his readers, acquires a subversive potential. Those who are able to concentrate, to dedicate themselves to detail and discriminate relevant data from mere data noise, may not fall victim to one of the great and terrible PR discoveries in modern democracy, which is that if sensitive issues of governance can be made sufficiently dull and arcane, there will be no need for officials to hide or dissemble, because no one not directly involved will pay enough attention to cause trouble. No one will pay attention because no one will be interested, because, more or less a priori, of these issues’ monumental dullness. (84) In a restless and confusing world, the capacity to concentrate, pay attention to detail, and resist stultification by easy distraction is a crucial strategy against a manipulative, infantilizing “Politics of Boredom” (Clare 444). “Sometimes what’s important is dull. Sometimes it’s work,” but the dull may be worthwhile, Wallace tells us (138). His accounts of paranormal phenomena which transcend bodily restrictions as a result of full concentration and tenacity underline this credo: e.g., the “office phantom” which appears to examiners in states of “concentrated boredom” (314), Drinion’s levitating when he is fully immersed in work or in listening to his interlocutor (see 485 ff.), or the boy who takes up the challenge to “be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body” by daily, disciplined practice (394). Interestingly, the dehumanized bureaucracy itself conditions this specific resilience, and thanks to human creativity, human responses to machine rule are never entirely predictable. Creativity is thus a further prerequisite potentially to subvert oppressive powers, comparable to Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to.” <?page no="74"?> Routine and Agency in Office Fiction 75 Loops, Routines, and the Conditions of Agency in Ling Ma’s Severance The ability to pay attention to detail, the capacity to differentiate the relevant from the redundant, and the theme of the mechanical in a capitalist society, as in repetitive routines and loops, also play a major role in Ma’s Severance. At first glance, however, Severance differs considerably from TPK. In interviews, Ma explained that she wanted to trace the source of an “undercurrent of anger [. . .] which had to do with working in an office” (qtd in Shapiro) - that is, the failure of corporate America. Moreover, she categorized Severance as an “apocalyptic office novel” (qtd in Lindner), testifying to the contemporary “genre turn” (Dorson). The apocalypse is marked by the outbreak of an epidemic, the fictive Shen Fever, which depopulates first China, then New York and the entire United States. The symptoms of the fever are loss of consciousness, while the body continues to execute habitual routine tasks in an apparently endless loop, until, eventually, the fevered waste away and die of starvation: 7 For the most part, from what we had seen, the fevered were creatures of habit, mimicking old routines and gestures they must have inhabited for years, decades. The lizard brain is a powerful thing. They could operate the mouse of a dead PC, they could drive stick in a jacked sedan, they could run an empty dishwasher, they could water dead houseplants. (28) Ma thus addresses the question of “life and death” openly and highlights its urgency by placing the novel not in a distant future, but in the period around 2011. The parallels between Bartleby’s wasting away and that of the fevered engender a major question of the novel: if the results of stopping completely, like Bartleby, or continuing endlessly, like the fevered, are similar, is the essential difference not grounded in an obvious either/ or dichotomy? The answer is complex: “But what is the difference between the fevered and us? ” (60) asks Candace Chen, the firstperson narrator, with “us” meaning the survivors of the apocalypse. In her pre-apocalyptic New York office life, Chen is committed to her job. Besides her regular paycheck, what Chen “like[s] best about working” (65) is its trance-like state, comparable to Wallace’s “concentrated boredom” (Wallace 314), and reminiscent of Bartleby’s “deadwall reveries” (Melville 653, passim). Being an immigrant and knowing 7 Ma’s fevered show some similarities with Colson Whitehead’s zombies in Zone One (2011). However, Whitehead’s zombies attack and eat humans, while Ma’s fevered do not represent a threatening mass. <?page no="75"?> Sixta Quassdorf 76 what uprootedness means, Chen appreciates the stabilizing effect of the repetitive in routine. She also sets up her own daily routines in periods when work does not structure her day. Routine per se is neither bad nor good; it can mean deadening boredom, but also a safeguard against a Bartlebyan “forlornness” (Melville 653) and chaos. Routine may even turn into “bliss” (Wallace 546). Again, the essential feature is not an abstract dichotomy, but the concrete and more complex conditions of bliss, or hell, or anything in between. Despite her positive attitude towards her job, Chen is not blind to its dubious social and environmental implications: “The company had huge collective buying power, so we offered even cheaper manufacture rates than individual publishers could achieve on their own, driving foreign labor costs down even further” (12) . She coordinates the production of Bibles in China for the American market. Not coincidentally - logistics being a key issue for corporations (Bernes; Trachtenberg 56) - the Shen fever follows the path of the books whose production she oversees. By “just doing [her] job” (Ma 85), she is both subject to, but also part of, an abusive system. The abusive economic system is represented as the grand master loop that incorporates and produces the specific loops and routines in Ma’s novel, such as the “loop” of the “rote, mechanical movement” that the Chinese workers have to perform (89), the “infinite loop” of fevered action and habit (62), or the “endless loop” of TV programs (176, 236). The incessant circulation of capital seems to suck everyone and everything into its swirl, striving for total commodification and incorporation. Who would be capable of finding a point of severance in that swirling loop, or room for true agency? Total severance is rejected as a viable alternative; the narrator doubts that opting out of the loop is a solution. In an inner monologue, Chen muses about her lover Jonathan: You live your life idealistically. You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs - I called it integrity - but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice. (205-06) Despite Jonathan’s admirable integrity, he only negates. He does not even idealize a Thoreauvian simple life, but merely wants “somewhere <?page no="76"?> Routine and Agency in Office Fiction 77 cheaper” (200). Jonathan subscribes to the concept of negative freedom, the freedom from something. His exclusive “preferring not to” tends to “avoid all commitments, all responsibilities” and denies the “facticity” of “human existence” as a precondition for becoming an autonomous self, as the existentialists (den Dulk 45-47) and also Ma’s narrator would have it: “It’s only possible for a while, when no one depends on you” (201). Freedom, apparently, cannot be a solipsistic concept, but acquires its meaning only within a social context (just as the meaning of a text can only unfold within the boundaries of genre). Chen is not satisfied with merely “preferring not to.” She also wants to prefer something. She sees the necessity of positive freedom - a concept that acknowledges resources as a precondition for freedom (see Sewell 9 ff.). “In this world, money is freedom” (Ma 206). Freedom, and thus agency, are not found in an abstract opposition between being in or outside the loop. As “outside” can only mean fantasy, the self has to relate to the world by assessing “individual limitations and possibilities” (den Dulk 45). In other words, it is a wrong question to ask for severance. Chen does not sever herself from the world but determines her preferences and seeks to clarify her space of agency “in relation to her accidental situation” (den Dulk 45). Yet, the determination of preferences is a tricky endeavor in times of growing incorporation. Whether at work or at leisure, repetitive drudgery and all-pervasive consumerism equally dull the senses. Besides descriptions of mind-numbing and dehumanizing work in China and the United States, the names of brands, stores, products, and of movies and TV shows are recurrently represented as cultural reference points and objects of desire. By succumbing to the desire-producing machinery of product marketing and the culture industry, consumers lose the ability to define their preferences autonomously, and another loop comes into play: the “circle of manipulation and retroactive need” (Horkheimer and Adorno 121). When people in the novel act out American lifestyles as they have seen them portrayed in the movies or consume for the sake of consumption, they are just as reduced to mere patterns of behavior as the fevered: “The End begins before you are ever aware of it. It passes as ordinary” (Ma 9). The epidemic in Ma’s novel is thus only the overt manifestation of what covertly has already prevailed. It models the threat of instrumental rationality, which tends to sever means from ends, action from thought (Horkheimer 21 ff.); and if “Shen” can mean “soul” but also “body” in Chi- <?page no="77"?> Sixta Quassdorf 78 nese, the fever symbolizes an unhealthy severance of the body from the soul. 8 This severance could be checked, and alienation decreased, if people could somewhat personalize the structures they encounter and - as in TPK - pay greater dedication to detail. Chen is “detail-oriented to the point of obsession” (Ma 17). She has learned, not least through her job, many specifics about production, marketing, and consumer manipulation: “I know that they are all selling the same thing, year after year [. . .] I see through everything. I can’t be touched” (139). However, it remains unclear why Chen and the other survivors with their very different personalities are not affected by the fever. There is no obvious safeguard against the dynamic power of incorporating capitalism. The fever shows capitalism’s failure. After the collapse, however, individual agency is not automatically set free. The survivors keep being attuned to familiar patterns of behavior, to hierarchical structures and instrumental reason. They continue to act like consumers, raid houses for goods, and their promised land, the so-called “facility,” turns out to be a shopping mall: “Everything we want is here, in these stores,” says the increasingly authoritarian group leader Bob (164). In the end, Chen must fear for her life; she flees from the group and has to start anew on her own. While her leaving is not an act of free will, Chen consciously chooses where she goes and why. She does not simply try to retrace her former life, follow habit, and fulfill a loop (a fatal urge for two other survivors). Nor does she sever the loop by rejecting history altogether and starting on a blank page. By assessing the “limitations and possibilities” of her “facticity” (den Dulk 45), she decides to go to Chicago, where Jonathan once lived and where her mother always dreamed of living. She thus grounds her future in the experiences of others, creates something unprecedented based on precedence, and turns the loop into a spiral. Chen severs herself from the oppressive structures of instrumental rationality by founding her new life on memories of family, on human bonds rather than on instrumental, materially useful considerations. Unsurprisingly, as one critic notes, the fever does not spread from human to human, but “from object to human” (Goodman). This seems to provide an answer to the question about essential differences. It makes a difference whether one pledges oneself to objects and structures, or, 8 A Chinese-speaking colleague has informed me that “Shen” is a homophone for “body” and “soul.” Ma herself, however, maintains that the name of the fever derives from the “industrial manufacturing hub” in the Shenzhen region (Shapiro). <?page no="78"?> Routine and Agency in Office Fiction 79 beyond the logic of instrumentality, to other human beings. Chen has thus found her way of acting like a human being. Machine Rule or Human Agency Acceptance of “facticity,” careful examination of “limitations and possibilities” (den Dulk 45), and subsequent action according to the perceived choices available seem to form the relevant preconditions in order to avoid alienating incorporation in both TPK and Severance. Yet there is not only the agency of the defending individual; human agency also lies behind the oppressive structures. While both Wallace’s IRS and Ma’s fever present an overpowering system in the form of a huge anonymous institution or a deadly disease (a seemingly “natural” catastrophe), we also find deliberate human intention behind these constructs. In TPK, the change of the IRS from a moral to a corporate institution is explicitly linked to the “pro-tech” Systems Director Dr. Lehrl, as opposed to the “Old School IRS-as-Civics believers” like District Director Glendenning (543). In Severance, oppressive agency is most clearly depicted through the authoritarian survivor Bob, who practices recognizable pre-apocalyptic methods like “a typical, power-hungry middle manager” (Schaub). Interestingly, his aspirations are not taken seriously by the other survivors until they belatedly realize that he has become too powerful - an implicit warning to nip such developments in the bud. By acknowledging agents of power, both novels implicitly contradict the neoliberal credos of “inherent necessities” and “there is no alternative.” Instead, they affirm the possibility of subversion and change. Other office novels certainly differ in many aspects from TPK and Severance. Nevertheless, a genre that highlights the structural embeddedness of the private in the public, such as the office novel, is bound to raise questions about the agency of power in one form or another. Yet the source of power is often not easy to locate. Power is disguised by hierarchical fragmentation (Heller; Philipps; Rowland; Wallace), outsourced to cash-rich anonymous clients (Ferris; Norman; Lipsyte), situated in remote cities or states (Egan; Park), or protected by the charisma with which the powerful are endowed (Cohen; Egan; Yen). If Bartleby shared his office with his boss, hemmed in by larger buildings blocking the view (the future corporate skyscrapers), later novels may contrast the limited horizons of the cubicle with the view from the top floor, where “sky is all that can be seen at this height” (Rowland 223-24). The <?page no="79"?> Sixta Quassdorf 80 exploration of the forms of power is thus another inherent trait of the genre. Office novels acknowledge the materiality of the individual in socioeconomic structures and explore that individual’s responses and options in a rationalized, totalizing system. The genre thus raises questions about the subject’s role in corporate America through its synecdoche, the office, and reflects contemporary anxieties about looming economic, social, political, and also environmental collapse, which we would all prefer not to see happening. In fact, while the genre is very much about “prefer[ring] not to,” it is also about how to prefer: that is, how to focus on the human, and to look for “what’s important” even if it is buried in “monumental dullness,” namely, to “cause trouble” (Wallace 84), and to act like the responsible citizens we would prefer to be. <?page no="80"?> Routine and Agency in Office Fiction 81 References Acree, Cat. “Rev. of Severance by Ling Ma.” BookPage, 2018. https: / / bookpage.com/ reviews/ 22980-ling-ma-severance#. W9b7y6Jv5xt. Accessed 29 October 2018. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 1951. New York: Harvest Book, 1985. Baldick, Chris, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Online. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Bedore, Pamela. “Understanding Popular Literature - What Does ‘Genre’ Mean? ” The Great Courses Daily, 26 October 2018. https: / / www. thegreatcoursesdaily.com/ understanding-popular-literature-whatdoes-genre-mean/ . Accessed 1 May 2019. Berebitsky, Julie. Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Bernes, Jasper. “Character, Genre, Labor: The Office Novel After Deindustrialization.” Post45, vol. 1, 2019. http: / / post45.research. yale.edu/ 2019/ 01/ character-genre-labor-the-office-novel-afterdeindustrialization/ . Accessed 21 January 2019. Biederman, Sam. “The Company Way.” Idiom, 20 February 2010. http: / / idiommag.com/ 2010/ 02/ the-company-way/ . Accessed 6 March 2018. Boswell, Marshall. Preface to David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing.” Ed. Marshall Boswell. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. vi-xii. Burrough, Bryan. “Workplace Fiction That’s True to Life.” New York Times, 17 April 2011, BU5. Clare, Ralph. “The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.” Studies in the Novel 44.4 (2012): 428-46. Cohen, Elizabeth. The Glitch. New York: Doubleday, 2018. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. den Dulk, Allard. “Boredom, Irony, and Anxiety: Wallace and the Kierkegaardian View of the Self.” David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing.” Ed. Marshall Boswell. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 43-60. DeWitt, Helen. Lightning Rods. New York: New Directions, 2011. Dobson, Joanne. “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature.” American Literature 69.2 (1997): 263-88. Dorson, James. “Cormac McCarthy and the Genre Turn in Contemporary Literary Fiction.” European Journal of American Studies: Cormac <?page no="81"?> Sixta Quassdorf 82 McCarthy Between Worlds 12.3 (2017). https: / / journals.openedition. org/ ejas/ 12291#entries. Accessed 30 May 2019. Egan, Elisabeth. A Window Opens. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. Eggers, Dave. The Circle. London and New York: Knopf, 2013. Ferris, Joshua. Then We Came to the End. London and New York: Penguin Books, 2007. Flanders, Judith. “Why don’t novels ‘do’ work? ” The Guardian, 30 March 2009. https: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ booksblog/ 2009/ mar/ 30/ work-novels-fiction-flanders. Accessed 9 October 2018. Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Wotton-under-Edge: Clarendon Press, 1987. Frow, John. Genre. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Giles, Paul. “Sentimental Posthumanism: David Foster Wallace.” Twentieth Century Literature 53.3 (2007): 327-44. Goodman, Robert. “Ling Ma Severance.” The Newtown Review of Books, 25 October 2018. https: / / newtownreviewofbooks.com.au/ ling-maseverance-reviewed-by-robert-goodman/ . Accessed 13 November 2018. Heller, Joseph. Something Happened. London and New York: Knopf, 1974. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1944. New York: Verso Classics, 2010. Horkheimer, Max. Eclipse of Reason. 1947. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Kiesling, Lydia. “The Office Politics of Workplace Fiction by Women.” New Yorker, 27 July 2016. www.newyorker.com/ books/ pageturner/ the-office-politics-of-workplace-fiction-by-women. Accessed 12 November 2018. Lanchester, John. “When fiction breaks down.” The Telegraph, 29 January 2010. https: / / www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/ books/ 7093699/ Whenfiction-breaks-down.html. Accessed 12 November 2018. Lanzendörfer, Tim. Introduction to The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel. Ed. Tim Lanzendörfer. New York: Lexington Books, 2017. 1- 15. Lindgren, Michael. “The office: Three new books offer a glimpse at the contemporary workplace.” Washington Post, 10 September 2014, C04. Lindner, Elsbeth. “Review of Severance by Ling Ma.” Bookoxygen, 2018. http: / / bookoxygen.com/ ? p=7973. Accessed 29 October 2018. Lipsyte, Sam. The Ask. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Ma, Ling. Severance. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon, 1964. <?page no="82"?> Routine and Agency in Office Fiction 83 Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener. A Story of Wall Street.” 1853. Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Israel Potter. His Fifty Years of Exile, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man. His Masquerade, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Ed. Harrison Hayford. New York: The Library of America, 1984. 635-72. Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151-67. Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. 1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Mulhall, Anne. “Resistance and Refusal in the New Literature of the Office: Reading Lydie Salvayre’s La Vie commune and Delphine de Vigan’s Les Heures souterraines.” Conference Paper at Work Stories: Documenting, Narrating and Representing the French Workplace, 15 and 16 April 2016. Institute of Modern Languages Research, Senate House, University of London. http: / / sas-space.sas.ac.uk/ 6418/ . Accessed 31 October 2018. Norman, Matthew. Domestic Violets. London and New York: Harper Perennial, 2011. Park, Ed. Personal Days. London and New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008. Pham, Larissa. “The Business of Survival - Ling Ma’s Disaster Fiction.” The Nation, 2 October 2018. https: / / www.thenation.com/ article/ the-business-of-survival/ . Accessed 29 October 2018. Philipps, Helen. The Beautiful Bureaucrat. New York: Henry Holt, 2015. Rowland, Amy. The Transcriptionist. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2014. Saval, Nikil. “Bartlebys All! ” Dissent 61.4 (2014): 22-26. ---. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. New York: Doubleday, 2014. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. “Literary Genres and Textual Genericity.” The Future of Literary Theory. Ed. Ralph Cohen. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. 167-87. Schaub, Michael. “In ‘Severance,’ The World Ends Not With A Bang, But A Memo.” National Public Radio, 19 August 2018. https: / / www.npr.org/ 2018/ 08/ 19/ 639251266/ in-severance-the-worldends-not-with-a-bang-but-a-memo. Accessed 29 October 2018. Sewell, William H. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98.1 (1992): 1-29. Shapiro, Ari. “In Satirical ‘Severance,’ A Stricken Country Works Itself To Death.” National Public Radio, 10 August 2018. https: / / www.npr.org/ templates/ transcript/ transcript.php? storyId= 637473748. Accessed 12 November 2018. <?page no="83"?> Sixta Quassdorf 84 Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Wallace, David Foster. The Pale King. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011. Weber, Max. Essays in Sociology. 1925. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946. Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. New York: Doubleday, 2011. Whyte, William H. The Organization Man. 1956. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Williams, Jeffrey J. “The Rise of the Academic Novel.” American Literary History 24.3 (2012): 561-89. Wouters, Conley. “‘What Am I, a Machine? ’: Humans, Information, and Matters of Record in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.” Studies in the Novel 44.4 (2012): 447-63. Yen, Anna. Sophia of Silicon Valley. New York: William Morrow, 2018. <?page no="84"?> “The Modality in Which Class is ‘Lived’”: Literalizing Race and Class in The Expanse Bryan Banker Science fiction often centers on questions of identity and how different identities relate to one another in some future society. In the Syfy network’s acclaimed space drama, The Expanse, the identity forms of race and class are not singular constructs, but are inscribed into one another. The television series describes a universe hundreds of years from now, where humans have colonized much of the solar system. Earth and Mars are competing superpowers that maintain a tense alliance to continue to manage the resources and people, known as “Belters,” of the Asteroid Belt. The Belters have lived and worked in deep space for many generations in hostile conditions that have dramatically altered their anatomy. In its depiction of the Belters, The Expanse makes literal what contemporary theories of identity treat abstractly; namely, that social relations of race and class cannot be divided, but are inseparable, and must be theorized as such. Analyzing the vivid portrayal of the lived experiences of Belters’ race and class relations under advanced capitalism in The Expanse offers lucid perspectives on identity and capital in the contemporary moment. Keywords: Science fiction, The Expanse, Marxism, race and class identity, social relations under capitalism The Genres of Genre: Form, Formats, and Cultural Formations. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 38. Ed. Cécile Heim, Boris Vejdovsky and Benjamin Pickford. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 85-103. <?page no="85"?> Bryan Banker 86 The constitution of this fraction as a class, and the class relations which ascribe it, function as race relations. Race is thus, also, the modality in which class is “lived,” the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and “fought through.” - Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis We do not want to live under anyone’s boot, Fred Johnson [. . .] Even a friendly one, afraid that if we disobey, we will have our air cut off, our water rationed, be spaced, or be herded into chambers to be used like animals. This is the way it has been until now. - Anderson Dawes (The Expanse) Race and Class in Science Fiction Adilifu Nama writes that science fiction is the “most imaginative genre because within its confines there are no confines” (2). Science fiction enables and enacts a multiplicity of creative systems within its narratological and visual structures. Producers and consumers of science fiction have fashioned and modeled the genre to investigate how people “see” and “think” about their contemporary and historical moment. The genre provides a critical lens through which to meditate upon contemporary society and politics, because much of science fiction builds upon the rich tableau of what Nama calls the “cultural urges, political yearnings and ideological dispositions” of American culture (3). Despite the appearance of otherworldly or distant temporal settings in science fiction, especially American science fiction, the genre is very much linked to the real political changes, dominant social discourses, and cultural practices at work in American society (96). As Sean Redmond contends, “if you want to know what really aches a culture at any given time don’t go to its art cinema, or its gritty social realist texts, but go to its science fiction” (x). This essay focuses on the ways that science fiction tackles the “aches” of racial and class identity in a hypothetical future society. The Syfy network’s acclaimed space drama, The Expanse, depicts a universe hundreds of years from now, when humans have colonized much of the solar system. Earth and Mars are competing superpowers that maintain a tense alliance in order to continue to subjugate the resources and people, known as “Belters,” of the Asteroid Belt. Earth and Martian capital controls and manages both productive property and wage labor throughout the Belt. As Belters do not command nor possess their own means of production or labor, Earth and Martian capital utterly dominates the Belters’ material lives. Belters have lived and worked in deep <?page no="86"?> Race and Class in The Expanse 87 space for many generations in conditions that have dramatically altered their anatomy. 1 In science fiction, bodily difference is often implicitly racial. Different physical appearances have historically been coded racially, as racial justice scholar Ian F. Haney-López notes, because bodily difference marks the ways in which people of color have been treated over time (3). According to historians Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields, bodily differences are “imagined” and presented historically and culturally “to the mind and imagination as a vivid truth” (24) - the “truth” of race. Just as perceived bodily features such as hair and skin complexion imply racial difference in everyday social reality, those same fabricated meanings of body dissimilarity are found in science fiction’s “spectacles of alien difference” (Nama 71). Science-fiction critic Ed Guerrero argues that science fiction enables readers to defamiliarize and discuss the social construction and representation of race, and how it interacts with other social identities (56). He writes that social identities often work themselves out in “many symbolic, cinematic forms of expression,” but in particular, “in the abundant racialized metaphors and allegories of the fantasy, sci-fi, and horror genres” (56). Guerrero explains that the practice of “seeing” the social construction of identities plays out in science fiction in the “genre’s dependence on difference or otherness in the form of the monster” (56). With the “vast technological possibilities of imagining and rendering of all kinds of simulacra for aliens, monsters, mutant outcasts,” science fiction can explore social identity formation in “fantastic narrative horizons and story worlds” (56, 57). While there is a rich tradition of critical race studies in science-fiction criticism, this essay focuses on race and class and attempts to remedy a lack of attention to the amalgamation of race and class in science fiction. In doing so, this essay builds on Nama’s exceptional reading of the 1960 film The Time Machine, adapted from H. G. Wells’s novel. The film depicts a scientist who creates a time machine that transports him to the distant future, where he uncovers a world where two races exist: the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi are white, healthy, and leisurely; the Morlocks, however, have blue skin, deformed facial features, and use technology. These bodily differences are byproducts of working underground (Nama 16). Nama writes that while the film “is commonly regarded as a reflection of cold war fears of nuclear annihilation” (15), it also “articulates multiple anxieties surrounding the redistribution of 1 While The Expanse spans three seasons, with a fourth season slated for 2019, the early episodes of the first season are principally examined as they establish important representative themes found throughout the series. <?page no="87"?> Bryan Banker 88 power and privilege that the civil rights movement represented, the demise of the separate and unequal world of Jim Crow racial segregation” (16). But if the Morlocks are “symbolically black” (16), the racial coding in the film suggests that the Morlocks are differentiated by bodily appearance and by their subservient class position. The Time Machine provides a direct parallel to the coding of bodily difference, race, and class in The Expanse because the Morlocks are differentiated from humans not only in allegorically racial terms - they have different skin colors and body types - but also in class terms, as the Morlocks are manual laborers and use technology. While the Morlocks’ underground work has caused them to (d)evolve into a distinct working-class “race,” the Belters’ work in deep space has racialized and classed their bodily differences. Marxist Theory and The Expanse In its depiction of the Belters and their relationship with Earth and Martian capital, The Expanse attempts to portray the interconnections of race and class under advanced capitalism. Marxist thought, while perhaps polemical in its “seeing” and “thinking” about race, is nevertheless a useful apparatus for investigating the intricacies and connections of race, class, and capitalism, and therefore provides clarity to unpack what is showcased in the television series. Marxism has a complicated relationship to race. Some thinkers argue that capitalism functions apart from race, that only “for historical reasons” does race happen to be a mechanism of class reproduction (Wood 276). Others see race as a mystification of class (Reed), while yet others think the two are always intertwined (Roediger and Esch). 2 Recently, Marxist thinkers have revisited the race and class debate in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, the role of the white working class in the electoral victory of Donald Trump, and the resurgence of socialist politics around Senator Bernie Sanders. Often at the heart of the discussion about race and class within contemporary Marxist thought is what kinds of social relations should be foregrounded in tackling inequality. Some thinkers attempt to distinguish race from class, “creating a dichotomy between them such that there’s an either/ or” (Backer). Others, however, argue that there is a “fundamental social ex- 2 Richard Seymour helpfully maps out the ongoing debates within Marxism (especially regarding Roediger and Wood) on the relationship between class, race, and capitalism (Seymour). <?page no="88"?> Race and Class in The Expanse 89 perience of the unity of race and class” (Clover and Singh) that cannot be ignored. The idea of unity recalls Michael Lebowitz’s claim that capital always produces “workers who are separated” (Beyond Capital 157). Workers are separated by accumulation and competition, both of which, Charles Post adds, create race and class inequalities “within the working class” (“Marxism and the Race Problem”). Post writes that “race and class are co-constituted under capitalism” and that the division of social relations amongst workers is “a necessary outcome of capitalist competition” (“Comments”). In other words, capital inspires divisions amongst social identities in order to foster a kind of competition amongst laborers that will increase the accumulation of surplus value. Similarly, in The Production of Difference, David R. Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch explicate how capitalists have historically differentiated workers racially, in order to enhance capital’s ability to raise the rate of exploitation (3-5). In his Class, Race and Marxism, Roediger asserts that “since capital produces difference in its own interests,” capitalist management has “both exploited and reproduced racial division as part of processes of expansion, production, and accumulation” (32). Representations of race and class in The Expanse resonate with these positions. The Expanse portrays race and class relations as a combined product of capitalist relations. Racial and class identities are not singular constructs, but are inscribed into one another. In line with Lebowitz’s assertion that “capital’s deployment of racism” (among other discriminatory practices) fosters divisions and competition among workers to increase capitalist accumulation (“The Politics of Assumption” 39), The Expanse portrays Earth and Martian capitalist power bearing down upon the Belters in order to dominate the extraction of both resources in the Asteroid Belt as well as to command the surplus labor of the Belters who perform the labor. Lebowitz contends that “capital must divide and separate workers as its necessary condition of existence” (39). This separation not only fosters competition amongst workers, thus granting capitalists value from that competition, but separation also inhibits worker solidarity movements to challenge capitalist social and economic power (46). The television series makes this overarching narrative clear in showcasing how Earth and Martian capitalist power often undercuts Belter worker solidarity and autonomy movements. Post, in particular, is useful in the discussion regarding race and class under capitalism, as his thinking also frames The Expanse’s portrayal of the same social relations. What viewers see in The Expanse relates not only to Post’s arguments that “capitalist production necessarily produces inequalities,” or the “fun- <?page no="89"?> Bryan Banker 90 damental basis for the production and reproduction of racism in the working class under capitalism” (Souvlis et. al.), but also that capital “produce[s] systematic racial disparities among workers” (Post, “Marxism and the Race Problem”). Essentially, race is an “ideological construction of the way that people organize their lived experiences” (Souvlis et. al.; emphasis added). Ultimately, The Expanse makes literal what contemporary theories of identity treat abstractly; namely, that social relations of race and class are inseparable and indivisible. Belter workers are separated and exploited not only due to their class position, but also along racial lines that the show represents as bodily and linguistic differences. Not only does The Expanse underscore what Marxist theorists emphasize in the capitalist process of differentiation - Earth and Martian capital owns the working and living conditions in deep space, which in turn assist in an anatomical and linguistic racialization process - but the series also complements theory with the aesthetic representations of how racialized and classed workers live, self-identify, and self-organize. In the show, science fiction works in tandem with theory. Whereas theory works through the abstraction of social relations, unpacking and demystifying everyday social life through concepts and categories, science fiction can vividly communicate the experience of those social categories - the “modality” in which they are “lived,” as Stuart Hall and his coauthors put it (347). Theory needs aesthetics to connect to experience and make abstract concepts more coherent and relatable, while aesthetics needs theory to expand the frame of reference and show the larger significance of everyday social life. Analyzing the aesthetic communication of lived experiences in The Expanse, therefore, offers perspectives that correlate the way theorists unpack and interpret the articulation of race and class in social and political consciousness. Produced by the science-fiction writer Naren Shankar, The Expanse was developed by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby from the series of novels written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (who also serve as writers and producers for the television show) under the pen name James S. A. Corey. Although the timeline takes place 200 years in the future, the show’s creators depict science and technology as what Shankar calls a “plausible reality” (qtd in Karlin). Shankar designed the show to “use the reality of space, which tends not to be done in most science fiction” (Karlin), and to ground technical and scientific elements in a conceivable reality. The show’s reality is informed by the working-class perspectives of characters who are shown working, in space, with plausible technology. The show has a clear working-class or “blue-collar” <?page no="90"?> Race and Class in The Expanse 91 concentration, as Shankar notes: “we’re not building a show around gadgets. It’s a blue-collar version of space; it’s just people doing a job out there. The technology is in the world, people use it, but they don’t sit around talking about it” (qtd in Karlin). Unlike more fantastic science fiction examples, The Expanse projects existing science and technology into the future, making humantechnology interfaces seem second nature to the characters in the show. Much of the technology revolves around space travel and industrial mining. The narrative of the series similarly follows a proletarian subjectivity as it traces a Belter police detective named Josephus Miller (Thomas Jane), who lives and works on one of the stations in the Belt. The detective is assigned to find an important young woman who has gone missing. Miller’s story intertwines with that of a working-class spacecraft captain, Jim Holden (Steven Strait), an Earther who, along with his mixed Earther/ Martian/ Belter crew, works in and around the Belt. Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo), a major political player on Earth, attempts to broker an alliance with Mars amidst the rising tensions regarding Earth and Martian interests in the Belt. The peace amongst Earthers and Martians (those who make up the Martian colony) is soon threatened by a series of political incidents involving a radical Belter political group, the Outer Planets Alliance (OPA), formed to bring the people of the Belt together to further their socioeconomic and political interests. Earther, Martian, and Belter ventures are soon intertwined in a vast conspiracy over the control of a powerful but seemingly unstable “proto-molecule” that threatens humanity. Lived Experiences of a Racialized and Classed Other Throughout the series, Belters appear almost alien-like, with extraordinary towering and slender figures that are a consequence of living in low-gravity environments in and around the Belt. The harsh conditions of interplanetary life cause poor musculature development and inelastic bones, as well as elongation of the spine, all of which render Belters tall, thin, and frail. Coupled with the effects of microgravity, radiation poison and cancer are another ever-present threat to Belters. As these physical markers indicate, The Expanse stresses from its opening episode how capital differentiates and separates Belters from the rest of humanity. This first episode underscores Belter segregation, as the viewer is treated to a planetary view, with spaceships large and small flying around and performing various industrial tasks. Much of the work is <?page no="91"?> Bryan Banker 92 centered on mining and extracting ice from a resource-rich asteroid called Ceres. The viewer’s perspective zooms in past these ships, towards the gray asteroid where much of the work is being done. As the scene progresses, with the viewer’s gaze continuing to drive towards the asteroid, a heavily accented voice gives a powerful political speech. The first spoken dialogue of The Expanse is the voice of the subjugated Belt. The Belter speech provides the history of Ceres, where generations of Belters have “toiled and suffered,” working for Earth and Mars (“Dulcinea”). Belters have mined the asteroid, worked the shipping docks, and performed other necessary jobs throughout the station to keep Ceres livable. The voice decries the amount of wealth that has been amassed by Earth and Mars as they strip the ice from the asteroid. The speech is overlaid with images of the levels in Ceres station where people live and work above and on the asteroid. The camera descends from the labor in Ceres’ atmosphere, down through underground levels of sparsely populated but serene clean spaces where, we learn, corporate elites manage their interests, and finally into the depths of the asteroid, landing upon familiar science fiction scenes. The underground spaces are filled with unclean air, and are home to the Belter working class. The scene ends in this location, with crowds of people gathered to hear the Belter deliver his speech as he towers above the throng. The Belter states that “the immense wealth” gained from Ceres - wealth that the viewer has just seen generated by the proletarian labor in space and appropriated in the clean corporatized spaces below - “was never meant for us” (“Dulcinea”). He describes the terrible living and working conditions on Ceres and infers the exacting environmental realities of living in climatized asteroid stations. The speaker invokes the word “slave” in characterizing how Earth and Mars “see” Belter “difference,” as Earth and Mars have separated Belters from the rest of humanity, forcing these conditions upon them. The Belter finishes his speech by declaring, “to them, we [sic] not even human any more” (“Dulcinea”). The Belter then turns to Detective Miller, who is from Ceres, and asks him the historically loaded question of which “side” is he on: “Hey you, badge, [. . .] when the blood is on the wall [denoting a potential Belter uprising], sasa que 3 which side you’re on? (“Dulcinea”). This question introduces the viewer to Miller, a central character, through the lens of racial and class difference as it remains uncertain whether he is a real Belter or “passing” as an Earther. Miller replies to the inquiry that he does indeed know what side he will be on and is 3 “Do you know” (Farmer) in the Belters’ invented language, on which see infra. <?page no="92"?> Race and Class in The Expanse 93 promptly called “traitor” by the Belter, who mimics putting on a fedora (“Dulcinea”). This scene is noteworthy as it introduces the viewer to the differentiation processes that divide Belters. When Miller is accused of passing as an Earther, the episode showcases how Belters are considered something else.” Miller’s passing is elaborated two scenes later, when he and his Earther partner Dimitri Havelock (Jay Hernandez) walk through Ceres. When Havelock attempts a Belter hand gesture, Miller tells him that he will “never pass for a Belter. They’ll look at you and will always see Earth.” To which Havelock, noting Miller’s clothes and hat, responds that this is “coming from a guy dressed like an Earther” (“Dulcinea”). The dissimilarities between Belters and Earthers develop in the following scene in a bar, where the two detectives point out the ways in which Belters are physically “different” from Earthers. Havelock, new to Ceres, asks Miller to identify distinguishing Belter traits as they scan the other patrons. Miller begins by singling out one extremely thin Belter, towards the back of the bar, who is visibly shaking: “See that piss-poor rock hopper? ” - that is, someone who works out in space, amongst the “rock” asteroids - “he’s trying to cover it up with that baggy flight suit - skin’s hanging off his bones, you get that red eyes, the shakes, when your body rejects the growth hormones, the tremors are from growing up in low-G [low gravity], the muscles don’t develop right” (“Dulcinea”). Again, we are treated to the idea of passing, or “covering” up the fact that Belters live under strenuous living and working conditions that transform their bodies in racially and class-specific ways. Havelock then points to another unusually tall and thin Belter man walking by displaying an OPA badge: “I guess that’s [also] from generations in low-G? ” Miller responds, “one day, they say every Belter will look just like that” (“Dulcinea”). It is important here to note the futurity of the Belters. At some point, they will no longer be physically recognizable as human. Again, The Expanse demonstratively marks the Belters’ physical distance from the rest of humanity, the process by which this distance develops, and the material conditions of that distancing which stem from the fact that they are forced to work and live in deep space. As Miller and his partner continue to scan the bar, looking at other Belter attributes and characteristics, Havelock, knowing his partner is a Belter, asks what his Belter “tell” is. The tall and thin Belter doubles back to answer the partner’s question with a degree of menace: “let me help you with that [. . .] this one” - here the Belter pulls back Miller’s shirt collar - “has spurs at the top of his spine where the bones didn’t fuse right. He probably got that cheap bone-density juice, as a child, <?page no="93"?> Bryan Banker 94 probably a ward of the [Ceres] station” (“Dulcinea”). The Belter then makes the point that no matter how hard Miller may try to “disguise” himself, “he’s just like me.” Miller, taking offense, arrests the Belter, saying, “I will never be like you, Longbone.” Miller’s use of the slur “Longbone” centers on Belters’ tall and lanky appearance. This bar scene is essential. Not only does it help establish the world of The Expanse; it also signals a number of ways in which Belters are othered as less than human. The scene identifies modes in which Belters attempt to control the muscular degeneration from living and working in deep space by taking hormones or treating space-induced osteoporosis with “bonedensity juice,” as the Belters describe it. Belters develop inhuman bodies from physical toil in space and thus must take hormones to cope with the demands of gravity. Since bodily difference has often been coded racially, what is telling here is how anatomical differences intertwine “race” and class - both race and class are inscribed into the Belters’ status as exploited proletarian labor. In this aesthetic gesture, the television series forces viewers to think about these social relations as amalgamated. Moreover, The Expanse indicates how Belter bodies reject growth hormones needed to combat their changing anatomy through Miller’s subtle comment that the hormones that are available are of a poor quality, a reference to the Belters being lower and working-class subjects. The Belter working-class position is additionally shown when the Belter gestures to Miller’s upbringing, his being an orphan on Ceres, and thus also susceptible to poor health conditions. In fact, being an orphan (although never fully addressed, but clearly hinted at through the first season) provides an apt metaphor here: Belters, far away from Earth, are orphaned by capital. Capitalist labor demands that Belters work in and around the Belt, apart from the rest of humanity. This estrangement fittingly morphs their bodies into increasingly unrecognizable forms. Capital, the Body, and Torture Capitalist power, as a material process of inequality, transposes a set of racial and class differences upon Belter workers to organize and manage Belters into submissive, dehumanized worker categories. The Expanse presents this material process in three major examples. First, in the torture of a Belter in the first episode, the series underscores how capital inflicts racial and class oppression upon Belters’ bodies. Second, The Expanse portrays Belters as immediate and intimate, as well as unwilling, <?page no="94"?> Race and Class in The Expanse 95 participants of deindustrialization, as capital forces Belters to the margins of the galaxy for work. Lastly, as Belters are those who live and perform industrial labor in an otherwise deindustrialized solar system, their human form is physically altered, creating a new, seemingly dehumanized race and class status. The Expanse clearly differentiates between two kinds of humans from the outset: the “Inners” (those from the inner solar system, namely Earth and Mars) and the Belters. In the first episode of the series, Avasarala, the Earther leader, interrogates and tortures a Belter by exacting punishment on the Belter’s racialized and classed body (“Dulcinea”). The scene underscores how Belters are othered and excluded from social normality. As the scene unfolds, Belter identity via his anatomical differentiation emerges as a racialized second-class entity. The Belter is considered a political radical, bent on Belter independence, and The Expanse thus inscribes “difference” with “identity.” Avasarala is able to torture the Belter on Earth, as he, in her eyes, is no longer human. Torture is illegal on Earth, a fact that viewers learn in the second episode, as a colleague reminds Avasarala of the “anti-gravity torture” legislation (“The Big Empty”). Yet, in the first episode, the torture scene takes place at a “black site,” thus illustrating that Avasarala does not consider a Belter to possess the same Earther (i.e., human) rights. The torture is simple: Earth’s gravity crushes the Belter’s body. The perceived raced and classed anatomical differences, stemming from living in deep space, exemplify what Earthers conceive as unnatural. Avasarala stands close to her captive, knowing he is unable to move and threatens that Earthers will do whatever it takes to get to the truth of his OPA political agenda. She mocks the fact that he is too weak to exist on Earth: “I’m sorry the gravity of a real planet hurts. It is appropriate. The Earth that is now crushing your weak Belter lungs and your fragile Belter bones” (“Dulcinea”). The theme is continued in the following episode, where the interrogation has changed to a less severe surrounding. Here, the Belter prisoner, now housed in a water tank to better deal with Earth’s gravity, redirects Avasarala’s Earther gaze, proving the point that he is being seen as other: “you talk to me through a piece of glass, see my body which can no longer survive on the same planet that bore my great grandmother” (“The Big Empty”). Though veiled by Avasarala’s interrogation, the scene underscores the way in which differentiation and domination are inscribed and inflicted directly upon the Belter’s racialized and classed body. <?page no="95"?> Bryan Banker 96 Deindustrialization and Dehumanization The Expanse portrays the deindustrialization 4 of earth as a reorganization of industry away from Earth and Mars - and their normative social relations - to the Belt. The viewers see deindustrialization up close and personal, as the Belters, through their embodied identity, their bodies, are depicted as the living results of those who actually live through deindustrialization. In The Expanse, deindustrialization of substantial industrial interests is moved away from Earth, out to the margins of the galaxy. Traditionally, science fiction represents the processes of deindustrialization as happening elsewhere, away from the main characters and plot. The quintessential example of this removal of industry from view is the film Blade Runner (1982), where synthetic humans labor in faraway places. The Expanse, however, does not disguise or hide forms of outsourced labor resulting from deindustrialization. Instead, it tracks these forms across the galaxy by illustrating how performing outsourced labor is a constitutive part of Belter identity. Thus, the series showcases the lived experiences of people under conditions of deindustrialization that the genre often renders “invisible” (Wells 75). What is made clear in The Expanse, then, is the impact of deindustrialization upon human life and social relations. The series depicts deindustrialization as a process with distinct industrialist effects inasmuch as it causes a generational disintegration of the Belter human form. The dissolution of Belter humanity, resulting from the interaction of deep space and human anatomy, underscores what Isiah Lavender III calls “posthuman technicities” (186). These seemingly “posthuman” positions, visible in The Expanse, indeed follow a long science-fiction tradition of othering the body - especially that of the deindustrial worker. 5 But the Belter posthuman figures that emerge in the television series do not represent what Brian Carr terms a “celebratory rendering of the ‘post’-human”; rather, they resonate with what he terms a “figure of the dehumanized” (120; emphasis mine). Carr clarifies that “obsession with the ‘post’ of the human [. . .] evacuates any kind of inquiry into the historicity of how the human is categorically accessed, who enters its circuits of symbolization and desire, and who is barred from it” (120). Ac- 4 The term “deindustrialization” is used here instead of “postindustrialization,” to indicate the reduction or the offshoring of heavy industry from the core to the periphery, as is the case in The Expanse. “Postindustrialization” denotes an economy that no longer relies on heavy industry, which is clearly not true of Earth in The Expanse. 5 I would like to thank J. Jesse Ramírez for bringing this tradition, stretching back to H. G. Wells, to my attention. See Ramírez. <?page no="96"?> Race and Class in The Expanse 97 cordingly, Carr argues that thinking in somewhat positive posthuman terminology distracts from the very figures that are most likely to be removed from humanity. Thus, this essay conceptualizes the Belters as de-, not post-, human because they are not a positive development of humanity but a degraded one. Abused by capitalist social relations, they are pushed and altered into new “other” categories. At no point in the series does being altered by deep space provide Belters with any prized qualities. Rather, Earthers and Martians consider Belters dehuman, a privation and separation from the human. Belter Resistance through Language, Tattoos, and Political Organization Belters are not only differentiated by their anatomical idiosyncracies; race and class under Earther and Martian capitalist power also segregate Belters. While Belters did not choose the way in which they are categorized, they still recuperate those ascriptive differences as a means of selforganization. Through the manner in which Belters communicate, through language and their use of tattooing, they place value on what separates them from Earthers and Martians. Belters not only look different, but sound different as well. Belters speak in a creolized patois, a constructed language “of the oppressed working class [. . .] the lingua franca for the universe’s most dispossessed peoples” (Dreyfuss). Developed by linguist Nick Farmer, the Belter language functions as a dialect, yet producers of the series looked to Farmer to create a fully embodied language that might intertwine Belter physicality with linguistics. 6 Language, then, is another form of racializing and classing a group with an implicit historical precedent. As a language spoken by workers at the margins of space, Belter language mirrors the historical creoles of those who were also pushed to the margins of colonial empires, and is thus patterned after Haitian Creole (Dreyfuss). Like most creoles, the Belter language is also based on a set natal language but influenced and encompassed by others. Farmer believed Haitian Creole was “the best correlate on Earth because it developed after people from all over the world arrived on the island - in many cases by force” (Dreyfuss). The relation to the Haitian example is useful. Farmer’s Belter language is based on the history of slavery as an 6 While only the Belter verbal language is discussed here, throughout the series Belters also are seen using stylized hand gestures and arm movements to communicate. These gestures are replicated from the type of communication they would need while working in space without communication devices. <?page no="97"?> Bryan Banker 98 important element in the development of Haitian Creole, which was created by enslaved workers. Although not enslaved, Belters are, nonetheless, exploited subjects and view themselves as wage slaves to capital. As the Belter in the first episode explains: “we Belters toil and suffer, without hope and without end, and for what? We will always be slaves” (“Dulcinea”). Belters, similar to the enslaved, transported population of Haiti, descend from people who were brought to work the Belt for capitalists on Earth and Mars. Similar to Belter language, self-identification is also made visible by Belter body art. The distinct black markings on temples, foreheads, necks, and forearms function as low-grade body modification. Tattoos are a symbol of Belter racial and class positions. Through tattooing, Belters attempt to transform the scarring where their cheap spacesuits and uniforms have insufficiently protected the body. The older and often more prominent Belter political figures in the series, such as Anderson Dawes (Jared Harris) and Klaes Ashford (David Straithairn), exhibit contact burns on their necks, where the helmet seals to the spacesuit. As the burns are considered rites of passage, the product of hard labor performed with poor materials, these leaders proudly display their scars for any would-be political challenger. Younger generations, however, like the protagonist Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper) - a Belter engineer on Holden’s work crew - use tattoos to cover and modify their scars. While tattoos in The Expanse, as in reality, are examples of individual aesthetics, much of the larger geometric shaped tattoos in the series are used to connect the scars from their exploited labor. In this way, then, the younger, more politically radical Belters reframe their scars and tattoos into a form of political expression, to employ the OPA’s project of self-identity and self-determination against capitalist Earther and Martian power. Belter tattoos are also messages which stress attempts by Belters to organize politically. The political tattoo of the OPA, an unfinished circle with an “A” in the center, receives the most attention in the series. Those who display the OPA tattoo are deemed the most politically radical of the Belters. The tattoo not only confirms one’s affiliation, but also enables political organization. In a brief exchange with a Belter worker who openly exhibits his OPA tattoo, Miller asks, “your boss let you wear your colors like that? ” The worker replies, “my boss has one just like it” (“Dulcinea”). OPA leaders, like Dawes, also use unifying rhetoric to consolidate Belter workers and those who are sympathetic to Belter causes under a banner of political autonomy for the Belt: “I have a million brothers and sisters” who live in the Belt with shared experiences and interests <?page no="98"?> Race and Class in The Expanse 99 (“Rock Bottom”). The OPA centers their political ideology on the lived experiences of being racialized and classed as “second-class citizens” compared to the Inners who own the means of production in the Belt. Thus, Belters use tattoos to connect their racialized and segregated status with others who share similar political ideologies. This reconfiguration of Belter social relations is then wielded as a weapon against Earther and Martian capitalist domination. Lessons from The Expanse It is in the aesthetic representation of Belter lived experiences of being racialized and classed that The Expanse articulates a perspective that parallels the way scholars and theorists comprehend social relations under capitalism. The representation of the Belters’ racialized-classed relation, by inscribing race upon class relations, and vice versa, makes literal how social relations are interlaced under Earther and Martian capitalist domination. This literalization answers Karl Marx’s warning in his “Speech on the Question of Free Trade” (1848) that those who “cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another” will be even less prepared “to understand how in the same country one class can enrich itself at the expense of another” (464-65). Marx is describing the systematic exploitation of Ireland and Irish workers by the British Empire (Losurdo 31-37; Lebowitz, Beyond Capital 159), but The Expanse matches Marx’s descriptions of Irish subjugation in that, similar to the Irish proletariat, the Belters are subject to “enslavement” and are unable to secure their “economic and social emancipation” (Losurdo 32) from Earth and Mars. As Earther and Martian capital institutes a wage-slave existence upon the Belt “without disguise” (Marx, “The Poverty of Philosophy” 168), Belters use a raced and classed relation to struggle against “the economic relations which constitute the material foundation” of their subjugation (Marx, “Wage Labor and Capital” 197). By literalizing and integrating race and class relations, this series delivers concrete illustrations for their inseparability. Not only do the Belters acknowledge what capitalist power structures have done to separate and suppress them, but also they redirect the dissimilarity as a means to organize and collectively challenge capitalist inequality. As Post makes clear, “only when workers are able to organize themselves collectively” - and here we may add universally - “against capital and the state do they have the potential to develop radical, revolutionary class-consciousness” (Souvlis et. al.). In turn, depictions of uniting race <?page no="99"?> Bryan Banker 100 and class relations against capital in The Expanse potentially offer prototypes of defiance and challenge to capitalism on-screen and, in the process, signal “that the same could and needed to be done off-screen” (Nama 97). <?page no="100"?> Race and Class in The Expanse 101 References Backer, David. “Race and Class Reductionism Today.” Verso Books, October 8, 2018. https: / / www.versobooks.com/ blogs/ 4068-race-andclass-reductionism-today. Accessed 8 January 2019. “The Big Empty,” The Expanse, Syfy. 15 December 2015. Dir. Terry McDonough, writ. Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby. Carr, Brian. “At the Thresholds of the ‘Human’: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Replication of Imperial Memory.” Cultural Critique 39 (spring 1998): 119-50. Clover, Joshua and Nikhil Pal Singh. “The Blindspot Revisited.” Verso Books, 12 October 2018. https: / / www.versobooks.com/ blogs/ 4079the-blindspot-revisited. Accessed 8 January 2019. Dreyfuss, Emily. “That Cool Dialect on The Expanse Mashes Up 6 Languages.” Wired, 4 May 2017. https: / / www.wired.com/ 2017/ 04/ the-expanse-belter-language/ . Accessed 20 October 2018. “Dulcinea,” The Expanse, Syfy. 23 November 2015. Dir. Terry McDonough, writ. Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby. Farmer, Nick (@Nfarmerlinguist). “sasa is to know a fact, or know how to do something, keng is to know a person, or be acquainted with something.” 21 January 2016, 18: 10. Tweet. Fields, Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. London: Verso, 2014. Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Hall, Stuart et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan Press, 1978. Haney-López, Ian F. “The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice.” The Harvard Civil Rights- Civil Liberties Law Review 29 (1994): 1-62. Karlin, Susan. “How Showrunner Naren Shankar Is Engineering ‘The Expanse.’” Fast Company, 12 December 2015. https: / / www.fastcompany. com/ 3054812/ how-showrunner-naren-shankar-is-engineering-theexpanse. Accessed 20 October 2018. Lavender, Isiah, III. Race in American Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Lebowitz, Michael. Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class. 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ---. “The Politics of Assumption, the Assumption of Politics.” Historical Materialism 14.2 (2006): 29-47. <?page no="101"?> Bryan Banker 102 Losurdo, Domenico. Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Marx, Karl. “The Poverty of Philosophy. Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon.” 1847. Marx & Engels Collected Works. Vol. 6. Ed. and trans. Jack Cohen et al. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976. 105-212.. ---. “Speech on the Question of Free Trade Delivered to the Democratic Association of Brussels at Its Public Meeting of January 9, 1848.” Marx & Engels Collected Works. Vol. 6. Ed. and trans. Jack Cohen et al. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976. 450-65 ---. “Wage Labor and Capital.” 1849. Marx & Engels Collected Works. Vol. 9. Ed. and trans. Jack Cohen et al. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977. 197-228. Nama, Adilifu. Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Post, Charles. “Comments on Roediger’s Class, Race, and Marxism.” Salvage, 25 October 2017. http: / / salvage.zone/ online-exclusive/ comments-on-roedigers-class-race-and-marxism/ . Accessed 10 December 2018. ---. “Marxism and the Race Problem.” Marxist Sociology Blog, 2 January 2019. https: / / marxistsociology.org/ 2019/ 01/ marxism-and-the-raceproblem/ . Accessed 5 January 2019. Ramírez, J. Jesse. “The ‘Balloonhead’ in the Early SF Pulps.” jjesseramirez.com, 15 May 2015. https: / / jjesseramirez.com/ 2015/ 05/ 15/ the-balloonhead-in-the-early-sf-pulps/ . Accessed 9 January 2019. Reed, Adolph. “Unraveling the Relation of Race and Class in American Politics.” Political Power and Social Theory. Ed. Diane Davis. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2002. 265-74. Redmond, Sean. Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader. New York: Wallflower Press, 2007. “Rock Bottom,” The Expanse, Syfy. 16 January 2016. Dir. Rob Lieberman, writ. Jason Ning. Roediger, David R. Class, Race, and Marxism. London: Verso, 2017. ---. and Elizabeth D. Esch. The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in US History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Seymour, Richard. “Does David Roediger Disagree with Ellen Meiksins Wood? ” Verso Books, 24 July 2017. https: / / www.versobooks. com/ blogs/ 3321-does-david-roediger-disagree-with-ellen-meiksinswood. Accessed 10 Jan 2019. <?page no="102"?> Race and Class in The Expanse 103 Souvlis, George et al. “Class, Race and Capital-centric Marxism: An Interview with Charlie Post.” Salvage, 19 January 2018. http: / / salvage.zone/ online-exclusive/ class-race-and-capital-centricmarxism-an-interview-with-charlie-post/ . Accessed 5 January 2019. Wells, Sarah Ann. “The Scar and the Node: Border Science Fiction and the Mise-en-scène of Globalized Labor.” The Global South 8.1 (2014): 69-90. Wood, Ellen Meiksins. “Class, Race, and Capitalism.” Political Power and Social Theory. Ed. Diane Davis. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2002. 275-84. <?page no="104"?> A Familiar Otherness: The Trope of Asia in Cyberpunk Movies since the 1980s Olga Thierbach-McLean Conceived broadly as a genre concerned with the possibilities and dangers of technology and their impact on human consciousness, cyberpunk has been characterized by gloomy visions of cultures on the brink of collapse. Having come into existence in the historical context of the onset of the electronic age and Asia’s rapid economic rise, cyberpunk - notably in its cinematic form - has habitually drawn on Asian motifs to express anxieties about the future of high-tech mass societies. From the 1980s on, movies such as Blade Runner (1982), Brazil (1985), the Matrix trilogy (1999-2003), Cloud Atlas (2012), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) have employed Asian imagery to address technophobic fears of mind invasion, rapacious consumerism, environmental breakdown, and the erosion of individual rights. All of this has spawned a visual language that casts Asia as a symbol of the future, but at the same time tends to evoke Yellow-Peril notions of the eternally alien Other. And so despite the genre’s ongoing reinterpretation of, and fascination with, the Asian trope - be it in the form of symbols, traditions, aesthetics, or actual characters as representatives of their culture - it has yet to escape inherited racial stereotypes. Keywords: cyberpunk, cyberpunk cinema, orientalism, techno-orientalism, dystopian fiction, science fiction, Asiaphobia, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, Brazil, the Matrix trilogy, Cloud Atlas The Genres of Genre: Form, Formats, and Cultural Formations. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 38. Ed. Cécile Heim, Boris Vejdovsky and Benjamin Pickford. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 105-24. <?page no="105"?> Olga Thierbach-McLean 106 A prolific genre in literature and the visual arts, cyberpunk has been a major development in recent US culture. Its themes and aesthetics have resonated strongly in the pop-cultural imagination and brought forth many derivatives such as biopunk, steampunk, or dieselpunk. By now, its dystopian visions of hypercapitalism, de-individuation, and destructive technology have become a part of the current global zeitgeist. Especially contemporary anglophone literature and cinema dwell extensively on classic cyberpunk topics such as the threats posed by artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, as well as the juxtaposition of technological advancement versus social decline and loss of spirituality. In spite or maybe because of this ubiquity, providing a clear-cut definition of cyberpunk is notoriously elusive, with various rivaling approaches being proposed in the literature (see Gözen 123-38). Sometimes the term is used to refer strictly to a short-lived literary movement of the 1980s, represented by a small group of writers who sought to revitalize the sci-fi genre by exploring the impact of the dawning digital age on human society. In contrast to classic science fiction, these authors anticipated that new technologies would not merely be utilized by humans, but would also cause profound metaphysical transformations of human nature itself, thus engendering post-human identities. William Gibson, whose 1984 novel Neuromancer is considered to be the seminal work of cyberpunk fiction, is widely credited with being the figurehead and main instigator of this literary mode. 1 However, at other times, the beginnings of the cyberpunk phenomenon are traced further back and placed within the broader context of the Gothic novel, in the tradition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which explores questions of artificial life and the possibilities and limitations of science. Other classification strategies focus on characteristic plot elements, with the standard formula featuring the renegade hacker from the fringes of society taking on corporate power in cyberspace, typically by making use of a technologically augmented body. In other instances, the label of cyberpunk is used to denote an aesthetic category that eclectically mixes punk fashion, high-tech, and Gothic visual elements. Herein, the term is 1 Other prominent representatives of this group include Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Bethke, Neal Stephenson, and Pat Cadigan. Much of the work of these writers is rooted in the earlier New Wave movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and inspired by writers such as Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, or Harlan Ellison. It is also influenced by the Japanese cyberpunk genre which was launched in 1982 by Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga series Akira. <?page no="106"?> Asian Tropes in Cyberpunk 107 set forth under the priority of thematic content, namely as a subgenre of speculative fiction in which contemporary trends in culture, technology, and science are extrapolated into the near future to explore the promises and dangers of technology, and especially their effects on human consciousness. While it is true for science fiction in general that it is rarely fully detached from reality, but contains at least some measure of reflection and commentary on existing societal conditions, this particularly applies to cyberpunk. With the explicit aspiration to take factually experienced reality as a starting point for glimpses into the future, the works of cyberpunk provide telling insights into the hopes and fears of the societal environment in which they are imagined. Thus, the standard cyberpunk themes - rampant consumerism, environmental collapse, mind control, and disintegrating individual and collective identities - constitute key issues that have been occupying Western mass societies since the late twentieth century. But while the “metaphors cyberpunk employed to explore our increasingly intimate relationship with technology [. . .] are as apt as ever,” lately the genre seems to have been suffering from an aesthetic standstill. As a recent article in the Guardian has diagnosed, the “future has looked the same for almost four decades. [. . .] Hacking: check. Cybernetic enhancements: check. Street crime: check. Punk fashion: check. Urban sprawl: check” (Walker-Emig). And one may also add, “Asian backdrop: check.” Indeed, it has now become an almost taken-for-granted trope that the bleak cyberpunk forecasts of the near future should unfold in Asia or an Orientalized West. 2 To some extent, this can be attributed to purely historical circumstances. Since the genre was conceived at a time when Japan was the main economic driving force of the new computer age, setting cyberpunk narratives in Japan became a formulaic pattern inherited from the original cyberpunk authors, most notably Gibson. Like many North Americans in the 1980s, Gibson perceived Japan as the country where “tomorrow is happening today.” As he once stated, “when I became known for a species of science fiction that journalists called cyberpunk, Japan was already, somehow, the de facto spiritual home of that influence, that particular flavor of popular culture.” In short, “modern Japan simply was cyberpunk.” The abundance of Japanese locales, motifs, and expressions in Gibson’s work begot a sensibility that gave direction to subsequent oeuvres within that genre. 2 Herein, the term Asia is used mostly to refer to East Asia, which has traditionally drawn the main interest of the cyberpunk genre geographically, culturally, as well as with respect to race. <?page no="107"?> Olga Thierbach-McLean 108 But this association of cyberpunk with Japan still does not explain why now, almost forty years since the inception of the movement and in a markedly changed geopolitical landscape, cyberpunk predictions of the future are still dominated by Asian themes and aesthetics. Especially given the fact that cyberpunk is an intrinsically global genre with global concerns as well as global stylistic influences, including film noir, hardboiled detective fiction, and the drawing style of 1970s French sci-fi comics 3 , it is remarkable how heavily it has been fixated on the trope of Asia. Although there have been attempts to break out of this convention - for example, Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 surprise hit District 9 ventured into African cyberpunk - the genre has been conspicuously slow to diversify. Indeed, the settings of the most recent cyberpunkthemed productions Altered Carbon (2018-) of or the video game Cyberpunk 2077 (2019) look a lot like downtown Tokyo or Hong Kong and can be easily mistaken for scenes out of Ridley Scott’s genrepioneering Blade Runner (1982), the first movie to expand cyberpunk concepts into cinema. This persisting affinity of cyberpunk to Asian imagery suggests that, within this particular genre, Asia has always been more than just the most plausible location for a high-tech future or a convenient setting for painting looming scenarios of sprawling megacities. Rather, this aesthetic fixation is also indicative of an undercurrent of more deepseated conceptions of the racial Other that are rooted in a centuries-old notion of the Yellow Peril, i.e., an existential psycho-cultural Western fear of being conquered and enslaved by Oriental hordes. 4 I will show how depictions of Asia and Asians in Western cyberpunk have consistently served as a vehicle for articulating collective Western anxieties about race, which have come to be a defining feature of this genre. 3 One of the main contributors to the emerging cyberpunk aesthetics was the French comics anthology Métal Hurlant created by Jean Giraud, Philippe Druillet, Jean-Pierre Dionnet, and Bernard Farkas between 1974 and 1987. It was cited as a major influence by William Gibson, Ridley Scott, and Katsuhiro Otomo. 4 The term was coined by French-Russian sociologist Jacques Novikow in his 1897 essay “Le Péril Jaune.” However, the underlying racial anxieties are much older and can be traced all the way back to the Mongol invasions of Europe in the thirteenth century. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the concept was established as a topos in Western adventure literature and science fiction. Prominent examples include Dr. Fu Manchu, the archetype of the Asian villain created by British author Sax Rohmer in a series of novels launched in 1913; and Emperor Ming the Merciless of the popular space-opera comic Flash Gordon, conceived by Alex Raymond in 1934. <?page no="108"?> Asian Tropes in Cyberpunk 109 The representation of Asian cultures and people has been dynamic and static at the same time. It has been dynamic in the sense that it has been highly responsive to real-life political and economic developments, with the main attention shifting swiftly from Japan to China as the latter overtook the former as Asia’s main economic powerhouse. Furthermore, the connotations attached to Asian signifiers went from being distinctly negative to neutral to positive synchronously with the tightening of economic ties to Asia and the West’s perceived familiarity with Asian people and styles. And yet, despite these shifts, they remained static in that they sustained an undifferentiated, amorphous idea of “Asianness” in the form of a hybrid Orientalism that indiscriminately draws on various cultures, symbols, and historical periods of Asia and perpetuates the idea of Asia as an unchanging abstraction of Otherness. These ambivalent tendencies will be traced through four decades of cyberpunk movies, with specific emphasis on major productions such as Blade Runner (1982), Brazil (1985), the Matrix trilogy (1999-2003), Cloud Atlas (2012), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Who Is Afraid of Nippon? - Blade Runner (1982) and Brazil (1985) Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) is considered the groundbreaking and formative work of cyberpunk cinema. It is set in 2019 Los Angeles, in the wake of an unspecified global catastrophe that has brought about an environmental cataclysm. People are encouraged to immigrate to offworld colonies which are built and maintained by bioengineered humanoids produced by the all-powerful Tyrell Corporation. The main character, Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, is a cop who specializes in hunting down and killing these so-called replicants when they illegally escape to earth to pose as humans. Deckard falls in love with the replicant Rachel, and even starts suspecting that he himself may not be human. He is thus confronted with fundamental questions about the nature of identity and reality, and is forced to radically revise his notions of what makes a human being. The film is loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? , and since the book itself does not contain Asian themes, Scott’s interpretation is a prime example of how cyberpunk movies have imposed their own layer of sociopolitical meaning by infusing the original narrative with the Asiaphobia of the 1980s. The film was made at a time when the West was strongly preoccupied with fears of Asian political and economic hegemony. The <?page no="109"?> Olga Thierbach-McLean 110 American involvement in Vietnam had only recently come to an end, and the Cold War fear of Communist China was giving way to rising alarm over developments in Japan. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Pacific siland state was undergoing a technological revolution in tandem with the onset of the new information age and the rising global demand for consumer electronics. Brands like Sony, Nintendo, and Yamaha were rapidly becoming household names in the West, and Japanese companies started investing heavily in the US, also purchasing highprofile companies and real estate, among them such landmarks as the Rockefeller Center, the Mobil Building, and Columbia Pictures. The American public was growing increasingly apprehensive of what it started to perceive as an “economic Pearl Harbor” (Harvey). This “Japanning of America” (Schweisberg) could also be strongly felt in popular culture as American teenagers discovered Japanese anime, and a vibrant martial-arts scene began to materialize. All this fueled strong anxieties over reverse colonization and incited animosities that are commonly referred to as the “Japan-bashing” of the 1980s. Popular books such as Ezra F. Vogel’s Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (1979) warned of Japan outcompeting the US and taking over global market leadership. In the mainstream American press, Japanese business practices were even compared to World War II militarism. Thus, in a 1985 New York Times article, American Pulitzer Prize-winning author Theodore H. White drastically warned his countrymen: Today, 40 years after the end of World War II, the Japanese are on the move again in one of history’s most brilliant commercial offensives, as they go about dismantling American industry. Whether they are still only smart, or have finally learned to be wiser than we, will be tested in the next 10 years. Only then will we know who finally won the war 50 years before. The atmosphere of uneasiness and hostility conveyed by these words can also be perceived in Blade Runner, where “the fears of economic invasion and colonization that led to calls for a renewed American isolationism in the 1980s are expressed by figuring America itself as the battleground between Asian and American capital” (Yu 53). A futuristic Los Angeles is shown as an Orientalized space that is crowded with people of Asian appearance and plastered with Japanese and Chinese street signs and ads. Throughout the film, the strangeness of the urban landscape is further stressed by otherworldly music featuring Easterninspired vocal themes over electronic synthesizer tracks, thus <?page no="110"?> Asian Tropes in Cyberpunk 111 reinforcing the identification of Asia with the future. 5 In a recurring image of the dark cityscape, an enormous electronic billboard displays a Japanese woman in traditional garb and makeup. Later, a Coca-Cola ad flashes over the same billboard. In the background, a much smaller Pan Am logo can be seen. All this imagery suggests a merging of Asian and American corporate power, with the latter being ultimately subjugated to the former (see Yu 56). Early on in the film, it becomes evident that Deckard, the white man, is foreign and marginalized in this environment. He is first shown attempting - unsuccessfully - to order in English, from a Japanese street vendor, the amount of sushi that he wants. Likewise, when in the course of his investigation he seeks to establish the origin of what he thinks might be a fish scale, his exchange with the Asian woman who specializes in analyzing such objects is conspicuously rudimentary: “Fish? ” he simply asks by way of introduction as he hands her the item. As it turns out, the woman speaks fluent if heavily accented English. Nevertheless, Deckard continues to talk to her in single words like “Snake? ” as if he were used to not being understood, negotiating his way through a strange land like an awkward tourist. At the same time that whiteness is construed as a disadvantage in everyday dealings with the outside world, there is also a contrary vertical stratification of races. Street life is overwhelmingly Asian, but overhead, whiteness prevails: a mostly white police force patrols the city in flying cars; the white middle class lives in Aztec-/ Mayan-styled buildings; and a white economic elite, epitomized by the Tyrell Corporation, remains isolated in high-rise pyramids with Victorian-inspired interiors and soft lighting that is in stark contrast to the neon glare of the gritty streets. In this context, it is also telling that, in this very Asian-influenced society, none of the replicants has Asian features. This absence further underscores the impression that the Caucasian body, although or precisely because it is increasingly under threat, remains the superior and most desirable commodity. Scott explained in a 1982 interview that he based his vision of 2019 Los Angeles on an extrapolation of real-life trends in California, predicting that “the influence in L.A. will be very Spanish, with a big cross-influence of Oriental” (qtd in Kerman 17). Along the same lines, 5 The award-winning score was created by Greek composer Vangelis, one of the main pioneers of electronic music. Only a few years before Blade Runner, in 1979, he had released a critically acclaimed concept album entitled China, in which he employed Asian instruments and compositional styles that were then largely unknown to Western audiences. <?page no="111"?> Olga Thierbach-McLean 112 production executive Katherine Haber remarked that the costumers working on Blade Runner were striving to “create the effect of a multinational, multi-racial society [. . .] We had tons of punks, Blacks, and Mexicans [. . .] a mélange of every part of society you could imagine” (qtd in Kerman 23). However, this is not the world we actually get to see in the finished movie. Although the city is depicted as culturally diverse - for example, Deckard’s investigation also takes him into an Arab segment of the Los Angeles underground - the Asian element is clearly dominant. One may speculate that, despite Scott’s expressly stated intentions to create a multicultural setting, the spirit of the time prevailed and found its way into the production. After all, the “Los Angeles of 2019 is not a simple extrapolation from current California demographic trends; instead, it is an imaginary postmodern site where futurist ‘realism’ has been replaced with oriental bodies and signifiers” (Yu 56). In general, Blade Runner portrays Asian and especially Japanese people and culture as the omnipresent and familiar, but at the same time profoundly separate and indecipherable Other. The film’s imagined future is one of cultural mongrelization that, far from promising a harmonious amalgamation of cultures, will ultimately lead to Western civilization ’s being overwhelmed and displaced by pervasive Asian influences. In sharp contrast to this vision, the future society imagined in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) is conspicuously homogenous culturally as well as racially. Like Blade Runner, the film was initially a commercial failure, but subsequently became a cult classic. Although Brazil’s classification as cyberpunk may be debated - strictly speaking, it lacks the basic ingredient of high-tech - it is often subsumed under this label. It does also meet the criteria established above as it takes on staple cyberpunk topics such as a future run down by technocracy, the underdog rebel who uses his superior technical skills to fight authority, the question of psychological and moral integrity, and the impact of consumerism on human society. There are also numerous references to artificial bodies, and even a variation on the topic of cyberspace, only that instead of an electronic infrastructure there is an omnipresent network of tubes intruding on every space and aspect of everyday life. Made only three years after Blade Runner, Brazil reveals very similar cultural fears. The story takes place “somewhere in the 20th century,” in a country that strongly resembles England, which is anticipated to have become a consumer-driven totalitarian society relying on a mindless bureaucracy and dysfunctional, nonsensical technology that is at the same time futuristic and obsolete. The protagonist, Sam, played by <?page no="112"?> Asian Tropes in Cyberpunk 113 Jonathan Pryce, is a low-level government employee who lives a monotonous and dreary life. But in his dreams, he turns into a heroic winged knight who bravely rescues an unknown woman from distress. When Sam happens to encounter this same woman in real life, he discovers that she is wanted by the government as a terrorist. Sam falls in love with her, but is unable to save her from being apprehended and killed. He, too, is arrested and ultimately descends into insanity after being tortured by the government police. Considering that the entire cast of Brazil is white, and that the referenced cultural materials belong almost exclusively to the Western realm, it is all the more striking that Sam’s growing sense of impending calamity should take the shape of a giant Japanese samurai who haunts him in his nightmares. By contrast, Sam wears an armor that is clearly reminiscent of European knights. Like a psychological echo, Sam dreams of being locked in a fight with his monstrous Asian antagonist following frustrating encounters with a callous bureaucracy that threatens to destroy his life. And just like the totalitarian system that Sam feels crushed by, the formidable Asian warrior seems to be allpowerful, unpredictable, and invincible. Often, the Japanese Goliath is accompanied by a crowd of stooping, ragged-looking figures who all wear identical caricature-like Budai masks. Later, when Sam is imprisoned by the government, his torturer - who happens to be an old friend of his, but shows no sympathy or mercy - wears the very same grotesque mask as a kind of professional clothing. Hence, overdrawn Asian features are used here as a symbol for the despotic force of a totalitarian bureaucracy and its de-individualized, de-humanized cohorts. Interestingly, when Sam finally manages to kill the samurai in a later dream sequence, he is surprised to look into his own face upon opening the visor of his Asian nemesis. This reflection suggests that Sam himself contributes to the system he so loathes; as an efficient government employee, he is literally part of the government body. In other words, he has become his own enemy by participating in the tyrannical machinery that is represented by the Asian body. Unlike Blade Runner, Brazil uses Asian imagery not by way of providing commentary on concrete demographic changes, but as an allegorical abstraction. Therefore, the artistic choice to project the fears of totalitarian oppressive power onto stereotypical Asian figures seems all the more significant as a direct manifestation of the cultural atmosphere of the 1980s, with the film’s imagery clearly seeking to tap into an almost taken-for-granted Western view of Asia as disturbingly threatening and unknowable. In this case, the fascination with the <?page no="113"?> Olga Thierbach-McLean 114 mysterious power of the East takes the shape of a supernatural apparition of unknowable peril that ultimately stands for the degeneration of Western liberal values. The choice of a traditional Japanese warrior to illustrate this figurative threat is ascribable to the pronounced Japanophobia of the 1980s, which was stirred up by Japan’s economic clout combined with its cultural difference. Incorporating the Red Dragon - the Matrix trilogy (1999-2003) Japan’s strong economic growth came to an abrupt halt when the Japanese asset price bubble collapsed in late 1991. In what would later be termed the Lost Decade, 6 the country’s economic fortune waned as China began outcompeting Japan politically and economically. Concomitantly, the anti-Japanese sentiment in Western popular media ebbed away and was rechanneled into animosity towards, and suspicion of, China. Particularly since the mid-1990s, Western anxieties over the acceleration of globalization processes became strongly connected to the discourse of China’s rise. This time, the fear of the ascendancy of an Asian country was additionally incited by divergences in political ideology. Especially with the historic event of the economic hub of Hong Kong being returned by Britain to China in 1997, the specter of a communist country capturing the world market began looming large in the West. Countless variations on headlines such as “The Red Dragon Awakens” or “The Evil Breath of the Dragon” 7 filled the press, once again conjuring up centuries-old prejudices of the Yellow Peril. But while China-bashing seamlessly replaced Japan-bashing, “Made in China” was also rapidly becoming a leitmotif in the everyday experience of Western consumers. Whatever collective concerns there may have been regarding a totalitarian state using cheap labor to advance its political interests, these concerns were overridden by the desire for affordable consumer goods. The West embraced Chinese products, and China’s growing importance in the world, combined with its large population, even led to speculations that a Chinese dialect would soon become the new global lingua franca. Millions of Westerners took up learning 6 This term was originally used in Japan to refer to the period from 1991 to 2000, but has recently been applied to the entire time span from 1991 to 2010, which is known as the Lost Score or the Lost 20 Years. 7 An article of this title, one of the more original variations on the ubiquitous image of the rising red dragon, was run by the German news magazine Der Spiegel in June 1998 (see Follath). <?page no="114"?> Asian Tropes in Cyberpunk 115 Mandarin or Cantonese as a way of remaining competitive in the new world market, while also seeking to get better acquainted with Chinese culture and traditions. These developments suggest that the economic and cultural influx feared in the case of Japan actually came to pass with China. Surprisingly, what had been so dreaded in theory turned out to be rather pleasurable in actuality, at least if judged by the unbroken Western appetite for Chinese-made consumer articles and the West’s growing interest in Chinese stories. In 1998, Disney released Mulan, a Chinese myth of a woman warrior, and by 2000, the enormous success of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon demonstrated that perceptions of Asia by Western audiences had markedly changed. Concurrently, in cyberpunk-themed movies of the 1990s, views of Asia were also undergoing a palpable transformation. At first, the image of the threatening alien began to fade in favor of a more neutral, purely visual cue for the future. Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days and Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic, both released in 1995, are representative of this transitional phase. While they may not be cinematic masterpieces, they represent a caesura in the evolution of cyberpunk cinema as tokens of a more relaxed attitude towards Asia. Strange Days is set in Los Angeles in the final days of the last millennium. Seizing on the Y2K scare, the film shows the city in an apocalyptic chaos of crime, violence, and social degeneration. Visually, the movie is strongly inspired by the grunge aesthetics of the 1990s’ punk rock scene, but it also features genre-typical Asian paraphernalia such as the ever-popular Chinese restaurant, or the cliché Japanese businessman who owns the very latest and best in entertainment technology. However, such motifs no longer stand out as political commentary, but seem more like a shorthand reference to the classic stylistic insignia of the cyberpunk tradition. Similarly, in Johnny Mnemonic, the protagonist, played by Keanu Reeves, operates in a sphere populated by stereotypical Japanese characters such as inscrutable businessmen, members of crime syndicates, anime characters, and martial artists. But decidedly unlike Deckard in Blade Runner, Johnny Mnemonic is now familiar with, and very much in control of, this environment. At least subliminally, Asian culture is beginning to be construed as something that - while still alien and exotic - can be incorporated and mastered by the Western hero. There may still be a clear demarcation between the foreground of a white protagonist and the Asian background, but the angst over Asian difference becomes less acute as Asian characters begin to figure more prominently within the narrative. “Since approximately 1995, [. . .] one can see a distinct shift in cyberpunk cinema, not only visually, in the <?page no="115"?> Olga Thierbach-McLean 116 sleeker, digital look of the films, but also ideologically, in its increased incorporation of non-white bodies and styles in the primary narratives and the foreground” (Park 92). Only four years later, this blending was fully realized in the first installment of the Matrix trilogy, which represents the next milestone in cyberpunk cinema after Blade Runner. True to the stylistic conventions of the genre, the Matrix movies are studded with hallmark Asian references. For example, all three films memorably open with the “matrix digital rain,” which is comprised of Latin letters, Arabic numerals, and half-width kana, a script used in the early days of Japanese computing. This code’s typeface is also an homage to the Japanese cyberpunk classic Ghost in the Shell, where a very similar green screen is used. 8 But of course the most iconic moments of The Matrix - and arguably its strongest selling point - are the kung fu fighting scenes that imitate the style of Hong Kong action movies. Critiques such as Janet Maslin’s enthusiastic 1999 review in the New York Times took particular note of this novel amalgamation: As supervised by [renowned Hong Kong martial arts choreographer and film director] Yuen Wo Ping, these airborne sequences bring Hong Kong action style home to audiences in a mainstream American adventure, with big prospects as a cult classic and with the future very much in mind. Unmistakably, The Matrix ushered in a new era in the genre. As Chi Hyun Park has suggested, “the originality of The Matrix stemmed from its ability to combine Eastern and Western popular culture through visual idioms” (183). In other words, Asian background and Western foreground begin to blur. At the same time, the unease over Asian Otherness seems to all but disappear, and as the trilogy progresses, the implications of everything Asian grow increasingly favorable. The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions strive to depict the last human enclave of Zion as a multiracial and multicultural society. But within this diversity, Asian characters and cultural elements are still assigned a prominent position. Whereas the first Matrix movie featured no leading Asian characters, the sequels do. Central positive figures such as Seraph, the Keymaker, or Captain Mifune are Asian. In addition, more often than not, the signifiers of the future are now imagined to be specifically Chinese. For example, Seraph, played by Taiwanese actor Collin Chou, appears in traditional-looking Chinese clothing, in a space that is 8 The manga Ghost in the Shell was published in 1989; its first anime version was released in 1995. <?page no="116"?> Asian Tropes in Cyberpunk 117 reminiscent of old-fashioned Chinese taverns, and speaks with a pronounced Chinese accent. 9 But most tellingly, the white hero Neo himself wears a coat that is in the style of a traditional Chinese tunic as it was popularized in the West by the legendary Cantonese Wing Chun master Ip Man, who taught Bruce Lee. Most importantly, in a battle fought mainly in digital cyberspace, it is not so much superior technological training, but rather the ancient Chinese art of kung fu, that is the weapon of choice and the central instrument in the fight to save humanity. All this indicates an increasing familiarity and comfortableness of Western audiences with Asian people, objects, and styles. Even if one can safely assume that this acclimatization is also driven by purely economic interests to reach new markets in Asia and to appeal to the fast-growing Asian community in North America, the contrast to the mentality of the 1980s is still staggering. Little seems to be left of the cacophony of clashing Eastern and Western cultures depicted in Blade Runner, or of the unfettered enemy stereotypes of Brazil. Not dissociation, but amalgamation has become the new guiding principle. Yet this embracing and incorporating of Asian culture has not been unproblematic. As concerns about racial and cultural identities were becoming more pronounced, and the concept of cultural appropriation started figuring more prominently in public discourse, critics found it increasingly questionable that Asian signifiers were assumed and performed by white or non-Asian actors. Between New Tendencies and Old Tropes - Cloud Atlas (2012) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) One example for this development is the controversy surrounding Cloud Atlas, a production based on David Mitchell’s 2004 novel of the same name. It is composed of six separate but interrelated stories that are set in different places and periods, spanning from the nineteenth to the twenty-seventh century. The central theme of the novel is the predatory aspect of human nature, with the storyline exploring the recurrence of racism, sexism, and colonialism in human history based on the concept of the transmigration of souls. In other words, each of the main actors performs various reincarnations of the same character, as the life paths 9 The fact that this role had previously been offered to Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh further confirms the assumption that having the role played by a star of Chinese cinema was a conscious choice on the part of the producers. <?page no="117"?> Olga Thierbach-McLean 118 of a set of characters crisscross one another in different historical periods and constellations, in a cosmic cycle of injustice and atonement. Of the six narrative strands, two are set in the future, one in twentysecond-century Korea, the other in twenty-seventh-century Hawaii. In a familiar pattern, it is once again an Asian country that is chosen as the setting for the nearer future. The film predicts that in the twenty-second century the epicenter of hyper-technologization will have moved on from Japan and China to Korea. The narrative takes place in Neo Seoul, a megacity that has emerged in place of today’s Seoul, which at that point has disappeared below sea level. The Korean peninsula has become a post-human totalitarian state in which corpocracy has completely replaced democracy. The heroine of this narrative is the female replicant Sonmi-451, played by South Korean actress Doona Bae, who has been genomed for the sole purpose of working as a server in a global fast-food chain. In a society organized strictly according to corporate interests, it is no longer race, but the naturalness of conception that is the main basis for discrimination, with a clear separation between clones and so-called pure bloods. Sonmi’s life is that of a slave; the mantra of her existence is “Honor thy customer.” But she starts questioning her situation, and is eventually freed by members of the resistance. In the book, the resistance turns out to be sponsored by the state as an instrument for perpetuating the exploitative system, in a twist that is strongly reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949). But the movie takes a more positive perspective. Here, the rebels are part of a genuine revolutionary movement fighting for the rights of clones. Their uprising is ultimately crushed by the government. But before being arrested and executed, Sonmi is able to broadcast a manifesto that reiterates spiritual humanist values in defiance of soulless materialism and exploitation. Later on, in the story set in twenty-seventh-century Hawaii, we learn that Sonmi is worshipped as a nebulous goddess. By then, humanity has reverted to a preindustrial stage of tribal communities dominated by superstitious beliefs. 10 In Cloud Atlas, the depiction of Asia and Asians is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, it is an Asian protagonist in an unmistakably Asian visual setting who speaks for the whole of humanity. She personifies the 10 As Oliver Lindner has suggested, the choice of Hawaii as the setting for the final narrative is in itself significant in that it represents a literal as well as symbolic middle ground between Asia and the West: “Hawaii, which is situated between East Asia and the United States as the most powerful representative of the West, links the first and final narrative, the past and the future” (366). <?page no="118"?> Asian Tropes in Cyberpunk 119 universal struggle for human dignity and right to self-determination. The underlying message is once again that future Asia, this time represented by Korea, may be the most fertile breeding ground for an inhumane totalitarian order. But at the same time, it is suggested that it is exactly in the frictions and tensions of this order that a new and better system may be forged, and a better future may arise. All this can be interpreted as a positive take on the old trope of Asian difference. On the other hand, the film keeps relying on a subtext of conventional Asian stereotypes. For example, in a globalized world, the clones are invariably Asian, a racial uniformity that implicitly appeals to the old Western notion of all Asians looking and acting alike. The motif of sameness is further layered in the film. When the clones solemnly march towards Elysium (where they believe they will be rewarded with a leisurely life after completing their time of service, but are in fact killed to be made into food for the new generation of clones), the camera sweeps over a crowd made up of identically styled Asian women, with some of the actors’ faces being duplicated throughout the crowd. In another scene, Sonmi encounters her doppelgänger in a prostitute on the streets of Neo Seoul. This is an allusion to the stereotypical images of women as either goddesses or whores, but it also serves to reinforce the idea of interchangeability in a world where bodies have become mere commodities. Thus, Asian features are used here as a visual code for sameness and loss of individuality. As mentioned earlier, Cloud Atlas specifically came under fire for casting white actors in “yellow-face makeup.” In the movie, the concept of the transmigration of souls is expressed by the same actors wearing makeup that represents them as members of different races, with white actors being turned into Asian, Hispanic, or Black characters, and vice versa. Given that this kind of transformation occurred throughout the film in all directions and actually helped stress the arbitrariness of race and the fluidity of cultural identities, the controversy seems misplaced at least in this particular case, but maybe not so with other recent productions. For example, the 2017 Hollywood adaptation of the Japanese cult classic Ghost in the Shell met with criticism for featuring Scarlett Johansson in the main role. The obvious commercial reasons for casting a Hollywood star aside, one may indeed question why - in a film that otherwise remained very close to the style of the original anime and meticulously adopted its Japanese setting - the one salient “adjustment” was the race of the protagonist, Major, and of other leading roles such as Major’s sidekick Batou and her main antagonist Kuze. The fact that the only two characters inhabiting a synthetic body, <?page no="119"?> Olga Thierbach-McLean 120 namely Major and Kuze (Michael Pitt), are both given decidedly Caucasian features even though they are meant to operate in an Asian metropolis, uncomfortably harkens back to the all-white replicants in Blade Runner. Once more, the implication seems to be that, if only they had the option, Asian people would surely prefer being Caucasian. In this respect, Ghost in the Shell is symptomatic of cyberpunk’s recycling of the Asian trope without critically reassessing and challenging it. As Paul Walker-Emig has observed, “[c]yberpunk’s stasis leaves little room to map the emerging nationalisms, fascisms, political populisms and revitalised leftist movements seeking to challenge political and economic orthodoxy.” This criticism also applies to cyberpunk’s coding of race: because the genre keeps relying on Asia as the emblem of the futuristic and the unfamiliar, it is inevitably stuck with casting Asian cultures and peoples as the Other. In this way, Asian actors and cultural tokens remain mere props for the white lead. Incidentally, this was one of the main criticisms directed at Denis Villeneuve’s highly anticipated 2017 release Blade Runner 2049, which was attacked for lacking Asian lead characters despite recreating the Orientalized urban landscape of Scott’s original. However, here I would like to offer a somewhat different perspective on this artistic choice within the greater context of the genre’s history: although many fans of the 1982 movie were disappointed by the sequel and the film underperformed commercially, Blade Runner 2049 made a great leap towards rejuvenating the stagnant genre by deepening and updating the themes of its predecessor. Set thirty years later, it tells the story of the replicant K, played by Ryan Gosling, who works as a blade runner for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). In his private life, he tries to find some fulfillment with his holographic artificial-intelligence (AI) girlfriend Joi, a mass product made by the Wallace Corporation that has taken over from the Tyrell Corporation as the main supplier of humanoids. After K happens upon the remains of a female replicant who turns out to be Rachel (Deckard’s love interest from the first film), it is established that she has died in childbirth. Because the discovery that replicants can reproduce threatens the social status quo, K is ordered to find and kill Rachel’s child to suppress this politically explosive information. But in the course of his mission, he comes to believe that he himself may be the son of Rachel and Deckard. Like Deckard’s, K’s concept of self is fundamentally shaken, albeit in the reverse direction, as he has to come to terms with the notion that he may not be an android but a human being. <?page no="120"?> Asian Tropes in Cyberpunk 121 The film thus continues to address the timeless question of what makes us human by further elaborating on the relationship between biology and technology, between virtual and physical reality. At the same time, it moves away from the fascination with cyberspace and puts more emphasis on environmental issues, introducing new moods, topics, and imagery that are more representative of present-day concerns. For example, scenes at the remote protein farm, Deckard’s hideout in the dustbowl version of Las Vegas, or the giant junkyard depict environments that are no longer associated with the corrosive forces of an Asia-centered hypercapitalism, but with global climate change. Although the sequel thus breaks new thematic ground, it is also quasi obligated to provide a continuation of Scott’s version not only with regard to its subject matter, but also visually. And so the Asian neon signs are still present, as are the chaotically teeming public settings. But the giant holographic ads now prominently feature a Russian ballerina, and the crowds on the streets look more racially diverse. Also, Los Angeles is no longer pictured as a futuristic babel of constant miscommunication. In a scene where a group of prostitutes approaches K on the street, one of them addresses the others in Finnish and is immediately understood. This is a display of a casual internationalism that has nothing more to do with the notion of an Asian invasion. Granted, when viewed against the background of the original, the complete absence of Asian leading roles is conspicuous. After all, given the demography of three decades earlier, one would expect to find Asian people in all areas of public life, including science and the police force. But while the film may fail to directly challenge the racial stereotypes of its precursor, it does so indirectly by way of artistic omission: by conspicuously not having Asian actors figuring prominently in the plot, Villeneuve is starting to walk away from the trope of Asians as being inextricably linked to a dystopian future. Not that this is the most that can be done to face the complex issues of racism, colonialism, imperialism, and representation in Western cultural production. But it may be a first step toward escaping the fossilized formulas of race handed down from the 1980s. In conclusion, the representation of Asia and Asians in Western cyberpunk movies remains highly ambivalent. On the one hand, a noticeable shift has occurred: after a peak of Yellow-Peril sentiments in the form of techno-orientalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the connotations of Asia have become more neutral, and eventually even distinctly positive. On the other hand, despite the subsiding of collective <?page no="121"?> Olga Thierbach-McLean 122 fears over a “high-tech yellow threat,” the dystopian forecasts of cyberpunk cinema keep relying on the trope of Asia as the arcane and profoundly separate Other. Thus, Asia keeps being construed - for better or for worse - as a dynamic symbol of the future, but at the same time as static, monolithic, and impenetrable. As a symptom of this enduring sense of division, the interest in distinct Asian cultures has remained surprisingly underdeveloped, notwithstanding the allure that Asia always had for the cyberpunk genre. Even as Western attention has shifted to individual Asian countries in parallel to changes in the political power balance, Asia has remained an undifferentiated and unexplored conglomerate of Otherness to large parts of the Western cyberpunk audience. It therefore seems as if the cyberpunk imagination is not so much captured by any distinctive culture of a specific Asian country as it is by the abstract, wholesale idea of “Asianness,” which is vague and normative at the same time. This is tantamount to a futurist Orientalism that habitually plays on wellestablished Western prejudices of Asian countries as human factories and of Asian people as a subaltern workforce of non-individuals - a quasi alien life form that has developed apart from Western ideals, but exactly for this reason may be much better adapted to survive the rough times to come. There have been some efforts to shed this pattern, but the genre still has a long way to go in dismantling the racial paradigms that have become such an ingrained part of its visual and conceptual vocabulary. Whether cyberpunk will continue to give productive impulses for the critique and analysis of the dynamics of a global society will in large part depend on how successful it is in innovating its treatment of race. <?page no="122"?> Asian Tropes in Cyberpunk 123 References Films Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott. USA, 1982. Blade Runner 2049. Directed by Denis Villeneuve. USA, 2017. Brazil. Directed by Terry Gilliam. UK, 1985. Cloud Atlas. Directed by Tom Tykwer, Andrew Wachowski and Lana Wachowski. Germany, USA, China and Singapore, 2012. Ghost in the Shell. Directed by Rupert Sanders. USA, 2017. Johnny Mnemonic. Directed by Robert Longo. USA, 1995. Strange Days. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. USA, 1995. The Matrix. Directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski. USA and Australia, 1999. The Matrix Reloaded. Directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski. USA and Australia, 2003. The Matrix Revolutions. Directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski. USA and Australia, 2003. Works Cited Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Doubleday, 1968. Follath, Erich. “Hongkong: Der böse Atem des Drachen.” Der Spiegel, 1 June 1998, 134-37. Gibson, William. “The Future Perfect.” Time International, 30 April 2001. http: / / content.time.com/ time/ magazine/ article/ 0,9171,1956774,00. html. Accessed 28 June 2019. ---. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984. Gözen, Jiré Emine. Cyperpunk Science Fiction: Literarische Fiktionen und Medientheorie. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012. Harvey, Paul. “Japan Buys US with Our Money.” Kentucky New Era, 6 September 1988, 16. Kerman, Judith B. “Technology and Politics in the Blade Runner Dystopia.” Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Ed. Judith B. Kerman. Bowling Green: State University Popular Press, 1991. 16-24. Lindner, Oliver. “Postmodernism and Dystopia: David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004).” Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalypse: Classics, New <?page no="123"?> Olga Thierbach-McLean 124 Tendencies, Model Interpretations. Ed. Eckart Voigts and Alessandra Boller. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015. 363-77. Maslin, Janet. “The Reality Is All Virtual, and Densely Complicated.” New York Times, 31 March 1999. https: / / www.nytimes. com/ 1999/ 03/ 31/ movies/ film-review-the-reality-is-all-virtual-anddensely-complicated.html. Accessed 28 June 2019. Park, Chi Hyun. “Orientalism in U.S. Cyberpunk Cinema from Blade Runner to The Matrix” (PhD diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 2004). https: / / repositories.lib.utexas.edu/ bitstream/ handle/ 2152/ 2159/ parkch042.pdf? sequence=2&isAllowed=y. Accessed 28 June 2019. Schweisberg, Dave. “How We Came To Adore Everything Japanese: The Japanning Of America.” Durant Daily Democrat, 17 October 1982, 22. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, 1818. Vogel, Ezra F. Japan as Number One: Lessons for America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Walker-Emig, Paul. “Neon and corporate dystopias: why does cyberpunk refuse to move on? ” The Guardian, 16 October 2018. https: / / www.theguardian.com/ games/ 2018/ oct/ 16/ neoncorporate-dystopias-why-does-cyberpunk-refuse-move-on. Accessed 28 June 2019. White, Theodore H. “The Danger From Japan.” New York Times, 28 July 1985, A19. Yu, Timothy. “Oriental Cities, Postmodern Futures: Naked Lunch, Blade Runner, and Neuromancer. MELUS 33.4 (winter 2008): 45-71. <?page no="124"?> Are Orcs Racist? Genre, Racecraft, and Bright J. Jesse Ramírez Bright (2017), the most expensive film produced to date by the American streaming media company Netflix, exemplifies the micro-genrefication of American film within the emerging digital ecosystem of platform cinema. This essay uses a symptomatic concept of genre to triangulate a close reading of the film with analyses of generic forms and “racecraft,” a social epistemology that transforms or “crafts” social relations so that they appear to be biological relations among discrete “races.” Combining elements of science fiction, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth mythology, and the interracial buddy cop movie, Bright is an allegory of contemporary struggles between oppressed “races” and the Los Angeles Police Department. The film is symptomatic of a post-Black Lives Matter moment in US political and cultural history in which narratives of “racial” diversification can no longer redeem the police as an institution. Bright suggests that a new fictional collectivity must be racecrafted in order for such narratives to persist in the current ideological conjuncture. I conclude the essay by explaining the significance of Bright’s racecraft in relation to the contemporary resurgence of “race” in genetics. Keywords: Race, racecraft, fantasy, science fiction, buddy cop film, Netflix Genre in the Age of Netflix Genres, whatever else they may be said to be or do, are about patterns and conventions, structures of repetition, and common codes. I want to begin with such a simple claim in order to develop a working concept of The Genres of Genre: Form, Formats, and Cultural Formations. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 38. Ed. Cécile Heim, Boris Vejdovsky and Benjamin Pickford. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 125-43. <?page no="125"?> J. Jesse Ramírez 126 genre that is elastic enough to encompass, on the one hand, the aesthetics of genre - genres of literature, film, and other cultural objects - and on the other, the social epistemologies of genre. Despite the recent (re)emergence of various post-symptomatic literary and cultural theories, a symptomatic concept of genre remains a powerful tool for connecting different domains of cultural and social life. 1 Fredric Jameson has influentially described genre as a means of triangulating the interpretation of an aesthetic or cultural object with historical analysis of both forms and social life: The strategic value of generic concepts for Marxism clearly lies in the mediatory function of the notion of a genre, which allows the coordination of immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life. (92) A symptomatic concept of genre that underscores the symptomaticity of patterns is especially relevant to the contemporary social and cultural conjuncture in the United States, as the production, capture, storage, and analysis of patterns are major organizing principles of platform and surveillance capitalism (Srnicek; Zuboff). What unites American social media platforms, the national security state, and artificial-intelligence engineers is their shared interest in the generic qualities of human perception and practice. These actors and institutions are keen on predicting what people will buy next or where the next criminal act might occur, and on externalizing human decision-making processes - including those that decide what constitutes consumer preference and “crime” - in technical systems that are cheaper, faster, and more controllable than human actors. David Ayer’s Bright (2017) exemplifies an emergent digital ecosystem in which surveillance, consumption, and genre amalgamate. Upon its release, Bright was the most expensive film ever produced by Netflix, an American streaming media company with roughly 58 million official subscribers in the United States alone (“Number”). (If illicit online streaming were included in viewer statistics, the total US audience would be much larger.) From an industrial perspective, Bright is noteworthy because it signals Netflix’s competition with established studios for the blockbuster film market. The company is pivoting from the licensing of 1 Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique is perhaps the most influential recent attempt to articulate a post-symptomatic, post-critical theory. For a response to which this essay is sympathetic, see Konstantinou. <?page no="126"?> Genre, Racecraft, and Bright 127 other studios’ and networks’ content to the production and distribution of its own content. Central to this industrial strategy is an algorithmic cultural logic. As one critic has observed, Bright “sounds like it was made by an algorithm” (Rodriguez) because of the quirky and hyper-specific way in which it combines generic elements. If a common critique of genre studies is that generic taxonomies always fail to capture the empirical diversity of cultural production and consumption, Netflix can “solve” this problem by surveilling what people watch on its platform - an analysis that culminates in myriad generic hybrids that are hardly legible for academic genre studies. Anyone who regularly watches Netflix is familiar with the platform’s unique, and sometimes hilarious, micro-genres, which, the company claims, recommend content that accounts for 80% of what users watch (“How Netflix”). Alexis Madrigal has counted 76,897 Netflix micro-genres, including “Sentimental set in Europe Dramas from the 1970s,” “Japanese Sports Movies,” “Criticallyacclaimed Emotional Underdog Movies,” and “Gritty Suspenseful Revenge Westerns.” If Bright represents a Netflix micro-genre, it might be called “Mind-Bending Visually Striking Sci-Fi Fantasy Buddy Cop Action Movies about Race.” Watching Bright is a peculiar experience because it feels as if the micro-genre was algorithmically generated first, as a marketing strategy, and the movie was made second. To be sure, in capitalist markets, genre has long been a technology for the production and capture of habitual consumption, a way for investors to lower financial risk by banking on the fact that people will consume something similar to what they have already consumed. As Janice A. Radway demonstrates in her pathbreaking study of the romance, nineteenth-century literary entrepreneurs like Irwin and Erastus Beadle reasoned that once they had loosely identified an actual audience by inducing it to buy a specific kind of book, it would not be difficult to keep that audience permanently constituted and available for further sales by supplying it with endless imitations of the first success. (23) But Radway also notes that the Beadle brothers’ strategy was still risky, and often unsuccessful, because “they lacked a formal way of maintaining contact with the audience they created” (23). After all, print books are stubbornly non-interactive media: you can tap the pages all you like, but the words on the page will not change, and your reading activity cannot be directly measured and communicated to publishers. With the ability (a) to capture, monitor, and analyze consumer patterns directly, on a huge scale and in real time, and (b) to generate micro- <?page no="127"?> J. Jesse Ramírez 128 generic forms - and even new content for these forms - on the basis of the metadata, Netflix has partially overcome the Beadle brothers’ problem of establishing “a formal way of maintaining contact” with an audience and of “keep[ing] that audience permanently constituted and available for further sales by supplying it with endless imitations of the first success.” Perhaps Bright points to a future in which genre, shattered and recombined into tens of thousands of smaller units, flows within a vast digital feedback loop that reshapes the production, distribution, and consumption of American movies. Racecraft, or, Demystifying Race When Netflix captures consumer patterns, it also captures the social common sense embedded in those patterns. Turning now to this essay’s other thematic concerns, I want to triangulate a reading of Bright and its micro-genres with a particular social epistemology, namely, racial perception. “Race” is generic in an etymological sense; genre comes from the Latin genus, meaning “birth, race, stock, kind” (“Genus”). But one important critical maneuver for demystifying “race” - and demystification will play a central role in the following analysis - is to insist on the anachronism of attributing a modern concept of “race” to the ancients, who certainly knew of human differences, or differences among “peoples,” but not of racial difference (Appiah 11-13). Thus, to claim that “race” is generic is to highlight its specifically modern character as a pseudo-scientific classificatory system. “The term race,” write Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields, “stands for the conception or the doctrine that nature produced humankind in distinct groups, each defined by inborn traits that its members share and that differentiate them from the members of other distinct groups of the same kind but of unequal rank” (16). Races are the “genres of man,” the types of human being, organized according to inherited and discrete patterns of skin color and eye shape, hair texture and nose size, temperament and custom. While racial constructivism appears to reign supreme in the humanities and social sciences - but even here it is not as hegemonic as it seems (Morning) - “race” remains the generic lens through which many Americans perceive one another and the social world. An average American need not have studied the various pseudo-scientific classificatory systems of a Linnaeus or Blumenbach to understand “race.” For racial awareness is an everyday convention of seeing, an <?page no="128"?> Genre, Racecraft, and Bright 129 obvious, expedient, and mostly tacit or unconscious explanation of human differences, of why people look, talk, dress, eat, and generally act a certain way - are a certain way - and not another. My invocation of “race” thus refers not to a natural substance, which does not exist, but rather to the ways in which sociopolitical experience and practice are “racialized” and “structured by the signification of human biological characteristics in such a way as to define and construct differentiated social collectivities” (Miles and Brown 101; emphasis added). I also understand racialization to be at work in instances in which people explicitly repudiate racist beliefs but still invoke “cultural” differences that function like the natural, inherited, and discrete essences that constitute racial difference (Balibar). Karen and Barbara Fields’s term racecraft is useful for thinking critically about “race” because it highlights the ways in which “race” is an ensemble of social practices - ways of doing, making, and crafting social ties that transform the latter into the results of already existing natural substances. Racecraft works like magic; it makes its own crafting disappear. It is racecraft that produces a sentence like “black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color.” But the Fieldses observe that in that sentence “segregation disappears as the doing of segregationists, and then, in a puff of smoke - paff - reappears as a trait of only one part of the segregated whole” (17). In other words, racecraft transfigures the action of segregation and replaces it with the pseudo-agency of skin color, i.e., “race.” “Racecraft” also names something like a worldview, analogous to witchcraft, insofar as both are broad systems of lived experience and practice that explain what are ultimately non-empirical forces. Neither races nor witches are empirically real, but they seem perfectly real to inhabitants of the worlds of racecraft and witchcraft. Racecraft is a field of collective belief and practice that makes sense to its inhabitants, who find evidence of its validity everywhere. Perhaps it can be compared to the environment in the psychiatric hospitals that D. L. Rosenhan famously exposes in “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” Rosenhan shows that once psychiatrists accept that a patient is insane, the diagnosis is reinforced by all subsequent behavior, making it extremely difficult for the patient to be recognized as sane. Within racecraft, it is the people who claim that “race” is not real who are the insane inmates, for they deny what is an abundantly and immediately evidential reality to most people most of the time. In another case of racecraft that is more directly relevant to my analysis of Bright, police officer Jeronimo Yanez shot and killed <?page no="129"?> J. Jesse Ramírez 130 Philando Castile, an African American man, during a traffic stop in 2016. Yanez was under the spell of racecraft when, shortly before pulling Castile over, he told a colleague over the radio that Castile resembled a suspect in a prior robbery because of his “wide-set nose” (Smith). For Yanez, it must have seemed self-evident that a “wide-set nose” is an objective and natural mark, a pure sense datum, by which a criminal can be racially identified - that is to say, by which “race” and criminality are racecrafted. Racecraft had transformed a mere body part into the sign of an invisible essence, Castile’s “race,” and of an additional property of that “race,” criminality. While “race” is preeminently visual, within racecraft physical features function merely as a visible index of an invisible essence that is separate and different from them. Racial essences belong to racecraft’s invisible ontology even though the visible manifestations of those essences are usually available to most Americans, from fifty yards or more, as race. (Fields and Fields 211) It also must have seemed immediately obvious to Yanez that, as a kind of natural outgrowth or reflex of his invisible racial essence, Castile posed an existential threat to him. Even when material facts blatantly contradict racecraft - Castile clearly and patiently announced his legal possession of a firearm - its fictional facts often prove overwhelming, especially when they are buttressed by a legal apparatus that systematically protects police officers’ judgments about the alleged threat posed to their safety by African Americans. Both senses of “racecraft” are useful because they powerfully demystify Americans’ racial common sense without placing a moralistic or post-racial prohibition on discussion of “race.” The concept of racecraft exposes “race” to be inexorably science-fictional, a way of using imaginary science to organize belief and practice in a nonor extra-empirical reality. As I will argue in my conclusion, the recuperation of “race” in contemporary genetics discourses makes the demystification of “race” as timely as ever. But the utility of the concept of racecraft is not that it debunks “race” so that we can get over it and stop talking about it, as if racialized social formations were archaic and our language irreparably dated. Just the opposite: racecraft captures the pervasive everyday life of “race” so that we can talk about it - and as long as the United States remains a racially hierarchical society, Americanists must continue to talk about it - while nonetheless maintaining critical distance from the pseudo-science of “race.” To inscribe a dialectical relation to “race,” which necessitates that we simultaneously <?page no="130"?> Genre, Racecraft, and Bright 131 recognize that it is pseudo-science and a dominant way of seeing and acting, I will mark all further references to “race” that might be mistaken for references to a natural substance with a strike-through, like this: race, racial. Conversely, I will leave references to racism, a social practice that needs no demystification, unmarked. Orcs Are Racist Bright can be viewed as a hybrid version of a subgenre of science fiction: alternate history, which typically presents a realistic fictional world that differs from the reader’s or viewer’s consensus reality insofar as a key historical event or set of events in that reality either never happened or had radically different outcomes. Ward Moore’s alternate-history novel Bring the Jubilee (1953), for example, is set in a world in which the Confederacy has won the Battle of Gettysburg, and subsequently the Civil War. But while Moore’s novel invites readers to imagine the consequences of a historical and material possibility - the Battle of Gettysburg was a contingent event that could have turned out otherwise - Bright asks viewers to discard any pretense to historical plausibility and imagine that J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth mythology is our actual past. Set in contemporary Los Angeles, Bright is populated by humans, fairies, centaurs, dragons, elves, and most importantly for my purposes here, orcs. At various points in the film, we learn that the events of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy have structured the city’s race relations. Having sided in the past with the Dark Lord - presumably Sauron from The Lord of the Rings - orcs are viewed with deep suspicion and hatred by most humans. This generic hybridity alone would make for a rather unique and even outlandish film. But if we reverse-engineer Bright’s genres, then it seems that Netflix’s algorithms have identified additional patterns: a significant portion of people who enjoy both science fiction and fantasy apparently also watch interracial buddy cop movies as well as films starring Will Smith. Bright’s plot turns on the relationship between Smith’s character Darryl Ward, a jaded Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officer who is looking forward to his pension, and Nick Jakoby (Joel Edgerton), the first orc in the LAPD, a “diversity hire,” the object of constant racist ridicule and outright hostility at the hands of his fellow human cops, and a race traitor in the eyes of other orcs. These other orcs, who are shown wearing baggy sports jerseys and baseball caps, or drinking alcohol in run-down neighborhoods, are transparently coded as Los Angeles’s new African <?page no="131"?> J. Jesse Ramírez 132 Americans and Latinxs - an oppressed, vaguely menacing, predominantly working class and poor race that is in a constant struggle against the LAPD. 2 To answer my question in the title of this essay: yes, orcs are racist. Tolkien created Middle Earth as a “mythology of England” (Shippey 268). Orcs originate in Tolkien’s orientalist caricatures of Muslims and Asians. Though I wish to avoid the thorny question of whether Tolkien himself was a racist, it seems clear that his mythology is inconceivable without the founding assumption that race differentiates the English, other Europeans, and the non-European world. The Lord of the Rings allegorizes these somatic, linguistic, and psychological differences as the differences among the races of “men,” orcs, and the mythology’s various other races. As Helen Young observes, although Tolkien’s characters are rarely, if ever, entirely circumscribed by their race, essentializing logics of racial difference nonetheless underpin the structure of the peoples of his world. Racial taxonomies shape the cultures of Middle Earth. (Race 23) Racecraft is especially obvious in the Lord of the Rings films, in which predominantly white or fair-skinned heroes battle predominantly darkskinned and undifferentiated hordes. Here the films are simply faithful to the source material. In a letter, Tolkien describes orcs as “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types” (274). While Middle Earth is obviously fantastic, this fantasy is remarkable, in my view, not so much for its escapist departures from consensus reality, but rather for its second-order social “realism.” The Middle 2 The orcs’ coding as black and Latinx is destabilized by the fact that Jakoby is played by a white actor and by the subtle implication that the orcs who sided with Sauron attempted to exterminate humanity. Orc history not only alludes to the genocide of Native American peoples committed by white colonists, but rewrites and displaces the United States’ history of white supremacy and allows the film’s white humans to take a self-righteous moral stance against genocide. When Ward and Jakoby battle a ruthless Mexican street gang that Ayer portrays as an undifferentiated and killable horde, it is again unclear whether Jakoby is coded as Latinx or something else entirely. These ambiguities are further complicated by the coding of the elves as white and ultrawealthy. I have chosen to omit these details and several others for the sake of developing a coherent argument about a fundamentally incoherent film that mixes genres and racial codes with sloppy abandon. <?page no="132"?> Genre, Racecraft, and Bright 133 Earth mythology mimics - and in a sense, validates - everyday racial common sense. Orcs and dwarves do not exist, yet the idea that the peoples or “cultures” of Middle Earth are distinguished and ranked by their inherited skin colors, phenotypes, body sizes, and psychological tendencies - the orcs being dumb and belligerent, the dwarves being avaricious - is simply an English understanding of “Mongol-types” and Jews in a displaced and slightly exaggerated form. Young calls Tolkien’s work “literally a racist’s fantasy land” (“How Can”), and the paradoxical juxtaposition of literality and fantasy captures the point I am trying to make about Tolkien’s aesthetics. In The Lord of the Rings, fantasy is the realism of racecraft; like racist drawings of large noses or lips, Tolkien embellishes social fictions of difference as if he were caricaturing real racial traits. Tolkien’s apparent departure from consensus reality and into the magical world of Middle Earth brings us right back to the science fantasies that shaped what he and many of his contemporaries took to be the common-sense reality of race. While Bright aspires to anti-racism, it reproduces Tolkien’s literalization of racial fantasy. The film treats Tolkien’s mythology as if it were an allegory of actual racial difference in the United States. Bright’s universe is one in which social and political relations are structured by biological differences among antagonistic races - an exaggerated version of the contemporary United States that already exists in the everyday science fantasy of racial difference. Racial social collectives - whites, African Americans, Latinxs, Asians, etc. - already exist, if not physically, then “metaphysically,” in the realm of racecraft. Americans already treat members of these collectives as if they were orcs or dwarves, i.e., as if their differences from one another in “real” life were organized around the same differences in kind that differentiate Tolkien’s races from one another. Using the social realism and grit of the buddy cop movie, Bright gives this racial common sense a visually and narratively concrete existence; it exemplifies the workings of racecraft itself as it transforms the non-empirical into nature. This transformation is on display in a scene in which a detective, racially coded as Middle Eastern, explains why there are no orcs in the American National Basketball Association: since all orcs have large, squat bodies - since their bodies are racially determined - they cannot jump. “It’s not racism, it’s physics,” the detective explains. This racial fantasy is a mimesis of the pervasive belief among Americans that the racial composition of professional sports is determined by the “physics” of natural, racially inherited bodies. What is novel is that Bright flips the racism embedded in Tolkien’s “Mongol” orcs and transforms its own orcs into the objects of racism. As <?page no="133"?> J. Jesse Ramírez 134 I mentioned above, Jakoby is the first orc in the LAPD. At the beginning of the film, a criminal orc shoots Ward while Jakoby is distractedly buying a burrito - a typically “ethnic” food - from a street vendor. Ward and other police officers suspect that Jakoby allowed the shooter to escape because orcs are racially loyal to other orcs, and thus cannot ever be true cops (thus implying, in a repetition of the rhetoric of the recent Blue Lives Matter movement, that the police are another, competing race). Jakoby must prove that he is more cop than orc, a difficult task given that he is subjected to constant racism, and because orcs in the city appear to have legitimate grievances against the LAPD. In a scene that resonates with the shooting of Castile and other African American men, Ward and Jakoby witness LAPD officers savagely beating an orc in front of an angry crowd. Thus, Jakoby’s dilemma is supposed to resonate with that of the “real” cop of color: he wants to join an institution that racially oppresses his own people. Bright’s “solution” to this dilemma involves a convoluted reworking of its most important generic intertext next to The Lord of the Rings, namely, Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day (2001). One connection between the two films is direct and obvious: Bright’s director David Ayer wrote the Training Day screenplay. It is instructive to recall that Training Day, starring Denzel Washington as dirty cop Alonzo Harris and Ethan Hawke as Jake Hoyt, his upstanding white counterpart, is based in part on the so-called Rampart scandal of the late 1990s. The scandal centered on police corruption in the LAPD’s Rampart Division, principally in the CRASH anti-gang unit. Members of the unit harassed, beat, and shot alleged gang members, most of whom were Latinx; planted evidence; and worked with the former Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport suspects. As Tom Hayden of The Nation reported at the time, the CRASH unit was effectively a paramilitary “law and order” squad that waged a racist war against Latinx youth (“LAPD”). Training Day’s Harris is based in part on one of the central figures in the scandal, officer Rafael Perez, a black Puerto Rican (Baker 57). In Training Day, Harris attempts to frame and kill Hoyt when Hoyt refuses to participate in Harris’s corrupt practices. Hoyt’s defeat of Harris at the end of the film is a remarkable white redemption of the LAPD, given that it racecrafts the institution’s abuses as black, displacing the LAPD’s historic oppression of people of color. Harris’s defiant speech at the end of the film invokes another moment of racecraft in American cinema - “King Kong ain’t got shit on me! ” - but while King Kong’s death in the 1933 film is pitiable, there is nothing <?page no="134"?> Genre, Racecraft, and Bright 135 sympathetic about Harris and nothing to mourn in his death (Sexton 60). For Training Day suggests that the problem with the LAPD is not that it is an institution with a deep history of white racism, but rather that it has been infiltrated by too many cops of color - too many “diversity” hires. How ironic, or perhaps all too fitting, that Washington won his first Academy Award for Best Actor as the LAPD’s scapegoat. Bright is Training Day with orcs. Or, to state the thesis more precisely: Bright is Training Day for a post-Black Lives Matter moment in US political and cultural history in which it is no longer ideologically possible to displace the police’s racist corruption onto a black “bad apple” cop, at the same time that it is no longer ideologically possible to redeem the police as a social institution through a narrative of diversification. Bright is of interest to the study of genre and American racecraft because it signals the ideological impossibility of the interracial buddy cop movie and attempts symbolically to solve the problem by inventing a new race. Training Day with Orcs, or, How to Make Cops Great Again Bright’s representation of the LAPD combines Tolkien’s racecraft and the racialized image of the police in Training Day. As in Training Day, the LAPD in Bright is post-white. Ward, the lead character, is black, and an unusually high percentage of police who receive screen time and dialogue are Latinx (Captain Perez [Andrea Navedo], Officer Rodriguez [Jay Hernandez]) and Asian (Sergeant Ching [Margaret Cho], Agent Yamahara [Kenneth Choi]). Although Ward’s white colleague, Officer Pollard (Ike Barinholtz), is the most vociferous anti-orc racist in the film, the non-white officers participate in this racism equally. There is a kind of equal-opportunity racism on display in Bright that suggests that a predominantly non-white police force - reflecting the demographic shifts in Los Angeles more broadly - is no less racist than a majority white police force. One Latina cop, for example, uses the “all you people look alike” racist trope on Jakoby when she mockingly asks him if an orc on a “Wanted” poster is his cousin. The film’s implicit message is that while it was white LAPD officers who beat the African American Rodney King in 1992, and while it is mainly white officers who have been involved in the more recent murders of black youth, the reverse scenario is just as likely if blacks and other people of color come to dominate the LAPD. If race is “physics,” an obvious, natural condition, <?page no="135"?> J. Jesse Ramírez 136 then racism is an equally obvious and natural response to race that any racial group in power will be tempted to practice. Later in Bright, the film’s predominantly post-white police will replay Alonzo Harris’s storyline and prove to be corrupt when Ward and Jakoby accidentally discover a magic wand. Instead of reporting the wand to the higher authorities, Ward and Jakoby’s colleagues want to keep it for themselves and use its powers to their advantage. Led by Sergeant Ching, the corrupt cops coerce Ward into agreeing with their plan to murder Jakoby, whom they suspect will report their misdeeds. Ward nearly carries out the plan but discovers in the last second before shooting Jakoby that the other cops have double-crossed him and intend to eliminate him, too. Thus, the narrative and racial logic of the film is that two good, conscientious cops are pitted against the same corrupt, racialized, post-white LAPD that Ayer depicts in Training Day. But the crucial difference is that in Bright, the black cop no longer epitomizes the police’s displaced racism, as Harris has been replaced with Ward, played by the perennial good guy and apolitical action hero Will Smith. 3 Ward kills the corrupt cops in self-defense, proving that he, despite being black, is on the side of the “good” LAPD. As if testifying to Ayer’s anxiety that the viewer has missed this rewriting of Training Day, Ward explains to Jakoby that he had to kill the corrupt cops because “half of our division is on some old-school Rampart shit.” Ward and Jakoby then spend most of the rest of the film running from the LAPD and engaged in shoot-outs with various antagonists who want to steal the magic wand from them. 4 If Ayer wanted Bright to revise, or perhaps even “correct,” the scapegoating of Harris in Training Day, could he have done so with Ward alone? Why does Ward need an orc sidekick? A scene at the beginning of Bright is telling. After recovering from his gunshot wound, Ward rises from bed and is pressured by his white wife to kill a fairy that is abusing the bird feeder in the front of their house. When Ward goes outside to kill the fairy, he is greeted by a crowd of black neighbors who are having 3 I would like to thank Keith Corson for this insight into the apolitical aura of Will Smith. 4 The primary antagonists are the Mexican street gang mentioned in the note above and Leilah, the leader of an elf sect that plans to resurrect the Dark Lord. As in many buddy cop movies, male homosociality in Bright requires the marginalization of women. Leilah’s prominent role in the plot as a brutally effective killer does little to change the film’s gender politics, which requires the destruction of the femme fatale in order to solidify male friendship. <?page no="136"?> Genre, Racecraft, and Bright 137 a small party on the front lawn. The neighbors are listening to rap music and drinking alcohol. Like the orcs, they are racecrafted as “gangstas” whom Ward finds annoying because they lower the value of his home: “You guys just keep doing your gangsta stuff. I’m just trying to sell my house.” Thus, while Ward and his neighbors are all black, they are not united in racial solidarity. In fact, the exchange between Ward and one of his neighbors reveals that Ward disagrees with Curtis Mayfield’s song “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue” (1970), for Ward’s blue is darker than black (this being the order of solidarity that Ward and other cops will demand that Jakoby practice in relation to his own race, the orcs). Seeing that Ward intends to kill the fairy, the neighbor cynically encourages Ward to “take the little homie out LAPD style, like you do.” This “little homie” could easily refer to one of the neighbor’s friends, and thus figures as an indirect reference to the LAPD’s routine violence (“like you do”) against black youth. Before brutally smashing the fairy with a broom, Ward utters the seemingly gratuitous phrase “fairy lives don’t matter today.” On the one hand, it is simply a bad joke, a throwaway line. On the other hand, Ward’s phrase is an obvious reference to the Black Lives Matter movement that subtly aligns Ward with police violence and against his own community. “It’s what I do,” says Ward, as if presenting his killing of the “little homie” as a demonstration of the same police power that he routinely uses against blacks. In the political climate of the contemporary United States, after the highly publicized police murders of African Americans, Bright suggests that it is no longer ideologically feasible to sacrifice a black cop as the scapegoat for police brutality. This is why Bright replaces Harris with Ward, a black antagonist for a black good guy. But Ward alone is insufficient. Crucially, Bright also seems to believe that it is no longer possible to fix the police by diversifying it. Ward is already a cop, and the rest of the LAPD is predominantly Latinx and Asian. Indeed, diversity itself has morphed into the problem. Although Ward will prove to be a decent cop in the end, his relationship to other African Americans is antagonistic. The other non-white cops in the LAPD are just as racist and corrupt as white cops. Thus, orcs are necessary because they are symptomatic of the ideological exhaustion of the interracial buddy cop movie as a narrative of racial inclusion. There are no more “real” races whose antagonisms can be overcome through the crucible of policing. In order to continue to tell this ideological narrative of the redemption of the police through integration, a new fictional collectivity must be racecrafted: the orcs. <?page no="137"?> J. Jesse Ramírez 138 Early on in Bright, Ward’s daughter announces the real problem of the film. “Why do you have to be a policeman? ” she asks disappointedly. “Everybody hates policemen.” In other words, the crisis to which Bright is responding - and in this sense it echoes conservative rhetoric - is that America hates cops, that the police are losing legitimacy, and that too many people have forgotten that blue lives matter, too. When Ward and Jakoby eventually bring the wand to the proper authorities and are cleared of wrongdoing, the two cops are given awards at a special public ceremony. Ward is bitter that Sergeant Ching and the other corrupt cops have not been exposed, but Jakoby reassures him that even if the public does not understand the full story, he and Ward know that there is still a difference between good cops and bad cops. Jakoby proudly receives his medal and applause from the crowd, which includes orcs. During the struggle to retrieve the wand, Jakoby is “blooded” - a vague term that the film never fully explains, but clearly functions as a sign of racial recognition among orcs. Jakoby has finally proven that an orc can be a real cop without repudiating his own race. For when the existing races no longer do the trick of legitimizing one of the most violent and oppressive of American institutions, racecraft must go to work on new races in order to make cops great again. Against Tolerance In “How Genetics is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race,’” an excerpt from his new book on DNA featured in the New York Times, the Harvard geneticist David Reich urges Americans to face up to a hard, uncomfortable fact: the unexamined assumptions that most of them already hold about the biological nature of race are true. Kicking down the wide-open door of American racecraft, Reich presents various data that allegedly demonstrate that this time, despite centuries of pseudoscientific theories, genetics has proven that race is real. Reich warns that if scientists fail to have the intellectual courage to keep on dressing up the old race consciousness in the latest science, they are in effect encouraging the growth of public skepticism toward expertise. Worse still, unless science meets racists on their own terms - their belief in the fundamental truth of racial difference - racists will dominate the conversation. To be sure, Reich sounds reasonable: “Arguing that no substantial differences among human populations are possible will only invite the racist misuse of genetics that we wish to avoid.” But Reich <?page no="138"?> Genre, Racecraft, and Bright 139 falsely uses race as a synonym for “differences among human populations” and echoes the right-wing conspiracy theory that there is a pervasive taboo - call it “political correctness” - against speaking honestly about racial difference. 5 Similarly, the most progressive position that Bright can muster is that we must politely respect racial differences that are obviously real. As Ward explains to his daughter, “orcs are not dumb. All the races are different, and just because they’re different doesn’t mean that anybody’s smarter or dumber, better or worse.” Reich could not have said it better. His research also emphasizes that although races are different on average, Americans should still treat one another equally as individuals. What Bright and the contemporary revival of race in genetics have in common is a rhetoric of liberal tolerance that continues to racecraft American social relations. To be sure, a racially tolerant America is preferable to a racially intolerant America. However, the critical utopian function of the concept of racecraft is its insistence that racial consciousness is a mystification of social life. It thus contains a counterscience fiction that anticipates an American future in which races can no longer be treated with tolerance or intolerance - not because the peoples currently misidentified as races will have disappeared, but because the everyday epistemology of race will have become defunct in a truly egalitarian society. To be clear: Bright is not a good movie. It was deservingly panned by most film critics, and given its slapdash mixture of generic elements, Lindsay Ellis is probably right to call Bright “The Apotheosis of Lazy Worldbuilding.” Nonetheless, within the emerging ecosystem of platform cinema, it does not matter that a film is bad - as long as people watch it. And watch it they did. Netflix is already planning a sequel to Bright. Yet I have not attempted to demonstrate that Bright is a good movie, only that it is significant to the study of genre in the age of Netflix and to the study of racecraft in the contemporary American conjuncture of police violence and the return of racial genetics. For the task of critical genre studies is not simply to celebrate the things we 5 There may indeed be average differences among human biogeographical ancestry groups. The fundamental flaw in Reich’s article is that he conflates race, a social construction, with these groups. Obviously, human beings are different, and some of these differences could possibly be described as average group traits. But the fact remains that race is pseudo-science and thus cannot accurately map these traits or their distribution. Genetics is not changing our understanding of race; it is demonstrating the radical inadequacy of race as a conceptual foundation for understanding human diversity. <?page no="139"?> J. Jesse Ramírez 140 love, but also to elucidate the things we love to hate, and to understand why products made to exploit American patterns of consumption and racial consciousness can only fail us in more or less interesting ways. <?page no="140"?> Genre, Racecraft, and Bright 141 References Films Bright. Directed by David Ayer. USA, 2017. Training Day. Directed by Antoine Fuqua. USA, 2001. Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Baker, Aaron. “Beyond the Thin Line of Black and Blue: Movies and Police Misconduct in Los Angeles.” Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen. Ed. Murray Pommerance. New York: State University of New York Press. 55-64. Balibar, Étienne. “Is There a Neo-Racism? ” Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Trans. Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 1991. 17- 28. Ellis, Lindsay. “Bright: The Apotheosis of Lazy Worldbuilding.” YouTube, uploaded by Lindsay Ellis, 1 February 2018. https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=gLOxQxMnEz8. Accessed 29 March 2019. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Fields, Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. New York: Verso, 2012. “Genus, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, www.oed.com/ view/ Entry/ 77719. Accessed 18 November 2018. Hayden, Tom. “LAPD: Law and Disorder.” The Nation, 22 March 2000. https: / / www.thenation.com/ article/ lapd-law-and-disorder/ . Accessed 29 March 2019. “How Netflix Uses Big Data to Drive Success.” Inside Big Data, 20 January 2018. https: / / insidebigdata.com/ 2018/ 01/ 20/ netflix-usesbig-data-drive-success/ . Accessed 29 March 2019. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge Classics, 2002. Konstantinou, Lee. “The Hangman of Critique.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 17 July 2016. https: / / lareviewofbooks.org/ article/ thehangman-of-critique/ . Accessed 29 March 2019. Madrigal, Alexis. “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood.” The Atlantic, 2 January 2014. https: / / www.theatlantic.com/ technology/ <?page no="141"?> J. Jesse Ramírez 142 archive/ 2014/ 01/ how-netflix-reverse-engineered-hollywood/ 282679/ . Accessed 29 March 2019. Miles, Robert and Malcolm Brown. Racism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2003. Moore, Ward. Bring the Jubilee. New York: Ballantine, 1953. Morning, Ann. The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. “Number of Netflix Streaming Subscribers in The United States from 3rd Quarter 2011 to 3rd Quarter 2018 (in Millions).” Statista. www.statista.com/ statistics/ 250937/ quarterly-number-of-netflixstreaming-subscribers-in-the-us/ . Accessed 29 March 2019. Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Reich, David. “How Genetics is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race.’” New York Times, 23 March 2018. https: / / www.nytimes. com/ 2018/ 03/ 23/ opinion/ sunday/ genetics-race.html. Accessed 29 March 2019. Rodriguez, Ashley. “Netflix’s First Big Movie ‘Bright’ Feels Like a Blockbuster Built by an Algorithm.” Quartz, 22 December 2017. https: / / qz.com/ 1161921/ netflixs-will-smith-movie-bright-acts-likealgorithms-made-it/ . Accessed 29 March 2019. Rosenhan, D. L. “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” Science 179 (1973): 250-58. Sexton, Jared. “The Ruse of Engagement: Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing.” American Quarterly 61.1 (2009): 39-63. Shippey, T. A. The Road to Middle Earth. London: Grafton, 1992. Smith, Mitch. “Video of Police Killing of Philando Castile Is Publicly Released.” New York Times, 20 June 2017. https: / / www.nytimes. com/ 2017/ 06/ 20/ us/ police-shooting-castile-trial-video.html. Accessed 29 March 2019. Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. ---. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Ballantine, 1965. Young, Helen. “How Can We Untangle White Supremacy From Medieval Studies? ” Pacific Standard, 9 October 2017. https: / / psmag.com/ education/ untangling-white-supremacy-frommedieval-studies. Accessed 29 March 2019. ---. Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness. New York: Routledge, 2016. <?page no="142"?> Genre, Racecraft, and Bright 143 Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books, 2019. <?page no="144"?> Literary Genre and Affective Experience: Intergenerational Trauma in the Neo-Slave Narrative of Toni Morrison’s Beloved Courtney Jacobs and Ronald Schleifer This essay examines narrative strategies of pain and suffering in two literary genres - the nineteenth-century slave narrative and the neo-slave narrative - that share as their focus the enduring trauma of American slavery across generations. Specifically, it compares how these genres shape and are shaped by the cultural politics of intergenerational emotional experience and, in the case of the contemporary neo-slave narrative, refigure personal emotions as “impersonal,” or culturally particular, affective experiences. This approach to affect as historical and contextual allows for an understanding of how genre functions to signify and establish what feels to be self-evident social meaning and to signify and establish social involvement. Taking as its focus Toni Morrison’s Beloved, this essay analyzes how the novel and its genre communicate the illegible and unspeakable interiority of traumatic experience to confront the blank and bewildering force of the legacy of chattel slavery that continues to influence the experience of American culture in the twenty-first century. Keywords: Toni Morrison, Beloved, genre theory, slave narrative, neoslave narrative, affect theory, trauma Preamble: Chattel Slavery The chattel slavery practiced in the antebellum South can be distinguished from other forms of human slavery by the corpus of laws that The Genres of Genre: Form, Formats, and Cultural Formations. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 38. Ed. Cécile Heim, Boris Vejdovsky and Benjamin Pickford. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 145-66. <?page no="145"?> Courtney Jacobs and Ronald Schleifer 146 identified the enslaved not as legal persons but as “chattels personal,” or the explicit property of an owner or master. Under this legal designation, and unlike other forms of human bondage, slaves in antebellum America could be individually sold as merchandise. In addition, they were not granted civic rights or protections; they could not enter into contracts, own property, or, in most cases, marry or “constitute families” (Goodell 379). Many slave narratives make clear that the fears of being sold or separated from family were among the worst, if not the worst abominations of American slavery. Introduction Traditional slave narratives of the American South were fueled, in part, by a desire to facilitate black participation in American democracy both prior to, and following, emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century. The genre depicts, in realistic detail, the extreme brutality of chattel slavery, and, for the first time in American history, the anguish of the suffering black body, which was rendered from the authorial perspective of previously enslaved persons. Nineteenth-century narrative portrayals of captives’ pain, emotional anguish, and violated bodies were rhetorically crafted to create the conditions for empathetic understanding in contemporary readers. Narrative empathy, as it was evoked in the slave narrative genre, was positioned ideally as a tool of political action: it functioned to marshal emotional experience with the end of promoting abolition and the subsequent enfranchisement of freed slaves. In significant part, this essay focuses on the degree to which readers are invited to participate in and emotionally respond to scenes of suffering in literary genres, like the slave narrative and its descendant the neo-slave narrative, that share as their focus the enduring trauma of American slavery across generations. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) pioneered the genre of neo-slave narrative. Unlike its literary predecessors, Beloved does not attempt to make the suffering black body entirely legible and therefore subject to processes of identification and empathetic understanding that gloss over differences and celebrate commonality. Rather, it recognizes that the portrayal of “legible” experience might only acknowledge pain and suffering to the degree that it can be imagined and understood outside the politics of the specific historical and cultural context of that pain and suffering. In depicting the “illegibility” of the suffering body or, more specifically, of the suffering family, Morrison’s novel, unlike the nine- <?page no="146"?> Beloved, Genre, and Affective Experience 147 teenth-century autobiographical slave narrative, does not fetishize, but rather interrogates, the political potential of narrative empathy. We argue then that Beloved recasts what Raymond Williams calls the “structures of feeling” (132) associated with the traditional slave narrative in order to reorient the attention of its collective American readership to the cause and source of the wounds it so painstakingly describes: the national and cultural narratives of which the institution of chattel slavery was a constitutive part. Taking narrative depictions of pain and suffering in Beloved as its focus, this essay examines how literary genres mediate between aesthetic conceptions of emotional experience conceived of as private, and conceptions of experience regarded as impersonal, or culturally particular, principally in relation to the treatment of race and gender in American literature. 1 The term affect has, since the 1990s, increasingly been deployed in the field of literary studies - as an alternative to, or supplement for, more traditional conceptualizations of emotion, feeling, or, in some cases, experience - in order to critique, or as Fredric Jameson posits “usefully unsettle” (36), sustained distinctions between the private and public (personal and impersonal) qualities of emotional experience. In his recent publication The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson describes affect as “global waves of generalized sensation” (28) and “singularities and intensities, existences rather than essences” (36) that are known exclusively to the body. Here, he gestures toward a common conceptualization of affect as the preconscious, somatic intensities that prime us to act in response to our environment without rational intention. This approach, however, suggests an explicit separation between mind and body that renders the experience of strong feeling unnarratable and unconnected to any social 1 We do not bring up the issue here of “collective American readership” of Morrison’s neo-slave narrative to suggest that non-American readers are incapable of engaging and benefitting from her work (and from American studies more generally). Rather, we bring this up because chattel slavery was not simply an aberrational atrocity in the development of the American republic - such atrocities can be discerned in cultural histories throughout the world - but, as we note above, it is a constitutive part of the development of American society organized, from its beginnings, around entrepreneurial capitalism, which, as we noted in the Preamble, understood human enslavement as essentially that of “chattels personal” (Goodell 379). Thus, to be an American - even, in our cases where our ancestors immigrated to the US long after emancipation - is to be a special audience for the “illegibility” of chattel slavery we describe in late twentieth-century neoslave narratives. That is, the intergenerational trauma of slavery we examine here is a constituent aspect of the American polity. Another special audience, as we suggest later, are African American writers who grapple, like Morrison, explicitly with the illegibility of such trauma. <?page no="147"?> Courtney Jacobs and Ronald Schleifer 148 or historical context. 2 Thus, insofar as this conception of affect might be associated with a working sense of how literary genre is characterized by an emotional force, it renders genre as a trans-historical manifestation of abstract form. 3 In this essay, however, we regard affect - even, automatic responses that seem to be what some call “preconscious” responses to the environment - as phenomena imbricated in a particular historical context. Moreover, by historicizing “preconscious” and “prediscursive” affect - recurrent terms in affect theory - we are able to contrast such affective feeling with conscious cognitive understanding to the ends of emphasizing the power, or the force, rather than the knowledge of the literary genres that these ends inform. Affect, for our purposes then, is relational, and our interpretation of the affective force of literary genre explores how the power of conspicuously impersonal affect in literature manifests itself in dynamic relation to specific material contexts. The notion of affect we are positing is influenced by Williams’s “structures of feeling.” In Marxism and Literature, Williams articulates this term in order to focus upon and analyze the phenomenon of social rather than individual experience - or really how the social inhabits seemingly individual or private experiences. He suggests that an alternative definition [to “structures of feeling”] would be structures of experience [. . .] a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics. (132) Approaching affect in this way allows us to explore how cognition, feeling, and a wider notion of impersonal experience help us to understand how the formal literary understanding of genre functions to signify and establish what feels to be self-evident social meaning and to signify and establish social involvement. Such an understanding of affect, we suggest, allows us to both focus and widen the power of genre in the study of literature. It is the work - or at least a major aspect of the work - of literary genres (as opposed to everyday speech genres), this paper argues, to deploy such impersonal emotional experience and sensation to the ends of widening sensibility and increasing the horizon of experience itself. As noted above, we begin by determining how the transmission of the 2 For further discussion of emotions and the human subject, see Terada. 3 For a gesture toward this notion of genre, see Schleifer, “Death.” <?page no="148"?> Beloved, Genre, and Affective Experience 149 affective experience of pain in the traditional slave narrative is positioned ideally as a political tool deployed to promote action, which is the work of speech genres. Then, by tracing the literary lineage between this historical genre and its subsequent twentieth-century transformation, we investigate how Morrison’s neo-slave narrative Beloved depicts a form of suffering, particularly the suffering associated with black motherhood, that is no longer celebrated or romanticized as a sign of individual agency, and is no longer deployed, as it once was, as a warrant to support rhetorical arguments for citizenship. Rather, neo-slave narratives such as Beloved aim at enlarging experience to encompass the illegible and unspeakable not in order to marshal and deploy cognitive understanding but, powerfully, to confront the blank and bewildering force of the legacy of chattel slavery that continues to shape the experience of American culture in the twenty-first century. The Affective Force of Traditional Slave Narratives I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself; on the contrary it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history. Neither do I care to excite sympathy for my own sufferings. But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what slavery really is. Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations. - Harriet A. Jacobs, Preface to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: : Written by Herself The emergence of the slave narrative genre marks a period in American history during which, according to Henry Louis Gates Jr., “the black slave first proclaimed himself a human being” (xii). The act of writing the slave narrative, says Gates, was simultaneously one of personal expression and social interpellation, an opportunity “for the slave to write himself into the human community through the action of first-person narration” (xiii). It was also through these stories that black slaves or their immediate offspring could be considered contributors to the national narrative of American identity; as the above epigraph from Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl shows, the genre did in fact reflect “an immense faith in the emancipatory promise” of storytelling (Dubey 187). In particular, the genre was marked by a rhetoric of political enfranchisement that significantly shaped the texts’ affective engagement with the brutal realities of chattel slavery and their larger ac- <?page no="149"?> Courtney Jacobs and Ronald Schleifer 150 knowledgment of the national affects defining race relations in the antebellum period. 4 The rhetorical force of slave narratives hinges on the establishment of narrative empathy, what Rita Charon describes as the ability to listen deeply to “the plight of another person” and “be moved” by that plight (3, 11). In her study of empathy in literature, Suzanne Keen agrees that readers or listeners need not have identical experiences to empathize with stories they read, but she argues that empathy is characterized by a “spontaneous sharing of affect” that “can be provoked by witnessing another’s emotional state” (4). She clarifies her argument by distinguishing between prosocial or “other-directed” empathy, which leads to “empathetic concern,” and “over-aroused” empathetic responses, which result in self-oriented personal anxiety (4-5). The elusive quality of “being moved” described by Charon approximates Keen’s understanding of “empathetic concern,” 5 and this particular terminology provides a foundation for understanding how the affective valences of the slave narrative are “transferential”: empathy provides a means of transferring affect from one situation to another and in doing so maintains the “legibility” of the emotion itself - rather than submerging readers in an emotional experience that is not quite their own to the point that they are driven to distress. By engaging this type of narrative empathy, the traditional slave narrative promote social solidarity and social action. 6 Written in a distinct literary style “derived from the pulpit, the lectern, and the soapbox” (Bell 28), nineteenth-century slave narratives have historically featured a “strident moral voice” (Stepto 3) and an “emotional fervor” (Bell 28). The tonal “fervor” of the slave narrative - also compared by Bernard Bell to generic understandings of “romance” or “melodrama” (27) - resembles that of a religious sermon; this particular tone of narrative voice constitutes, in part, the genre’s affective force in that it guides the degree to which readers are able to feel empathetic concern for the suffering of characters. While sermons were often 4 José Esteban Muñoz contends that “standard models of United States citizenship are based on a national affect” and defines this “official” national affect as a normalized “mode of being in the world primarily associated with white middle-class subjectivity” (“Feeling Brown” 69). 5 Keen argues that “empathetic concern,” a term she borrows from the field of psychology, more closely resembles sympathy - “the more complex, differentiated feeling for another” (4). 6 While we are not using this term in strict connection with Sigmund Freud’s central psychoanalytic concept of “transference” as such, it is interesting to note that Freud’s therapeutic project was precisely to make illegible affect legible. <?page no="150"?> Beloved, Genre, and Affective Experience 151 characterized by an outpouring of devotion, the slave narrative’s rhetorical style included the cultivation of emotional restraint - in particular, the denial of personal emotional engagement in favor of personal cognitive engagement - with the goal of achieving emancipation and, later, enfranchisement for larger communities of slaves and freemen in the Southern states. The inclusion of one or more prefaces or disclaimers is a common rhetorical strategy that serves this political purpose in the autobiographical slave narrative; these paratextual features act to establish authorial ethos by way of an appeal to a rational, as opposed to emotional or sentimental, logic of storytelling. Claims of stoicism, or the denial - or at least the dampening - of personal emotional engagement with one’s tale allowed authors of slave narratives to accentuate a larger political project. Jacobs establishes an emotional register intended to inform her contemporary audience’s experience of the text, 7 but such a register subordinates itself to its larger cognitive goals. Thus, Jacobs denies taking pleasure in narration - and alludes to, even as she dampens, feelings of suffering associated with recounting her tale - and suggests that she does not seek an empathetic response for her own personal experience, but rather asks readers to feel for “two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them worse” (1). Here, Jacobs’s preface highlights an important distinction that emerges through the genre’s treatment of the black body suffering pain - the distinction between the personal (and in this case authorial) and the impersonal or social experience of pain. Zoe Norridge calls such impersonal experience “social suffering”: the expression of suffering as a “manifestation of a social ill and a symptom of inequalities of power” (15). “Social suffering” can be characterized as legible rather than preconsciously affective, insofar as it is based upon shared assumptions and understandings. The genre of the slave narrative documents an important movement toward recognizing, as Williams purports, the social qualities of emotional experience - and in particular the common experience of suffering - that might otherwise seem deeply private and personal. 7 As such, authors of slave narratives were subject to editorial pressures, and requests were often made to remove material deemed “too disturbing for antebellum white readers” (Li 329). Moreover, authors were also obliged to include testimonials from white abolitionists or political leaders attesting to the moral character, intellectual capacity, and past accomplishments of the primary author. A white abolitionist and women’s rights activist named Lydia Maria Child, for example, provided a preface to Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; similarly, William Lloyd Garrison offered a testimony to preface the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). <?page no="151"?> Courtney Jacobs and Ronald Schleifer 152 Therefore, disclaimers like those that precede Jacobs’s narrative set the parameters for the text’s ability to inspire a type of empathetic concern that traffics in shared categories of feeling rather than prediscursive affect. In addition, such invocations of shared categories of feeling respond to and counter widely held racist assumptions that captive people did not have the capacity to communicate through the written word (see Gates xi). Buried in this assumption is a fetishization of the physical black body in a state of perpetual contentment and as incapable of experiencing pain and expressing suffering. “Fetishization” - a religious term appropriated by Karl Marx for purposes of political analysis and by Freud for psychoanalysis - attempts to create a shared category for emotional response, a category which is, essentially, cognitive: it fully exists within a program of understanding rather than feeling. In her analysis of the affective forms of domination deployed during slavery in nineteenth-century America, Saidiya V. Hartman describes this type of “program of understanding” within the context of chattel slavery: “the fixation” on (or fetishization of) a slave’s perceived enjoyment of their captivity “conceals the affiliations of white enjoyment and black subjection and the affective dimensions of mastery and servitude” (25). Hartman begins, here, to articulate the value of investigating “affect” as not only a record of emotional intensity but as a legalistic impulse within the slave narrative; it is part of the exigency surrounding the literary genre to counter - to argue against rather than to emotionally respond to - the social belief that the inability to experience and express pain, and perhaps emotion in general, warranted the legal subjugation of black slaves. Foundational to the legal framework underlying chattel slavery is the conviction, according to Hartman, that the black slave “is both insensate and content [. . .] indifferent to pain and induced to work by threats of corporal punishment” (51). This type of “pathologizing of the black body,” Hartman goes on, “then serves to justify acts of violence that exceed normative standards of the humanely tolerable, though within the limits of the socially tolerable as concerned the black slave” (51). Hartman’s description of the incongruity at the center of what she calls the slave’s “contented servitude” (52) highlights how the systematic torture of black slaves marshaled an analysis of affective social phenomenon within a framework of shared, in this case legal, understanding. The slave narrative takes to task this fetishization of the perceived pleasure, and the denial of the pain, of black slaves - what we might call a radical and egregious failure of empathetic concern for the human plight of chattel slaves - not by offering a nuanced psychological profile of enslaved persons, but rather by forwarding urgent abolitionist arguments <?page no="152"?> Beloved, Genre, and Affective Experience 153 that utilize the conventions surrounding categories of understanding shared by nineteenth-century white readers (abolitionist or not). Thus, the characterization of black figures in traditional slave narratives often serves as a corrective to the legalistic argument that Hartman documents: namely, that the pathologizing of the black body as incapable of experiencing suffering justified the legal and social normalization of extreme violence against slaves in the antebellum South. Such characterization, as we mentioned earlier, provides legible accounts of affect. Thus, characters in slave narratives are often uniformly heroic and skilled, and by possessing such traits, they represent a set of important shared categories of understanding, tropes, and archetypes that outweigh their cognitive function as “model persons.” 8 Figures like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Nat Turner, as well as Jacobs herself, each symbolized a litany of inspiring values - “an indomitable will to be free, unshakable faith in the justice of their cause, extraordinary genius, and irrepressible bravery” (Bell 29) - that contributed above all to the texts’ (and the genre’s) urgent political agenda. These characters served a complex metaleptic function: 9 as both author and literary persona, they reinforce the truth of their stories while also exemplifying traits that metonymically lend emotional force to a text’s abolitionist argument. That is, metaleptically, they bring together the archetypal authority of personal narrative (autobiography) and the authority of narrative functions (e.g., the archetypal characteristics of a literary hero) to enhance the legibility of their narratives. Such authority is powerful because it is based on shared horizons of cognitive understanding among readers, authors, and recognizable narrative forms; and this cognitive understanding is the basis of legibility rendered in literary narrative insofar as it is distinct from the embodied sensations and intensities of affect. 8 In Storytelling and the Sciences of the Mind, David Herman states that “characters in fictional as well as nonfictional narratives can be described as textually grounded models of individuals-in-a-world, or [what he terms] model persons” (193). Herman’s concept of model persons reflects his larger contention that storytelling practices, including characterization, are interlinked with recognizable intelligent, or cognitive, activity. 9 Authorial metalepsis works to complicate or collapse narrative boundaries and shatter mimetic illusion in a text by explicitly representing an extradiegetic author figure within the diegetic story world. <?page no="153"?> Courtney Jacobs and Ronald Schleifer 154 The Neo-Slave Narrative We are considering the antebellum slave narrative, particularly its affective rhetoric, as an important literary precursor to the late twentiethcentury genre of the neo-slave narrative, which Stephanie Li argues is “one of the most important African-American literary genres of the past 50 years” (326). By directly engaging with the rhetorical and narrative strategies of nineteenth-century autobiographical accounts of chattel slavery, authors like Gayle Jones, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, and Toni Morrison explore the history of slavery in the United States while interrogating the relation between affect and dominant forms of national history-telling. By establishing varying degrees of distance from the official historical record, the genre works to interrogate the relationship between the history of slavery and the dynamics of contemporary racial identity in America. Such analysis sheds light on the possibilities and precariousness of narrative empathy as well as the distinction between the professed historicity of the slave narrative and what we might describe as the “literary historicity” of the neo-slave narrative. What makes the neo-slave narrative so integral to the canon of contemporary American literature, according to Morrison, is how its novels account for the critical absence of the “interior lives” of enslaved men and women (“The Site of Memory” 110). In response to Morrison’s analysis, we suggest that the neo-slave narrative - through the deployment of a bewildering affective force - renders the interior emotional lives of enslaved people not as legible, but as a palpable phenomenon in order to instigate disidentification in readers. José Esteban Muñoz defines “disidentification” as a process that scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. (Disidentifications 31) In the context of our essay, the “raw material” he describes is precisely illegible to the same degree that “preconscious” and “pre-discursive” affect is illegible. But in Morrison and others, that “raw material” is deployed to indicate, without specifying, the “interior lives” of slaves. Essentially, then, rather than making the affective force of such an account <?page no="154"?> Beloved, Genre, and Affective Experience 155 legible by means of shared understandings of affective states for rhetorical purposes - as Jacobs purports to do in her preface - one goal of the neo-slave narrative, particularly in the example of Morrison’s Beloved, is to isolate and explore, in depth, the interiority of experience; in particular the experiences of pain and suffering, which cannot be grasped or comprehended by way of narrative empathy by all audiences. Such affective bewilderment, we argue, creates a sense of the power of “interiority” in narrative discourse that cannot be recuperated within traditional notions of feeling and emotion, but instead offers up an understanding - or, at least, a recognition - of affect as an impersonal force in social institutions. 10 Bewildered Affect in Beloved But to the slave mother, New Year’s day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns. She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from childhood; but she has a mother’s instincts, and is capable of feeling a mother’s agonies. - Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, A long way from home, A long way from home. - Traditional Slave Spiritual Like Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Morrison’s Beloved powerfully focuses upon the suffering of enslaved women: “those most marginalized in the historical record of antebellum slavery” (Li 327-28). While the novel delves into the emotional experiences of several generations of black women, all haunted to varying degrees by their family’s history of enslavement, Jean Wyatt highlights how Beloved engages predominantly with the emotional history of “slave mothering” (20), in particular the phenomenon of “overclose mother-love” (19). Such a love is shaped by the familial and reproductive dynamics dictated by the enterprise of chattel slavery, here described by Hortense Spillers: “under conditions of captivity, the offspring of the female does not ‘belong’ to the Mother, nor is s/ he ‘related’ to the ‘owner,’ though the latter ‘pos- 10 For an account of the provocation of bewilderment in modernist literature - which could, in fact, include Morrison - see Schleifer, “Modernism.” <?page no="155"?> Courtney Jacobs and Ronald Schleifer 156 sess’ it, and in the African-American instance, often fathered it, and as often, without whatever benefit of patrimony” (74). Spillers describes a system in which the cultural bonds of “kinship” lose meaning since they can be severed at any moment by intervening laws that defined black slaves, even children, as possessions subject to trade. For Jacobs’s “slave mother” in the above epigraph, this “enforced state of breach” (Spillers 74) activates an instinct to suffer at the thought of the certain potential loss of her children. It is a certainty built into the fabric of life itself, a product of the social system that has “brutalized her from childhood” (Jacobs 16) to such a degree that she prefers death and infanticide over separation. Similarly, finding themselves related to neither their begetters nor their legal owners, enslaved children, as the Slave Spiritual above demonstrates, suffered a radical (i.e., a certain) sense of displacement that positioned them as both literal and symbolic orphans. The first epigraph to this section - whose purport is repeated throughout Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - documents the exclusive affective experience of the enslaved mother and child and alludes to the same pathology that rendered the slave, according to Hartman, incapable of suffering yet subject to excessive acts of violent discipline. “[O]verclose mother-love” is a specific case of the “universalizing and exclusionary machinations,” which disidentification recognizes, and which, in that recognition, Muñoz notes, allow “a step further than [simply] cracking open the code of the majority” (Disidentifications 31). Such a “step” into an almost illegible “furthermore” is effected by the contradiction between the familial love of “overclose mother-love” and the always possible - the social certainty of the possibility - of the destruction (or really the social nonexistence) of the slave “family” in the first place. Similar foundational contradictions can be seen and felt at the beginning and ending of Beloved, in its epigraph and in the final section of the novel itself. To begin, Morrison cites Romans 9: 25: I will call them my people; which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved. The epigraph encapsulates the bewildering emotional burden of loving what will certainly be lost. Such certainty beyond accident has no place in “the code of the majority” (Muñoz, Disidentifications 31) but rather stands in contest with it, as a “minoritarian” affect (Muñoz, “Feeling Brown” 70). Beloved, as an exemplar of the neo-slave narrative genre, utilizes anti-mimetic narrative strategies - in particular, the characteriza- <?page no="156"?> Beloved, Genre, and Affective Experience 157 tion of the “unnatural” figure of Beloved and the inclusion of streamof-consciousness narration. It does so in order to circumscribe this “minoritarian” affect beyond the simple de-legitimization of the code of the majority: the bewildering pain of the enslaved mother that resides at the nexus of (what we understand as) the personal and impersonal affective experience of a terrible certainty, with which it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify. This unreadable affect indicates, without cognitively understanding it, the “interior life” of chattel slavery, which is impersonal, bewildering “raw material” that “positions,” as Muñoz argues, the “unthinkable” (Disidentifications 31). The last section of the novel similarly presents a discourse outside “the code of the majority” that cannot be recuperated into a universalizing empathy. Following Beloved’s disappearance, the novel’s discourse describes how her ghostly presence haunts familiar places: “Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there” (Beloved 275). In the coming and going of her narrative, Morrison attempts to capture the affect of the “interior life” of a subject whose “interiority” is so embedded in a historical moment (and as such is not purely “interior”) that “identification” is all but impossible. Just before this paragraph of ephemeral pacings the novel states the following about Beloved’s family: So they forgot her. Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep. Occasionally, however, the rustle of a skirt hushes when they wake, and the knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seem to belong to the sleeper. Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative - looked at too long - shifts, and something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can touch it if they like, but don’t, because they know things will never be the same if they do. This is not a story to pass on. (275) The “something more familiar” in this text about slavery is different from the “peculiar sorrows” of the slave mother that Jacobs almost immediately associates with “a mother’s instinct,” “a mother’s agonies,” feelings she considers essential and universal. What Morrison imagines seeing and feeling in a photograph of a friend “looked at too long” - “something more familiar than the dear face itself” - is the “raw” material reality of pain and suffering whose familiarity is impossible to identify with beyond a vague assertion of bewilderment. Is such familiar be- <?page no="157"?> Courtney Jacobs and Ronald Schleifer 158 wilderment a mark of despair? Is it simple confusion? Is it the ghostly presence of trauma that haunts beyond identification? Is it what James Phelan describes as a “stubborn” narrative strategy, what we might call a “hesitation” in the experience of narrative? In his exploration of “stubborn” narrative strategies in Beloved - whose stubbornness, we are suggesting, provokes bewilderment - Phelan theorizes his own experience of reading the confounding character of Beloved. He admits that the novel, but most importantly its puzzling namesake, “eludes” him: Like Stamp Paid on the threshold of 124, I cannot enter. Parts of Morrison’s world won’t let me in. Especially Beloved herself and the narrative’s last two pages. Who, what is Beloved? Yes, Sethe’s murdered daughter. And - or? - a survivor of the Middle Passage. Labels, not understanding [. . .] Another label for Beloved - from the litcrit drawer: oppositional character. Spiteful ghost, manipulating lover, selfish sister, all-consuming daughter. But also innocent - and representative - victim. Where is the integration - or the reason for no integration? (710) Here, Phelan captures the bewilderment of reading a character who/ that is illegible, or to employ his own terminology, who/ that stubbornly resists the reader’s explanatory efforts (714). Like Sethe’s unruly and unpredictable house, “124,” the novel itself is unsettling because, as Andrew Hock Soon Ng also explains, “the reader no longer ‘feels at home’ in the text, for the anchoring normally established by clear characterization is lost” (233). To Morrison’s readers, as to Sethe and Denver, Beloved is at once familiar - Phelan deploys tools from his “litcrit drawer” to render a reading that documents Beloved’s historical significance as a product of the Middle Passage, for example - and disconcerting, and as such provokes the bewildering feeling of the uncanny. Essentially, Morrison attempts to capture the affects circulating through the interior life of a subject whose world does not recognize such interiority. Beloved is “nobody” (Beloved 275), yet her presence in the narrative is forceful. “A Hot Thing” and the Aftereffects of Trauma The uncanny familiarity that we, Phelan, and Ng describe is a bewilderingly unmoored experience, almost - or, in Beloved’s case, maybe precisely - an experience without a subject and thus “preconscious” and “pre-discursive,” but in its lack of subjectivity hardly felt to be somatic. <?page no="158"?> Beloved, Genre, and Affective Experience 159 This subject-less affective experience closely approximates what many have described as the disorienting and uncanny effects of trauma. Cathy Caruth describes trauma as a “singular possession by the past” and what remains, in Caruth’s estimation, particularly compelling about this singular experience “is that its insistent reenactments of the past do not simply serve as testimony to an event, but may also, paradoxically enough, bear witness to a past that was never fully experienced as it occurred” (151). What Caruth describes - the “force of an experience that is not yet fully owned” (151) - generates a certain resistance to the work of integration of self, experience, and understanding that is accomplished via ordinary memory. 11 Bessell van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart argue that this type of traumatic memory is always dissociative, that it always resists conscious integration in “autobiographical memory” - the type of memory narrativized in traditional slave narratives and interrogated, we are suggesting here, in the genre of the neo-slave narrative. In this analysis, the condition of trauma enacts the possession of the present by the past and the inability of the subject of experience to own that experience itself, even as this subject acts out or is drawn toward the past again and again. Beloved is fundamentally shaped by this concept of dissociative memory in that its narrative is always “circling, circling” (Beloved 162) around an unspeakable past event that gnaws at the text’s protagonist, Sethe, and her family. Some illegible, or unspeakable, memory lies at the center of Morrison’s novel; and in the sense that Beloved, and other neo-slave narratives, are also novels of their contemporary historical moment (i.e., the long turn of twenty-first-century America), they also document how America today has yet to come to terms with the legacy of chattel slavery and, as part of that legacy, the continued enactment of racial violence and disenfranchisement. These traumatic memories - both Sethe’s in Beloved and the national haunting of chattel slavery - persist as narrative “points” (Beloved 37) beyond which the novel will not initially venture. Sethe “could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn’t get it right off - she could never explain” (163; emphasis added). Though “it” remains a memory unmoored from Sethe’s larger life narrative, the novel is organized to avoid and circle around its illegibility, as Ashraf H. A. Rushdy notes, which generates a palpable “tension between needing to bury the 11 Put another way, Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart note that “under [the] extreme conditions [of trauma], existing meaning schemes may be entirely unable to accommodate frightening experiences, which causes memory of those experiences to be stored differently and not be available for retrieval under ordinary circumstances” (160). This gives rise to Pierre Janet’s foundational conceptualization of “traumatic memory.” <?page no="159"?> Courtney Jacobs and Ronald Schleifer 160 past as well as needing to revive it, between a necessary remembering and an equally necessary forgetting” (569). Beloved finally flashes back to articulate the traumatic memory through the intimate third-person account of a mother faced with the certainty of losing her children. Following her escape from the Sweet Home plantation, Sethe is pursued by her previous owner: she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher’s hat, she heard wings [. . .] And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe. (163) Focalized through Sethe’s perspective, the event takes on a poetic sensibility. Read within the cadence of this sensibility, it is the story of a mother’s love compelling her, instinctively and urgently, to protect her children. It is the story of a family under threat “flying away” to freedom and safety that is comforting in its telling. Yet, when Sethe speaks of love and safety, the novel reminds us, “what she meant could cleave the bone” (164). What Morrison’s novel circles around is not just the reality that Sethe resorts to infanticide - to “dragging” her children through the “veil” (163) - to ensure that they not return to bondage, but also that she rationalizes the act of murder as a performance of a mother’s instinctual love: “it is my job to keep them away from what I know is terrible. I did that” (165). One can imagine that the whole of Beloved, then, is Sethe’s “acting out” in response to this bewildering decision, or rather, is an attempt to somehow accommodate an illegible narrative void in her memory. And the affective force of the story originates in the futility of this narrative praxis, in its continued attempts to narrativize the pain and suffering associated with an illegible traumatic event. The actual historical and cultural reality of violence and disenfranchisement resides, almost illegibly, in the provocation - the generic deployment - of bewilderment and impersonality in Beloved; it resides in the very force of the novel and its genre, whose presence is felt, but whose meaning is never fully comprehensible. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s description of the “experience” of meaning - in a language very close to Morrison’s description of a photograph “looked at too long” (275) - helps us to understand how this type of traumatic repetition or “acting out” might specifically manifest itself in narrative experience. “What would you be missing,” he asks, “If you did <?page no="160"?> Beloved, Genre, and Affective Experience 161 not experience the meaning of a word? ” (182). In expanding his own query, Wittgenstein gestures toward the felt experience of the illegible: “What would you be missing, for instance, if you did not understand the request to pronounce the word ‘till’ and to mean it as a verb, - or if you did not feel that a word lost its meaning and became a mere sound if it was repeated ten times over? ” (200). As Morrison does in her epigraph and in her description of the illegible “it” that initially resists narration, Wittgenstein describes an experience that, in its nature, feels bewildering - the experience of losing meaning (and, in the case of the relative’s photograph, losing family). The “living interior” of chattel slavery, the neo-slave narrative of Beloved suggests, is precisely this: the “extravagant irresolution” (Aubry 177) of the loss of meaning that is so overwhelming that it cannot be recuperated in the cognitive language of “agony” or “instinct” - the very same language Sethe deploys to explain her harrowing experience. Moreover, the extravagant irresolution of trauma haunts experience, so to speak, its force embodied by the familiarity of uncanny footprints and faces marked by an affective experience whose subject, like both Sethe and the mysterious Beloved, is not recognizable as a conduit of human experience. Morrison’s novel continues to convey this “experience of meaning” (and its loss) in a series of monologues delivered through the perspectives of the text’s female protagonists. Each monologue coalesces around concerns of kinship and radical affection and, stylistically, each creates a “linguistic facsimile” (Wyatt 30) of the bewildering aftereffects of trauma, which are shared across individuals and generations. Here, through the deployment of anti-mimetic narrative strategies, the novel hypothesizes how the affective force of private trauma - the unspeakable “it” that haunts Sethe’s narrative - circulates and persists among family members and even across generations. The women’s narrative voices settle atop one another to create a palimpsestic portrait of communal trauma, a unique concept defined by Kai Erikson as “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality” (184). Each vignette begins with a declaration of kinship. “Beloved, she my daughter. She mine,” begins Sethe (Beloved 200). “Beloved is my sister,” daughter Denver begins, “I swallowed her blood right along with my mother’s milk” (205). Together, mother and daughter weave a tale of the “overclose mother-love” - the affection that Sethe terms “tough” and “too thick” (200, 203) - that is grounded in suffering, the same force that drove Sethe, we understand, to infanticide. In a stream of consciousness, Sethe explains, “My plan was to take us all to the other <?page no="161"?> Courtney Jacobs and Ronald Schleifer 162 side where my own ma’am is. They stopped me from getting us there, but they didn’t stop you from getting here. Ha Ha. You came right on back like a good girl . . .” (203). Addressing Beloved herself, Sethe gestures toward a suffering love that is so forceful it penetrates and permeates generations. Denver witnesses the force of this possessive affection and recognizes the violence of Sethe’s loving “too much”: “Maybe it’s still in her the thing that makes it all right to kill her children” (206). This “thing” Denver describes - akin to Sethe’s “it” - is the loss of meaning that accompanies the bewildering affective force of suffering beyond comprehension and identification. Yet, Beloved’s vignette, a famously difficult passage for readers, strictly draws the events of the near and distant past into the “present.” The first section of Beloved’s monologue presents a familiar declaration of identity and affinity that seems to place it in tandem with Sethe’s and Denver’s accounts: “I am Beloved and she is mine [. . .] All of it is now. it is always now” (210). Still, the following lines reveal that the figure readers know as Beloved is channeling, across time and space, the voice of a child on a slave ship: there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching the man on my face is dead his face is not mine his mouth smells sweet but his eyes are locked some who eat nasty themselves I do not eat the men without skin bring us their morning water to drink we have none [. . .] if we had more to drink we could make tears (210) This account of the Middle Passage, written entirely in the present tense and with a disorienting, fragmented syntax and typographical spacings, exemplifies what Wittgenstein describes as a loss of meaning and what we are describing as a hesitation in narrative; it imitates the loss of temporal order, a loss brought about by traumatic experience, while also detailing grotesque and inhuman horrors. There is no clear progression through time, only the repetition of violence and neglect that goes beyond simply cracking the code of the majority; without any sense of beginning or end this vignette suggests a vision of the past dislocated in the present. Although Beloved’s monologue conforms to the monologues of Denver and Sethe in its opening - “I am Beloved and she is mine” (210) - there is little evidence that this testimony of the Middle Passage journey drives, along with Sethe’s and Denver’s accounts, the plot of Beloved forward. Yet, the relentless - and stubbornly non-narrative - present of Beloved’s monologue affords readers an affective confrontation with <?page no="162"?> Beloved, Genre, and Affective Experience 163 the elusive, threatening “thing” that Denver mentions earlier, here described as the “hot thing,” that compels her mother to kill herself and her family. Still, among the abrupt sentences describing a litany of abominations - starvation, extreme thirst, rape, and a pileup of bodies - there remains a hint of “familiar” narrative forms. While the chaos of the writing allows a plethora of interpretations, the vignette suggests that the child witnesses her mother leaping overboard and drowning. The “hot thing,” a phrase repeated throughout the monologue, signals a fierce affective response to the loss of a mother where, traumatically, feeling is displaced to object (the “thing” of “hot thing”). This is precisely the social “process” of experience Williams describes as “taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and isolating” (132). In this monologue Beloved describes what it feels like to see her mother gasping for air in the waves, to desire to join her: I see her face which is mine it is the face that was going to smile at me in the place where we crouched now she is going to her face comes through the water a hot thing her face is mine she is not smiling she is chewing and swallowing [. . .] she knows I want to join she chews and swallows me I am gone now I am her face my own face has left me I see me swim away a hot thing (212-13) This series of statements describes the “feeling” of intergenerational trauma. As her mother dies, the child wishes to “join,” to be with her mother in death, and this burning feeling, this “hot thing,” is the same fervor that Denver recognizes (again, without comprehending it) in Sethe. The child, however, does not die and instead takes her mother’s “face,” suggesting that this suffering and the intense love that accompanies it is a not-quite-comprehensible aftereffect across generations. Contemporary readers are invited to recognize the relentless present of this bewildering affective experience and to see that the “thing” that drove Sethe’s infanticide is tethered to a historical lineage of suffering. Literary Genre and Affect Beloved - and the genre of neo-slave narratives more generally - strive to provoke feelings of unmoored, preconscious, and pre-discursive affect that are nevertheless grounded in the trafficking of human beings as chattel property. Such trafficking offers itself as incomprehensible insofar as it presents, as Beloved does, an uncanny sense of the familiarity of the strange: commerce is essentially a social act, but the commerce of <?page no="163"?> Courtney Jacobs and Ronald Schleifer 164 persons in chattel slavery cracks open any sense of sociality by destroying the basis of human sociality altogether, namely the personhood of persons. This is unspeakable and illegible: it is a scandal to any sense of social value and morality and yet it has remained relentlessly and palimpsestically “present” in the American social order. That is, Morrison’s neo-slave narrative can help us engage with the affective forms we call literary genres, in which feelings are provoked to marshal social solidarity and enlarge horizons of experience. But to “experience” trauma - and particularly the overwhelming trauma of chattel slavery - which, in its nature, cannot be experienced as such simply because trauma dislocates the subject of experience altogether, is to encounter the illegible, the unspeakable “hot thing” of trauma. Still, the neo-slave narrative of Beloved deploys the illegible in order to “crack open the code of the majority” and “to use this code as raw material” for circumscribing, as Muñoz argues, “a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture” (Disidentifications 31). What is “unthinkable” is the destruction of human life embodied in the “overclose mother-love” of the slave Mother, who understands that anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. (Beloved 151) In this way the absolute destruction of human life is embodied in the “unthinkable” and unspeakable, namely, the erasure of human subjectivity and the erasure of qualities of “personhood.” In “positioning” this erasure, the genre of the neo-slave narrative allows infanticide to come to seem “thinkable” after all, or at least to indicate a felt aftereffect - a not-quite-comprehensible after-affect - of the national trauma of chattel slavery. <?page no="164"?> Beloved, Genre, and Affective Experience 165 References Aubry, Timothy. Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. Bell, Bernard B. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Caruth, Cathy. “Recapturing the Past.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995. 151-58. Charon, Rita. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Dubey, Madhu. “The Politics of Genre in ‘Beloved.’” NOVEL: A Forum in Fiction 32.2 (spring 1999): 187-206. Erikson, Kai. “Notes on Trauma and Community.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. 183-200. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Introduction: The Language of Slavery.” The Slave’s Narrative. Ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. xi-xxxiv. Goodell, William. Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A History of the Great Struggle in Both Hemispheres; With a View of the Slavery Question in the United States. New York: William Harned Publishers, 1852. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Herman, David. Storytelling and the Sciences of the Mind. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013. Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. Janet, Pierre. L’évolution de la mémoire et la notion du temps. Paris: Cahine, 1928. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Li, Stephanie. “12 Years a Slave as a Neo-Slave Narrative.” American Literary History 26.2 (2014): 326-31. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987. ---. “The Site of Memory.” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Ed. William Zinsser. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. 101-24. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. <?page no="165"?> Courtney Jacobs and Ronald Schleifer 166 ---. “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s ‘The Sweetest Hangover (And Other STDs).’” Theatre Journal 52.1 (March 2000): 67-79. Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Space, Architecture, Trauma.” symploke 19 (2011): 231-45. Norridge, Zoe. Perceiving Pain in African American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Phelan, James. “Toward a Rhetorical Reader-Response Criticism: The Difficult, the Stubborn, and the Ending of Beloved.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 39 (fall/ winter 1993): 709-28. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “Daughters Signifyin(g) History: The Example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” American Literature 64.3 (September 1992): 567-97. Schleifer, Ronald. “Death, Literary Form, and Affective Comprehension: Primary Emotions and the Neurological Basis of Genre.” The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature. Ed. Daniel Jernigan, Neil Murphy and W. Michelle Wang. New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2020. ---. “Modernism and Gesture: The Experience of Music, Samuel Beckett, and Performed Bewilderment.” Criticism 61 (2019): 73-96. Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2 (summer 1987): 64-81. Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Terada, Rei. “Introduction: Emotion After the ‘Death of the Subject.’” Feeling in Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. 1-15. Van der Kolk, Bessel and Onno van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995. 158-82. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. Wyatt, Jean. Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2017. <?page no="166"?> Notes on Contributors BRYAN BANKER is a lecturer at the Hochschule Fresenius University of Applied Sciences in Munich, where he teaches interculturality, diversity, language, and ethics. In early 2019, he defended his PhD, titled Black Hegelians: Dialectical Philosophy in the Aesthetics of W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, in the department of American literature at Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität (LMU) in Munich. In the fall of 2019, he will conduct a seminar in comparative literature at LMU titled “Reading Europe from the Periphery.” JAMES DORSON is Assistant Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. His first book is titled Counternarrative Possibilities: Virgin Land, Homeland, and Cormac McCarthy’s Westerns (Campus, 2016). He is also the coeditor of Fictions of Management: Efficiency and Control in American Literature and Culture (Winter, 2019) and of two special journal issues: “Data Fiction: Naturalism, Narratives, and Numbers” (Studies in American Naturalism, 2017) and “Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds” (European Journal of American Studies, 2017). His current book project is on competing forms of economic organization in American literary naturalism at the turn of the twentieth century. COURTNEY JACOBS is PhD candidate and Nancy L. Mergler Fellow at the University of Oklahoma. Her current research project focuses on affective and cognitive approaches to reading “the home” in American women’s literature. AUDREY LOETSCHER, a graduate of the University of Lausanne, has been pursuing a PhD in American Studies in this institution since February 2016. Thanks to a diversified curriculum, she has developed an interdisciplinary profile and her interests lie at the crossroads of disciplines ranging from the environmental humanities to cultural history, <?page no="167"?> Notes on Contributors 168 continental philosophy, and political economy. Her dissertation addresses the cultural causes of unsustainability in the United States, and more specifically the relationship between dominant narratives underlying national identity and the unsustainable environmental discourse and practices that have accompanied the country’s economic and cultural development. SIXTA QUASSDORF studied English, general linguistics and philosophy at the University of Basel, and holds a PhD in English linguistics. She has published several articles on phraseology and quotation studies, as well as a monograph titled “A little more than kin”: Quotations as a Linguistic Phenomenon, A Study Based on Quotations from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2016). Since then, she has leaned further towards literary and cultural studies. Her current research project - which she is pursuing as a postdoctoral assistant at the University of St Gallen - focuses on the representation of work in contemporary American fiction since the 1970s. J. JESSE RAMÍREZ (PhD, American Studies, Yale University) is Assistant Professor of American Studies and co-coordinator of the “Technologies” area of concentration in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of St Gallen. RONALD SCHLEIFER is George Lynn Cross Research Professor of English and Adjunct Professor in Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. His most recent books are A Political Economy of Modernism: Literature, Post-Classical Economics, and the Lower Middle-Class (Cambridge University Press 2018) and, with Jerry Vannatta, MD, Literature and Medicine: A Practical and Pedagogical Guide (Palgrave 2019). OLGA THIERBACH-MCLEAN is an independent researcher, author, and literary translator. After studying North American literature, Russian literature, and musicology at the University of Hamburg (UHH)and UC Berkeley, she earned her doctorate in American Studies at UHH. She is the author of various articles on US political culture, as well as the book Emersonian Nation, which traces the resonance of Emersonian individualism in current US discourses on personal rights, identity politics, and social reform. Her main research interests are in the intellectual history 168 and political economy. Her dissertation ad- United States, and more specifically the relationship between dominant narratives underlying national identity and the unsustainable environmental discourse and s economic and cultural guistics and philosoand holds a PhD in English linguistics. quotation studies, “A little more than kin”: Quotations as a Linguistic Phenomenon, A Study Based on Quotations from Shakespeare’s Hamlet leaned further towards literary and cultural which she is pursuing as a postfocuses on the representation of work in contemporary American fiction since the 1970s. (PhD, American Studies, Yale University) is Assiscoordinator of the “Techthe School of Humanities and Social is George Lynn Cross Research Professor of English and Adjunct Professor in Medicine at the University of Okla- Economy of Modernism: Litera- Cambridge Uni- Literature and Medicine: independent researcher, author, and literary translator. After studying North American literature, Russian Hamburg (UHH)and UC Berkeley, she earned her doctorate in American Studies at UHH. She is of various articles on US political culture, as well as the book which traces the resonance of Emersonian individualism in current US discourses on personal rights, identity politics, and n the intellectual history <?page no="168"?> Notes on Contributors 169 of liberalism, American Transcendentalism, and dystopian fiction. Currently, her projects are focused on the significance of race in the cyberpunk genre as well as on interpretations of traditional individualist tenets in contemporary US cinema. 169 of liberalism, American Transcendentalism, and dystopian fiction. Cu rently, her projects are focused on the significance of race in the cybe punk genre as well as on interpretations of traditional individualist te ets in contemporary US cinema. <?page no="170"?> Index of Names Abastado, Claude, 45 Abraham, Daniel, 90 Abrams, M. H., 15 Acree, Cat, 67n4 Adorno, Theodor W., 70, 77 Allmon, Warren D., 48 Alpers, Paul, 14-15 Alworth, David, 25 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 128 Arendt, Hannah, 70 Ariew, André, 37n8 Aristotle, 12-13, 25 Arrhenius, Svente, 47 Arrighi, Giovanni, 31-32 Aubry, Timothy, 161 Ayer, David, 126, 132n2, 134, 136 Backer, David, 88 Bae, Doona, 118 Baldick, Chris, 68 Baldwin, James, 11, 16 Balibar, Étienne, 129 Baker, Aaron, 134 Barinholtz, Ike, 135 Bawarshi, Anis S., 50 Bazerman, Charles, 44 Beadle, Irwin and Erastus, 127- 28 Bedore, Pamela, 68 Bell, Bernard B., 150, 153 Berebitsky, Julie, 67n3, 71, 79 Bernard, Claude, 34, 37 Best, Stephen, 26n1 Bethke, Bruce, 106n1 Biederman, Sam, 67, 67n4, 69, 71 Bigelow, Kathryn, 115 Blomkamp, Neill, 108 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 128 Boltanski, Luc, 31-32, 32n4 Boswell, Marshall, 72 Boyle, Alan, 46 Brown, Malcolm, 129 Butler, Halle, 66n3 Butler, Octavia, 154 Byrd, Jodi A., 16 Cadigan, Pat, 106n1 Carr, Brian, 96-97 Caruth, Cathy, 159 Castile, Philando, 129-130, 134 Caws, Mary Ann, 50, 57 Chandler, Raymond, 15 Charon, Rita, 150 Chiapello, Eve, 31-32 Child, Lydia Maria, 151n7 Cho, Margaret, 135 Choi, Kenneth, 135 Chou, Collin, 116 Christie, Agatha, 15 Clare, Ralph, 74 Clover, Joshua, 89 Cohen, Elizabeth, 67n3, 71, 79 Cohen, Ralph, 27 Coupland, Douglass, 66n2 Culler, Jonathan, 68-69 Dante Alighieri, 13, 15 Darwin, Charles, 37 <?page no="171"?> Index of Names 172 DeLillo, Don, 66n2 Deloria, Vine, , 16 den Dulk, Allard, 74, 77, 78, 79 Denton, Robert E., 57 Derrida, Jacques, 11, 14 Devitt, Amy J., 44, 49, 51, 58 DeWitt, Helen, 66, 66n3, 68, 71 Dick, Philip K., 106n1, 109 Dimock, Wai Chee, 27-28 Dionnet, Jean-Pierre, 108n3 Dobson, Joanne, 66n2 Dorson, James, 68, 75 Douglass, Frederick, 153 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 15 Dreyfuss, Emily, 97 Druillet, Philippe, 108n3 Dubey, Madhu, 149 Ebert, Teresa L., 50 Edgerton, Joel, 131 Egan, Elizabeth, 66n3, 71, 79 Eggers, Dave, 66, 66n3, 67 Ellis, Lindsay, 139 Ellison, Harlan, 106n1 Engels, Friedrich, 56 Erikson, Kai, 161 Esch, Elizabeth D., 88, 89 Estrin, David, 53 Farkas, Bernard, 108n3 Farmer, Nick, 97-98 Felski, Rita, 24, 126n1 Fergus, Mark, 90 Ferris, Joshua, 66, 66n1, 66n3, 67, 68, 71, 79 Fiege, Mark, 48 Fields, Barbara J., 87, 128, 129, 130, 87 Fields, Karen E., 87, 128, 129, 130, 87 Flanders, Judith, 66n1 Follath, Erich, 114n7 Ford, Harrison, 109 Fourier, Jean-Baptiste Joseph, 47 Frank, Ty, 90 Freud, Sigmund, 150n6, 152 Frow, John, 12, 27 Fuqua, Antoine, 134 Gallagher, Victoria J., 44, 51, 58 Garrison, William Lloyd, 151n7 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 149, 152 Geertz, Clifford, 38n9 Gibson, William, 106, 107, 108n3 Giles, Paul, 73 Gilliam, Terry, 112 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 25, 32-33 Giraud, Jean, 108n3 Goodell, William, 146, 147n1 Goodman, Robert, 78 Gore, Al, 48 Gosling, Ryan, 120 Gözen, Jiré Emine, 106 Green, Miranda, 46 Greenblatt, Stephen, 38n9 Guerrero, Ed, 87 Gustin, Georgina, 57 Hall, Stuart, 86, 90 Hammer, Langdon, 28-29 Hammett, Dashiell, 15, 16n3 Haney-López, Ian, 87 Hansen, James, 47 Hartman, Saidiya V., 152-53, 156 Harvey, Paul, 110 Hawke, Ethan, 134 Hayden, Tom, 134 Heede, Richard, 47 Heller, Joseph, 66n2, 70, 79 Herman, David, 153n8 Hernandez, Jay, 135 172 Baptiste Joseph, Freud, Sigmund, 150n6, 152 Frow, John, 12, 27 Fuqua, Antoine, 134 Gallagher, Victoria J., 44, 51, 58 Garrison, William Lloyd, 151n7 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 149, Geertz, Clifford, 38n9 Gibson, William, 106, 107, Gilliam, Terry, 112 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 25, Giraud, Jean, 108n3 Goodell, William, 146, 147n1 Goodman, Robert, 78 yan, 120 Gözen, Jiré Emine, 106 Green, Miranda, 46 Greenblatt, Stephen, 38n9 Guerrero, Ed, 87 Gustin, Georgina, 57 Hall, Stuart, 86, 90 Hammer, Langdon, 28-29 Hammett, Dashiell, 15, 16n3 López, Ian, 87 Hansen, James, 47 Hartman, Saidiya V., 152-53, Harvey, Paul, 110 Hawke, Ethan, 134 Hayden, Tom, 134 Heede, Richard, 47 Heller, Joseph, 66n2, 70, 79 Herman, David, 153n8 Hernandez, Jay, 135 <?page no="172"?> Index of Names 173 Hewitt Pate, R., 47 Himes, Chester, 16 Höglund, Johan, 12 Horkheimer, Max, 70, 77 Howells, William Dean, 37 Hoyt, Long, 29-30n3 Jacobs, Harriet A., 149, 151-53, 151n7, 155-56 Jameson, Frederic, 126, 147 Jefferson, Thomas, 13-14, 15, 69 Johansson, Scarlett, 119 Jones, Gayle, 154 Jones, Stephen Graham, 16 Justice, Daniel Heath, 16-17 Karlin, Susan, 90-91 Keen, Suzanne, 150, 150n5 Kerman, Judith B., 111, 112 Kiesling, Lydia, 66, 67, 67n4, 68 King, Rodney, 135 Knight, Stephen, 15n2 Kramnick, Jonathan, 38 Lamoreaux, Naomi R., 30-31 Lanchester, John, 66n1 Länzendörfer, Tim, 67 Lavender, Isiah, III, 96 Lebowitz, Michael, 89, 99 Lee, Ang, 115 Lee, Bruce, 117 Leighton, Angela, 24, 25, 39 Leonardo da Vinci, 13 Levine, Caroline, 12n1, 17, 23- 39 Levinson, Majorie, 24-25 Lewis, Sinclair, 66n2 Li, Jet, 117n9 Li, Stephanie, 151n7, 154, 55 Lindgreen, Michael, 66 Lindner, Elsbeth, 67n4, 75 Lindner, Oliver, 118n10 Linnaeus, Carl, 128 Lipsyte, Sam, 66n3, 71, 79 Longo, Robert, 115 Losurdo, Domenico, 99 Love, Heather, 26 Lytle, Clifford, 16 Ma, Ling, 65, 66, 67, 67n3, 68, 71, 75-78, 75n7, 78n8, 79 Madrigal, Alexis, 127 Marcus, Sharon, 26n1 Marcuse, Herbert, 70 Mark, Jason, 46, 47, 50 Marx, Karl, 56, 99, 152 Maslin, Janet, 116 Mayfield, Curtis, 137 McCormick, Sabrina, 54 Meinshausen, Malte, 53 Melville, Herman, 17-18, 65-67, 70, 72, 74, 75-76 Miles, Robert, 129 Miller, Carolyn R., 44, 51, 58, 67 Mills, C. Wright, 66, 69, 70 Milton, John, 15 Mitchell, David, 117 Mitchell, Lee Clark, 35n6 Moore, Ward, 131 Morning, Ann, 128 Morrison, Toni, 19, 145, 146, 147n1, 149, 154-61, 155n10, 164 Mukherjee, Ipshita, 54 Mulhall, Anne, 66, 67, 67n4, 70, 71, 72-73 Muñoz, José Esteban, 150n4, 154, 156-57, 164 Nama, Adilifu, 86, 87, 100 Navedo, Andrea, 135 Nersessian, Anahid, 38 Ng, Andrew Hock Soon, 158 Norman, Matthew, 66n3, 67, 71, 79 <?page no="173"?> Index of Names 174 Norridge, Zoe, 151 Norris, Frank, 25, 33-37 Novikow, Jacques, 108n4 Orwell, George, 118 Ostby, Hawk, 90 Otomo, Katsuhiro, 106n1, 108n3 Park, Chi Hyun, 116 Park, Ed, 66, 66n3, 67, 71, 79 Paretsky, Sarah, 16, 16n3 Perez, Rafael, 134 Pham, Larissa, 71 Phelan, James, 158 Philipps, Helen, 66n3, 67, 68, 79 Pitt, Michael, 120 Plato, 11, 12, 14, 15 Poe, Edgar Allan, 15 Post, Charles, 89, 99 Powers, Melissa, 52, 54 Pryce, Jonathan, 113 Puchner, Martin, 55-56 Radway, Janice A., 127 Raff, Daniel M. G., 30-31 Raymond, Alex, 108n4 Redmond, Sean, 86 Reed, Adolph, 88 Reeves, Keanu, 115 Reich, David, 138-39, 139n5 Reiff, Mary Jo, 50 Robiou du Pont, Yann, 53 Rodriguez, Ashley, 127 Roediger, David R., 88, 88n2, 89 Rogers, Andrea, 53 Rohmer, Sax, 108n4 Rosenhan, D. L., 129 Ross, Robert M., 48 Ross-Nickerson, Catherine, 15n2 Rowland, Amy, 66, 66n3, 79 Rucker, Rudy, 106n1 Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., 159 Sanders, Bernie, 88 Saval, Nikil, 66n1, 67n4, 69, 70, 71, 72-73 Scaggs, John, 15n2 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 68, 69 Schaub, Michael, 79 Schweisberg, Dave, 110 Shelley, Mary, 106 Schiller, Joseph, 37n8 Schleifer, Ronald, 19, 148n3, 155n10 Schneiberg, Marc, 30-31 Schumacher, Julie, 66n3 Schwarz, John, 47 Scott, Ridley, 108, 108n3, 109, 111, 112, 120, 121 Seweell, William H., 77 Sexton, Jared, 135 Seymour, Richard, 88n2 Shankar, Naren, 90-91 Shapiro, Ari, 75, 78n8 Shirley, John, 106n1 Singh, Nikhil Pal, 89 Smith, Craig Allen, 57 Smith, Mitch, 130 Smith, Will, 131, 136, 136n3 Soltysik Monnet, Agnieszka, 12 Souvlis, George, 90, 99 Spillers, Hortense, 155-56 Srnicek, Nick, 126 Stephenson, Neal, 106n1 Stepto, Robert B., 150 Sterling, Bruce, 106n1 Stewart, Charles J., 57 Temin, Peter, 30-31 Terada, Rei, 147n2 Thatcher, Margaret, 48 Thévenot, Laurent, 32n4 174 er, Rudy, 106n1 H. A., 159 Sanders, Bernie, 88 Saval, Nikil, 66n1, 67n4, 69, 70, Scaggs, John, 15n2 Marie, 68, 69 Schaub, Michael, 79 Schweisberg, Dave, 110 Shelley, Mary, 106 Schiller, Joseph, 37n8 Schleifer, Ronald, 19, 148n3, Schneiberg, Marc, 30-31 Schumacher, Julie, 66n3 Schwarz, John, 47 Scott, Ridley, 108, 108n3, 109, 111, 112, 120, 121 Seweell, William H., 77 Sexton, Jared, 135 Seymour, Richard, 88n2 Shankar, Naren, 90-91 75, 78n8 106n1 Singh, Nikhil Pal, 89 Smith, Craig Allen, 57 Smith, Mitch, 130 Smith, Will, 131, 136, 136n3 Soltysik Monnet, Agnieszka, 12 Souvlis, George, 90, 99 Spillers, Hortense, 155-56 Srnicek, Nick, 126 Stephenson, Neal, 106n1 B., 150 Bruce, 106n1 Stewart, Charles J., 57 , 30-31 Terada, Rei, 147n2 Thatcher, Margaret, 48 Thévenot, Laurent, 32n4 <?page no="174"?> Index of Names 175 Tolkien, J. R. R., 125, 131-33, 135 Trachtenberg, Alan, 69-70, 76 Trump, Donald, 45, 51, 88 Truth, Sojourner, 153 Turner, Nat, 153 Tyndall, John, 47 Van der Hart, Onno, 159, 159n11 Van der Kolk, Bessel 159, 159n11 Vangelis (Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou), 111n5 Villeneuve, Denis, 120, 121 Virgil, 15 Vogel, Ezra F., 110 Walcutt, Charles Child, 35n5 Wallace, David Foster, 18, 65, 66, 66n3, 71-76, 79, 80 Walker-Emig, Paul, 107, 120 Washington, Denzel, 134-35 Weart, Spencer R., 53 Weber, Max, 70 Weeks, Kathi, 56 Wells, H. G., 87, 96n5 Wells, Sarah Ann, 96 Wheatley, Phyllis, 14 White, Theodore H., 110 Whitehead, Colson, 75n7, 154 Whitman, Walt, 69 Whyte, William H., 70n5 Williams, Jeffrey, 70 Williams, Linda, 11, 16n4 Williams, Raymond, 147-48, 151, 163 Wilson, Sloan, 66n2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 160-161, 162 Wittig, Monique, 11 Wood, Mary, 54 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 88, 88n2 Wouters, Conley, 73 Wyatt, Jean, 155, 161 Yanez, Jeronimo, 129-30 Yanoshevsky, Galia, 45, 55 Yates, Richard, 66n2 Yen, Anna, 67n3, 68, 71, 79 Yeoh, Michelle, 117n9 Young, Helen, 132-33 Yu, Timothy, 110-111, 112 Zelazny, Roger, 106n1 Zola, Émile, 34-35 Zuboff, Shoshana, 126 <?page no="175"?> Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature (SPELL) Edited by The Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (SAUTE) General Editor: Lukas Erne Already published: 1 Anthony Mortimer (ed.) Contemporary Approaches to Narrative 1984, 129 Seiten €[D] 16,- ISBN 978-3-87808-841-7 2 Richard Waswo (ed.) 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Drama and Pedagogy in Medieval and Early Modern England 2015, 304 Seiten €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6968-4 32 Ridvan Askin / Philipp Schweighauser (eds.) Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives 2015, 238 Seiten €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6967-7 33 Ridvan Askin / Philipp Schweighauser (eds.) Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives 2017, 238 Seiten €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6967-7 34 Antoinina Bevan Zlatar / Olga Timofeeva What is an Image in Medieval and Early Modern England? 2017, 300 Seiten €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8150-1 35 Lukas Etter / Julia Straub American Communities: Between the Popular and the Political 2017, 250 Seiten €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8151-8 36 Margaret Tudeau-Clayton / Martin Hilpert The Challenge of Change 2018, 267 Seiten €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8241-6 37 Annette Kern-Stähler / Nicole Nyffenegger Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval and Early Modern England 2019, 216 Seiten €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8326-0 38 Cécile Heim / Boris Vejdovsky / Benjamin Pickford The Genres of Genre: Form, Formats, and Cultural Formations 2019, 178 Seiten €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8327-7 <?page no="178"?> SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature The 38th volume of SPELL is dedicated to the discussion and analysis of the concept of genre. Terms such as “the political unconscious” (Jameson), “cultural work” (Tompkins), “narrative mode” (Williams) and “performative” (Austin, Turner) have been centrally determining, over the years, to help us understand how genres work and what they do. This collection seeks to further explore what roles genre plays in past and contemporary American national narratives and counter-narratives. While the first three essays of the volume attempt to tackle the difficult task of defining genre and its affordances, the following three essays discuss specific genres, namely, the office novel, the political TV show, and science-fiction. Finally, the last three essays explore how genre can be a valuable concept for the analysis of larger issues, such as the representation of race in American cultural productions. This collection of essays therefore offers a variety of approaches to the literary device of genre, reflecting ongoing research in the Swiss community of American studies, in order to underline the productive potential of genre analysis. ISBN 978-3-8233-8327-7 38 Heim / Vejdovsky / Pickford (eds.) The Genres of Genre The Genres of Genre: Forms, Formats, and Cultural Formations Edited by Cécile Heim, Boris Vejdovsky and Benjamin Pickford 38 18327_Umschlag.indd Alle Seiten 25.09.2019 12: 40: 36