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Ecologies of Harm: Rhetorics of Violence in the United States examines violent spectacles and their quotidian manifestations in order to better understand violence’s cultural work and persistence. Starting with the supposition that violence is communicative andmeant to “send a message”—be it to deter, to scare, or to threaten—Megan Eatman goes one step further to argue that violence needs to be understood on a deeper level: as direct, structural, cultural, and constitutive across modes, a formulation that requires rethinking its rhetorical aims as less about conscious persuasion and more about the gradual shaping of public identity.
 
While Eatman looks to examples of violent spectacles to make her case (lynching, capital punishment, and torture in the War on Terror), it is in her analysis of more mundane responses to these forms of violence (congressional debates, court documents, visual art, and memorial performance) where the key to her argument lies—as she shows how circulating violence in these ways produces violent rhetorical ecologies that facilitate some modes of being while foreclosing others. Through this ecological approach, Ecologies of Harm offers a new understanding of the debates surrounding legacies of violence, examines how rhetoric and violence function together, and explores implications of their entanglement for antiviolence work.
 

A more-than-human approach to planetary survival, from a leading environmental humanist.

Ecologies of a Storied Planet in the Anthropocene is a tour de force. With transdisciplinarity and theoretical lucidity, it rethinks the Anthropocene from a material ecocritical perspective, envisioning innovative modes of knowledge for deeper understandings of Anthropocene ecologies. Focusing on nonhuman agencies, Serpil Oppermann shows in fascinating detail how to better imagine an ecological future on our storied planet that has suffered enormously from an anthropocentric mindset.

In this groundbreaking book, Jessica Martell investigates the relationship between industrial food and the emergence of literary modernisms in Britain and Ireland. By the early twentieth century, the industrialization of the British Empire’s food system had rendered many traditional farming operations, and attendant agrarian ways of life, obsolete. Weaving insights from modernist studies, food studies, and ecocriticism, Farm to Form contends that industrial food made nature “modernist,” a term used as literary scholars understand it—stylistically disorienting, unfamiliar, and artificial but also exhilarating, excessive, and above all, new. Martell draws in part upon archives in the United Kingdom but also presents imperial foodways as an extended rehearsal for the current era of industrial food supremacy. She analyzes how pastoral mode, anachronism, fragmentation, and polyvocal narration reflect the power of the literary arts to reckon with—and to resist—the new “modernist ecologies” of the twentieth century.

Deeply informed by Martell’s extensive knowledge of modern British, Irish, American, and World Literatures, this progressive work positions modernism as central to the study of narratives of resistance against social and environmental degradation. Analyzed works include those of Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, George Russell, and James Joyce.

In light of climate change, fossil fuel supremacy, nutritional dearth, and other pressing food issues, modernist texts bring to life an era of crisis and anxiety similar to our own. In doing so, Martell summons the past as a way to employ the modernist term of “defamiliarizing” the present so that entrenched perceptions can be challenged. Our current food regime is both new and constantly evolving with the first industrial food trades. Studying earlier cultural responses to them invites us to return to persistent problems with new insights and renewed passion.
 

Vision limited, sounds muffled. Tiny water droplets reflect light back to its source and make it difficult to locate the origin of sounds: this is fog. In Chakad Ojani’s ethnography, this atmospheric phenomenon plays a pivotal role.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on engagements with fog in Lima and coastal Peru, Harvesting the Clouds examines how local NGO workers and fog oasis conservationists sought to utilize coastal fog as a water source. NGO workers installed fog catchers in informal or recently formalized neighborhoods where state infrastructure was absent, while conservationists harnessed ground-touching clouds in order to prevent informal urbanization. As they set out to capture ground-touching clouds to pursue their distinct goals, these collectives became entrapped by activities, demands, and expectations that they had not foreseen. The book frames these relationships as ecologies of capture: emergent webs of relationships held together by conflicting aims and expectations, the possibilities and limitations of fog capture, and the material qualities of fog itself. 

Harvesting the Clouds argues that capture is always only partially successful, but by virtue of this partiality, it becomes productive of social relations—an understanding that the author extends to anthropological inquiry itself as an exercise in the productive impossibility of ethnographic entrapment.

In Legacies of War Kimberly Theidon examines the lives of children born of wartime rape and the experiences of their mothers and communities to offer a gendered theory of harm and repair. Drawing on ethnographic research in postconflict Peru and Colombia, Theidon considers the multiple environments in which conception, pregnancy, and childbirth unfold. She reimagines harm by taking into account the impact of violence on individual people as well as on more-than-human lives, bodies, and ecologies, showing how wartime violence reveals the interdependency of all life. She also critiques policy makers, governments, and humanitarian organizations for their efforts at postconflict justice, which frequently take an anthropocentric rights-based approach that is steeped in liberal legalism. Rethinking the intergenerational reach of war while questioning what counts as sexual and reproductive violence, Theidon calls for an explicitly feminist peace-building and postconflict agenda that includes a full range of sexual and reproductive rights, including access to safe and affordable abortions.

In Ruderal City Bettina Stoetzer traces relationships among people, plants, and animals in contemporary Berlin as they make their lives in the ruins of European nationalism and capitalism. She develops the notion of the ruderal—originally an ecological designation for the unruly life that inhabits inhospitable environments such as rubble, roadsides, train tracks, and sidewalk cracks—to theorize Berlin as a “ruderal city.” Stoetzer explores sites in and around Berlin that have figured in German national imaginaries—gardens, forests, parks, and rubble fields—to show how racial, class, and gender inequalities shape contestations over today’s uses and knowledges of urban nature. Drawing on fieldwork with gardeners, botanists, migrant workers, refugees, public officials, and nature enthusiasts while charting human and more-than-human worlds, Stoetzer offers a wide-ranging ethnographic portrait of Berlin’s postwar ecologies that reveals emergent futures in the margins of European cities. Brimming with stories that break down divides between environmental perspectives and the study of migration and racial politics, Berlin’s ruderal worlds help us rethink the space of nature and culture and the categories through which we make sense of urban life in inhospitable times.

How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life, Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters.

Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Domínguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus—from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machine rooms—and teams of workers—from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers—who fight to hold artworks still.

As MoMA reopens after a massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion.