Overview

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.

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9781684484591

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Reviews

""The idea of improvement through labor offered Europe a pretext for conquest and the means for colonizing the world in its image. This lively and provocative volume spotlights the enduring extractivist legacies of this deep cultural history, offering a fresh reexamination of labor, leisure, and the Anthropocene.""--Dominic Boyer ""author of Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene"" ""This exciting collection of theoretical reflections and historical case-studies explores the question of work as a critical category for environmental thought and social ethics. The cultural and literary explorations pursued in this volume offer a collective argument for attending to local textures and dynamic contingencies in the context of planetary ecological collapse.""--Eric Gidal ""author of Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age"" ""This fascinating collection rethinks the Anthropocene by emphasizing the centrality of work--that is, human labor--in remaking the planet. Cutting through debates over when to date the epoch, or what to call it, while eschewing the nebulous language of 'agency, ' it offers an immensely clarifying perspective that will speak to readers in many disciplines.""--Jesse Oak Taylor ""coeditor of Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times""

"""The idea of improvement through labor offered Europe a pretext for conquest and the means for colonizing the world in its image. This lively and provocative volume spotlights the enduring extractivist legacies of this deep cultural history, offering a fresh reexamination of labor, leisure, and the Anthropocene.""--Dominic Boyer ""author of Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene"" ""This exciting collection of theoretical reflections and historical case-studies explores the question of work as a critical category for environmental thought and social ethics. The cultural and literary explorations pursued in this volume offer a collective argument for attending to local textures and dynamic contingencies in the context of planetary ecological collapse.""--Eric Gidal ""author of Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age"" ""This fascinating collection rethinks the Anthropocene by emphasizing the centrality of work--that is, human labor--in remaking the planet. Cutting through debates over when to date the epoch, or what to call it, while eschewing the nebulous language of 'agency, ' it offers an immensely clarifying perspective that will speak to readers in many disciplines.""--Jesse Oak Taylor ""coeditor of Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times"""

Author Information

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.    

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