Planet Work Rethinking Labor and Leisure in the Anthropocene

EDITED BY RYAN HEDIGER

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.

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.

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