Planet Work: Rethinking Labor and Leisure in the Anthropocene
Planet Work: Rethinking Labor and Leisure in the Anthropocene
edited by Ryan Hediger contributions by Jennifer K. Ladino, Will Elliot, Kevin Maier, Jo Rey, Sharon O'Dair, Ryan Hediger, David Rodland, Ted Geier, Sinan Akilli, Daniel Clausen, James Armstrong, Matt Wanat and Amanda Adams
Bucknell University Press, 2023 Cloth: 978-1-68448-459-1 | Paper: 978-1-68448-458-4 | eISBN: 978-1-68448-462-1 Library of Congress Classification HD4904.P53 2023 Dewey Decimal Classification 331.01
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Labor and labor norms orient much of contemporary life, organizing our days and years and driving planetary environmental change. Yet, labor, as a foundational set of values and practices, has not been sufficiently interrogated in the context of the environmental humanities for its profound role in climate change and other crises. This collection of essays demonstrates the urgent need to rethink models and customs of labor and leisure in the Anthropocene. Recognizing the grave traumas and hazards plaguing planet Earth, contributors expose fundamental flaws in ideas of work and search for ways to redirect cultures toward more sustainable modes of life. These essays evaluate Anthropocene frames of interpretation, dramatize problems and potentials in regimes of labor, and explore leisure practices such as walking and storytelling as modes of recasting life, while a coda advocates reviving notions of work as craft.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Ryan Hediger is a professor of English at Kent State University in Ohio. He is the author of Homesickness: Of Trauma and the Longing for Place in a Changing Environment, editor of Animals and War, coeditor of Animals and Agency, and is currently writing a monograph on labor norms and settler colonialism.
REVIEWS
“This exciting collection of theoretical reflections and historical case-studies explores the question of work as a critical category for environmental thought and social ethics. The cultural and literary explorations pursued in this volume offer a collective argument for attending to local textures and dynamic contingencies in the context of planetary ecological collapse.”
— Eric Gidal, author of Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age
“The idea of improvement through labor offered Europe a pretext for conquest and the means for colonizing the world in its image. This lively and provocative volume spotlights the enduring extractivist legacies of this deep cultural history, offering a fresh reexamination of labor, leisure, and the Anthropocene.”
— Dominic Boyer, author of Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene
“This fascinating collection rethinks the Anthropocene by emphasizing the centrality of work—that is, human labor—in remaking the planet. Cutting through debates over when to date the epoch, or what to call it, while eschewing the nebulous language of ‘agency,’ it offers an immensely clarifying perspective that will speak to readers in many disciplines.”
— Jesse Oak Taylor, coeditor of Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Denaturalizing the Slow Violence of Work
Ryan Hediger
Section One: Questioning “Anthropocene” Frames
Chapter 1: What’s Past is Prologue: The Dragon, the Phoenix, and the Golden Spike
David L. Rodland
Chapter 2: Anthropocene Performance: Work without Ends
Ted Geier
Section Two: Rethinking Work in the Anthropocene
Chapter 3: Unfree Labor: Slavery and the Anthropocene in the Americas
Ryan Hediger
Chapter 4: The Rise of the Novel and the Narrative Labor of Horses in the English Novel of the Early Anthropocene
Sinan Akıllı
Chapter 5: Reconstruction Agrarianism in Douglass and Burroughs: Relational Labor Against White Supremacist Ownership
Daniel Clausen
Chapter 6: The Work of the Globe: How the Unisphere, Icon of the 1964-65 World’s Fair, Illuminates the Nature of Modern Work
James Armstrong
Chapter 7: Leisure and Light Work: Coming of Age in Wendell Berry’s and Thomas Pynchon’s Novels of Extraction
Matt Wanat
Section Three: Learning from Leisure in the Anthropocene
Chapter 8: Walking the Line between Leisure and Labor: Dorothy Wordsworth and Harriet Martineau in the English Lake District
Amanda Adams
Chapter 9: Labor, Leisure and Love of Country: Rangering in the Age of the Alt-NPS
Jennifer K. Ladino
Chapter 10: Learning to Play in the Anthropocene: Winter Recreation and the Politics of Climate Change
Will Elliot and Kevin Maier
Chapter 11: Weaving “Lifeworkings”: Goanna Walking between Humanism and Posthumanism, Dharug Women’s Way
Jo Rey
Coda
Pedagogical Anthropo/Scenes: Reviving Craft in the Academy
Sharon O'Dair
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
