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Matthias Klestil

African American Literature, Racial Vulnerability, and the Anthropocene: Reading W .E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece in the Twenty-First Century

This article discusses W. E. B. Du Bois's first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), in the context of the broader debate on the role of race in the Anthropocene and in relation to Judith Butler's theory on corporeal vulnerability. Specifically, this article spotlights three particular ways in which rereading African American literature may enhance a more race-conscious Anthropocene discourse. Initially, this article demonstrates how Du Bois's text gives opportunity to trace African American vulnerabilities through various scales from the local to the planetary. A genealogy of African American racial vulnerability, I argue, can be vital for better understanding and acting against continuing forms of racism in the Anthropocene. This article continues by turning to Du Bois's representation of vulnerabilities as part of power relations, showing how African American epistemologies of resistance negotiate racial vulnerability. Lastly, this article examines how the novel plays with generic conventions to engage racial vulnerabilities, evincing an African American aesthetics of resistance and suggesting alternative forms of storytelling.

Silvia Schultermandl, Gulsin Ciftci, Jennifer Reimer

American Studies as Vulnerability Studies: Introduction

This special issue explores the ambivalent nature of vulnerability as a "politically produced" condition of suffering which contains the potential for resistance and consequential social change for minoritized individuals and communities. Judith Butler's now-classic rendering of vulnerability as "unequally distributed through and by a differential operation of power" helps us better grasp interrelated forms of oppression, yet we argue that narratives of vulnerability also foreground the relational and interconnected conditions of vulnerable lives, while at the same time engendering worldmaking projects centered around agency and resistance.

Marina Pingler

The "Colonial Anthropocene" Imaginary: Re-Imagining Climate Change in Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018)

Climate imaginaries – collectively held visions of future climate change – take shape in a variety of media and genres, from computer models to poetry. While some climate imaginaries have proven particularly enduring and have managed to attain a hegemonic status in climate change discourse – for example, the "techno-market" imaginary and the "climate apocalypse" imaginary – others remain marginalized. Drawing on Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), this article theorizes the "colonial Anthropocene" imaginary as an alternative imaginary and examines its co-production at the intersection of academic discourses, activism, and literature. The "colonial Anthropocene" imaginary generally and Moon of the Crusted Snow specifically negotiate ideological tensions that have emerged in the discourse on the Anthropocene and forge a connection between the seemingly exceptional event of anthropogenic climate change and a historical sequence of colonial violence and forced displacement of Indigenous peoples. As one of this imaginary's manifestations in the literary domain, Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) embeds climate change into a longer story that begins with settler colonialism on the North American continent by drawing on an equally old genre: the Indian captivity narrative. Significantly, the "colonial Anthropocene" imaginary is a reaction to the impulse toward claims to universality resurfacing in the discourse on the Anthropocene, particularly in the notion of "the human."

Barbara Gfoellner

'It sounds like erasure': Mobility, Vulnerability, and Queer Coolitude Poetics in Rajiv Mohabir's The Taxidermist's Cut

Various im/mobilities linked to colonialism have shaped the Caribbean, fundamentally structuring the unevenness of vulnerability. This paper reads vulnerabilities as relationally produced through the entanglement of human and more-than-human im/mobilities. Rajiv Mohabir's poetry collection The Taxidermist's Cut (2016) addresses the vulnerability of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora and extends it to a shared more-than-human vulnerability. This is done by employing the practice of taxidermy as a figurative device to expose violences and vulnerabilities of oppressive and colonial regimes and its legacies today. These multiple vulnerabilities are related to both imperial im/mobilizations of peoples during the period of indentureship, as well as of animals, on which taxidermy is performed, immobilizing their desired shape for eternity. The book then queers understandings of singular national affiliation and binary classifications that serve to immobilize humans and non-humans alike, and instead moves out of these fixation by opening up the vulnerabilities of the self to other possibilities. 

Jennifer A. Reimer

From Crisis to Cata/Strophe: Prepositional Poetics as Decolonizing Praxis

This article shows how Aracelis Girmay's The Black Maria (2016) and Raquel Salas Rivera's while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (2019) turn the ongoing catastrophe of coloniality into a visual grammar of/for loss. Aracelis Girmay's The Black Maria offers a prepositional poetics to visualize the catastrophe of Mediterranean migrant crossings within the spacetime of an oceanic coloniality that joins Mediterranean to Atlantic and Caribbean. Raquel Salas Rivera's poetic response to Hurricane María invokes prepositional relationships to reveal and contest the United States' existing hierarchies of colonial-imperial power. Through form, their poetry visualizes how witness, survival, and mourning become decolonizing tactics of resistance. In the two texts, I identify a prepositional poetics that, by signaling movements through space and time, locates the specific catastrophes of displacement and climate change disaster in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean as part of a continuum of coloniality that stretches from the sixteenth century to the present.

Michael Fuchs

Videogames in Horror Movies: Remediation, Metalepsis, Interface Effects, and Fear of the Digital

This article discusses four movies in which transgressions between gameworlds and diegetic realities take center stage: Brainscan (1994), Stay Alive (2006), Livescream (2018), and Choose or Die (2022). By exploring the interactions between videogame worlds and "reality," these movies do not simply project anxieties onto digital games, but rather reflect on media-specific affordances of videogames, inquire into discourses surrounding videogames, and explore game cultures. I am particularly interested in the strategies and aesthetics of remediating videogames in the horror films and the conceptualizations of videogames and game cultures thus produced, as well as the larger cultural fears and anxieties (and hopes and dreams) that these representations evoke.