Volume 70, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Elemental Agency: American Culture and the Politics of Matter; Guest Editors: Moritz Ingwersen and Timo Müller

The elements and the elemental have emerged as increasingly productive concepts at the intersection of media theory, ecocriticism, and environmental philosophy. The article builds on this scholarship to discuss the potentials of an elemental approach in literary and cultural studies. Against the backdrop of the climate crisis, it outlines the stakes of an elemental aesthetics capable of interrelating modes of sensory, epistemological, and artistic mediation of ecological relations. As a signifier of animated environments, specific material substances, figurative notions of place, and enabling infrastructures, the elements are key for understanding agency as always already compositional, situated, and distributed. Exploring methodologies of elemental analysis with a focus on American literature and culture, the article concludes by illustrating how an aesthetically grounded conceptualization of agency as elemental is particularly useful for addressing the politics of exposure, emplacement, and extraction in the Anthropocene.

Generating a conversation between nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman and contemporary composer John Luther Adams, this article offers a sonic-elemental account of American geography and community. It argues that Adams and Whitman treat America as a constellation of elemental relations between bodies and materialities, and that sound helps to discern and describe those relations. In doing so, the article outlines initial parameters of an elemental politics that relates political actions to their surrounding soundscapes, thus emphasizing communality while rebuffing nationalism and spanning across multiple times and places while remaining rooted in specific present situations. To make this argument, the article draws upon scholarship in elemental media studies, new materialism, and soundscape theory. It treats both poetry and music as types of elemental sound art, appreciating that sonic vibrations affect bodies below the level of consciousness even when finding expression in perceivable language or music.

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) offers a meditation on elemental matter and its intersections with slavery, race, and resistance to racialization. Combining Lindgren Johnson’s concept of a fugitive humanism with elemental analysis for a reading of Whitehead’s sixth novel, the article proceeds in three steps. First, I briefly outline ways in which an elemental focus may connect with African American (Studies) perspectives, in particular Johnson’s fugitive humanism. Subsequently, my discussion explores the novel’s representation of an elemental biopolitics of slavery that involves what I identify as three elements of race. Whitehead presents the peculiar institution’s harnessing of these elements of fire, metal(s), and cotton as interconnected processes that not only help extract African American labor power and energy, but also racialize categories of the human. Finally, I focus on fugitive humanist forms of resisting to and through the elements. In this respect, the novel highlights through its protagonist how resistance strategies involve not only an ultimately uncontrollable elemental vitality, but also new forms of labor in which the human and the elemental emerge as co-agents.

Slime—elemental to life and to eco-horror—is conceptually entangled with many things, some very unsavory. It is an utterly indifferent element, but for millennia in the popular imagination, it has been an elemental intruder, a border-crosser, an agent with bad intentions. Raced, classed, and gendered, slime is unpredictable and uncontainable. Its very elementality is ambivalent. Scholars have grappled usefully with slime as a theoretical concept, but little has appeared linking specific examples of the raced, classed, and gendered slimic imagination with eco-horror. “The Slimic Imagination and Elemental Eco-horror” begins such a discussion, based on specific literary and filmic examples from a range of historical periods, to show that slime is elementally transmorphous, is liminal in many senses, and that it moves freely across the borders of the living and the dead, the solid and the liquid, the dangerous and the necessary, evoking responses as varied as terror and horror, on the one hand, and joy and excitement on the other. Slime appears in variously devious forms in texts from Dickens to Swift, from Brontë to Stevenson, from Roth to Machen, and from Kenneth Branagh to Ridley Scott—never in the same way, but always in ways that demand political engagement.

Considering the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Spill, the largest environmental disaster in American history, this article examines the elemental intermixing of oil and water via the chemical agent Corexit, the substantial effects submerging oil into the water column had on ocean life, and the aesthetic translation of this environmental destruction by the poetry platform Poets for Living Waters . Functioning as a communal expression of grief, of remembrance, and a demand for change, Poets for Living Waters brings together the work of hundreds of authors, figuratively raising oil’s toxic specter to the surface by challenging America’s failure to protect ocean ecosystems through an elementally-attentive poetics that highlights the characteristic traits of both water and oil and the deadly effects that occur when these two elements intermix.

This contribution examines the elemental aesthetics of Bill Morrison’s documentary film Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016). The film traces connections between the birth of Dawson City as a boomtown of the Klondike Gold Rush in Yukon Territory in 1896 and the birth of cinema and the rise of the Hollywood movie industry, linking actual resource extraction (gold mining) to its discursive framing and mythologization (in Hollywood movies). Throughout the film, Morrison incorporates extracts of silent-film reels that were recovered from the permafrost below Dawson City in 1978 and that thus bear distinct marks of water damage that shape the aesthetic of Dawson City: Frozen Time . Through its comprehensive engagement of elemental materialities, Morrison’s film narrates the Klondike Gold Rush as a particular moment in the history of (North American) resource extraction. It invites analysis through the lenses of material and elemental ecocriticism, lenses that allow for understanding this moment within the vast network of profound transformations of the earth that have become known as the Anthropocene. The filmic composition itself prompts the audience to pay close attention to different elements—gold, earth, water, fire—that are crucially involved in both the Klondike Gold Rush and the film’s own history. Via this elemental focus, Morrison also creates a tension between the film’s elicitation of vicarious grief for the loss of the landscape and its evocation of irrevocable transformation as an ongoing process of human and elemental agency.