Abstract This article examines the particular, evanescent character of oil in the American cultural imaginary. It takes as its central case study Hisaye Yamamoto’s “Life Among the Oil Fields” (1979), which calls itself a “memoir” only to falter at the act of recollection. Terse, disjointed, and curiously void of subjectivity, “Oil Fields” suggestively indexes a broader problem of representation. How do we square the developmental promise of the American century with the crudeness of its base? What does it mean to “live among” oil infrastructure, when oil’s perfusion into everyday life is so often experienced as a disappearance? While critics like Amitav Ghosh have proposed that the paucity of “oil encounters” in American literature stems from a lack of adequate aesthetic forms, Yamamoto’s memoir suggests that we may be looking in the wrong places. This essay argues that oil’s persistent displacement is not a technical flaw, but its most defining feature. Starting from the racial hinterlands of Los Angeles, where homes, fields, and oil ditches are layered palimpsestically atop one another, “Oil Fields” confronts capitalism’s event horizon not with the recovery of plot, but with its breakdown. The memoir recasts the typically Asian American trope of absent memory as a problem of capitalist abstraction, discovering new—though decidedly partial—ways of mapping the century’s form-giving resource: petroleum.
Abstract Who doesn’t believe that most US literature is published in New York City? Our analysis of 303,563 Library of Congress records reveals the expected rise followed by the unexpected fall of NYC in twentieth-century US literary publishing. NYC was only the place of publication for most works of US literature cataloged by the LC between 1947 and 1963, peaking in 1956 and declining sharply thereafter. That decline does not reflect decreased publishing in NYC, but increased publishing elsewhere. These findings nuance conventional narratives of conglomeration since consolidation of capital and proliferation of publishers happened simultaneously. Material approaches to literary history best explain these trends. As newer technologies displaced letterpress, older presses became available for cheap, allowing publishers outside NYC to flourish. New cataloging standards, NEA funding, and the rise of third-party distributors empowered the geographical expansion of US literary publishing. We demonstrate how this material approach enriches literary interpretation by reading Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49. Recent US literary historiography has been undermined by the assumption that NYC’s qualitative dominance of US literary publishing entails its quantitative dominance. US literary histories benefit from attending to the supply-side of literary production, which reveals that the periphery is not peripheral.
Abstract Of the twelve letters comprising J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters From an American Farmer (1782), the penultimate eleventh stands out. It is narrated not by the titular Farmer James but by “Iwan,” a Russian gentleman who declares America and Russia “nearer neighbours” (262). This essay recovers the unacknowledged work Russian-American neighborliness performs within Crèvecoeur’s vision of American futurity. I show how Crèvecoeur borrows an eighteenth-century grammar of the neighborhood to both depict and predict Russian and American settler expansion as parallel, even doubled, projects. I further argue that Iwan is not, as he is often interpreted, a continuation of James’s narrational function, but is Crèvecoeur’s historically inflected amalgam of Fedor Karzhavin, a Russian traveler throughout colonial America. Finally, turning to Iwan’s conversations with the botanist John Bartram, I demonstrate how Crèvecoeur uses botanical language to recast slavery and serfdom as benevolent forms of human gardening, a refiguration that sublimates Russia and America’s systems of enslaved labor and indigenous dispossession into shared fictions of cultivation and care. Against the backdrop of contemporary diagnoses of the “Russification” of US government, I show that tracing early American expressions of Russia and America as “nearer neighbors” promises new trajectories for US literary scholarship.
Abstract This article examines the influence of conservation biologist E. O. Wilson’s thought on the novella A Psalm of the Wild-Built (2021) by Becky Chambers in order to position the award-winning science fiction novella in contemporary environmental and posthumanist thought. This article argues that recognizing the influence of Wilson’s ecological thought, including his “half-earth” manifesto and his theory of biophilia, complicates some readers’ conclusions that Chambers dissolves binary oppositions between humans and non-humans (in Chambers’s title, the wild and built). In its effort to give narrative form to ecotopian solarpunk visions, A Psalm for the Wild-Built reworks pastoral and romantic constructions of the wilderness. In doing so, it invokes and mediates what William Cronon has called the “wilderness dualism,” which separates the human conceptually from “nature.” While Chambers does work concertedly against Cartesian binaries, the novella ultimately preserves a special status for humanity, one that is both authorized to steward a totalized planetary system and circumscribed by an ecology of affect theorized in its pages. The novella’s treatment of non-binary gender identity, part of an approach that Chambers calls “ambient queerness,” is argued to be correlative to the text’s preservation of the human/non-human binary.
