Labor and labor norms orient much of contemporary life, organizing our days and years. Yet, surprisingly, work norms have not been sufficiently interrogated for their profound roles in climate change and other crises gathered under the term Anthropocene. Essays in this book expose deep flaws in ideas of work and investigate leisure practices for (sometimes radically) alternative ways of life.
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.
Introduction: Denaturalizing the Slow Violence of Work
Ryan Hediger
Section One: Questioning Anthropocene Frames
Chapter 1: Whats 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 Akll
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
Worlds Fair, Illuminates the Nature of Modern Work
James Armstrong
Chapter 7: Leisure and Light Work: Coming of Age in Wendell Berrys and
Thomas Pynchons 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 Womens Way
Jo Rey
Coda
Pedagogical Anthropo/Scenes: Reviving Craft in the Academy
Sharon O'Dair
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
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.
