The American Anthropocene: Spectral Literary Ecologies In Post-1945 Narratives

This project explores the relation between American exceptionalism and global ecological crisis of our present. It argues that US exceptionalist narratives of progress begot and/or propelled several markers of the Anthropocene that find their traces in the United States: the nuclear age, climate change, and plastic pollution. I examine the American- Anthropocene histories of the bomb, the automobile, and plastic through the liberal progress narratives of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as an organizing framework. In particular, I analyze literary narratives after 1945 (including film, literature, and art) as sites for revealing the fiction of US progress and surfacing what I call “spectral literary ecologies”—haunting ecological relations across time and space that link our contemporary environmental crises with the oppressive historical, material conditions of the United States. This project thus retells the Anthropocene story three ways in order to emphasize the inter-relationality between social injustice and environmental injustice in US and US-adjacent contexts. Through these retellings, I argue that our inheritances of the nuclear age, climate change, and plastic pollution are bound up in ongoing US structures of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and reproductive labor. While US narratives of progress continue to legitimize social and environmental harm, I argue that literary narratives grant us space to imagine nonlinear relations of accountability with the past and future—to reckon with the ghosts of the American Anthropocene. Ultimately, this project offers an environmental humanities intervention by foregrounding “America” in the Anthropocene, and by underscoring narrative as both a critical mode and restorative framework for understanding how we got here and where we must go for a scholarly-informed justice in the Anthropocene