Peter Raccuglia
Yale University
Peter Raccuglia is a PhD candidate in English at Yale University. He is currently completing a dissertation entitled American Cosmos: Scale and Freedom in the Nineteenth Century, which looks at the development of environment concepts at particular spatial scales as forms of world-making which alternately enhance or inhibit political forms of agency and affective modes of belonging.
The most pressing problems facing the environmental humanities right now—global warming, mass extinction, the Anthropocene debates—require us to radically alter the temporal and spatial scales on which we approach cultural... [ view full abstract ]
The most pressing problems facing the environmental humanities right now—global warming, mass extinction, the Anthropocene debates—require us to radically alter the temporal and spatial scales on which we approach cultural history. But it is not enough to expand the scale of our inquiries to cover the longue durée of geological history; our environmental crises necessitate a multiplication of scales, each with its own frame of relevance and scale of resolution, each attending to the newly problematic categories of agency, constraint, and affect that global change brings to the fore. Multiscalar environmental analysis can sharpen the contradictions that arise when these categories, having been developed at particular scale (say, that of phenomenology or nation-state politics), are metaleptically imported to a higher or lower scale of analysis (say, species history).
I regard the nineteenth century as a period in which a host of developments—the discovery of geologic and evolutionary time, large-scale industrialization, westward expansion and the consolidation of regional identities, the development of aerial technologies, and the formation of natural history, psychology, and geography as distinct disciplines, to name a few—led to a wholesale revision in popular and theoretical notions of where and how environments matter. Taking scale as a keyword for C19 environmental humanities can point us towards the ways in which concepts of dwelling, embeddedness, and affiliation attached to environments conceived at varying levels of spatial scale—the body, the local, region, nation, planet, cosmos—and thereby determined the horizons for the emerging environmental discourse from the early republican period through the birth of ecology.
