Juliana Chow
Saint Louis University
Juliana Chow is an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Louis University. Her research on nineteenth-century American literature has constellated around topics of ecocriticism and science studies such as natural history, regionalism, vitalism, labor, and ecology. Her most recent publication is an essay called “Partial Readings: Thoreau’s Studies as Natural History’s Casualties” in the collection Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times.
As the hurricanes batter the Atlantic coast and the monsoons transform the South Asian landscape, we find ourselves seeking ways to respond to climate and to the myriad manifestations of its change. We call for green forms of living, resource management, and new urban planning tools. Nature appears, once again, a separate entity the outbursts of which we have provoked and ought now to appease. Responding to this trend of separation and distancing, the humanities at large have turned the vicissitudes of the globally warmed planet into a metaphor, asking how an ecology without nature, in its overpowering interconnectedness and unpredictability, can be deployed as a novel way to read.
Our panel aligns with the discipline's ecological turn, but reverses the roles of the equation. Instead of asking how today’s environmental theories may be used to elucidate literary works or add to reading strategies, we explore how nineteenth-century authors invoked oceanic bionomics to conceptualize models of nature and practices of reading which break with the taxonomizing imagination prevalent in mainstream scientific debates. We look at how McCune Smith, Melville, Jewett, and Douglass consult the largely forgotten and lesser known archive on the aquatic element—from oceanic landscape to marine cross-species. We conclude that the countercultural force of their alternative ecologies stems from their recourse to oceanic as opposed to terrestrial ecology. The marine dimension, we argue, enabled them to articulate surprising theories of personhood and agency, and consequently of ethics, language, and politics.
To that end, Juliana Chow's "Coral Reef Theory, Vitalism, and Black Labor" reads James McCune Smith’s interest in coral insects as a direct result of contemporary geology’s and geography’s conflation with biology, where fascination with coral insects as an index of species agency in the formation of land contrasts with today’s view of the coral as an index of potential species extinctions in response to environmental change. Putting his work into conversation with research on vitalism in polyps like coral insects and on the formation of volcanic lagoons and coral reefs, Chow reads McCune Smith’s engagement with corals as expressing a Darwinian concept of branching but discontinuous life that widens the embrace and temporalities of the human family, extending across species and through environmental anachronisms.
