BEYOND SAFETY: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, and Neoliberal Contemporary Life 9781501377013, 9781501377044, 9781501377037

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BEYOND SAFETY

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BEYOND SAFETY

Risk, Cosmopolitanism, and Neoliberal Contemporary Life

Emily Johansen

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Copyright © Emily Johansen Aase, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. vii–viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover image: Bose Bluetooth Speaker, Left Image by Shuli Hallak All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-7701-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-7703-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-7702-0 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS List of Figures vi Acknowledgmentsvii Introduction RISKY COSMOPOLITANISM

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Chapter 1 RISK AND PROXIMITY

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Chapter 2 RISK AND EMBODIMENT

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Chapter 3 RISK AND SCALE

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Chapter 4 RISK, ACTION, AND SYMPATHY

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Afterword RISKY COSMOPOLITANISM IN A PANDEMIC

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Notes149 Bibliography161 Index171

FIGURES

1.1 2.1 2.2 3.1

Image of Palestinian iteration of Conflict Kitchen Shuli Hallak, “Facebook Data Centre” Telegeography, “2020 Submarine Cable Map” Edward Burtynsky, “Oxford Tire Pile #5, Westley, California, USA, 1999” 3.2 Sebastião Salgado, “Iceberg between the Paulet Island and the South Shetland Islands, Antarctica”

39 56 57 90 94

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The great irony of this book is my own tendency toward caution. I have had the great luck, however, to be surrounded by collaborators who enable and push me to think past this boundary. Beyond Safety is indebted to the various coffee shops and coworkers that made its creation, if not a pleasure exactly, rewarding. Its earliest drafts were written in the company of Joshua Barbour and Rebecca Gill in the Village Café in Bryan, Texas. Various additions and revisions were made globally, in coffee shops and libraries in Austin; Houston; Winston-Salem; Ottawa; Montréal; Edmonton; Paris; Wellington; as well as others I now forget. The book was finished under pandemic lockdowns and quarantines, which required new working conditions but allowed for the resumption of coworking sessions with Joshua and Rebecca. Thinking and writing are often agonizingly solo processes but I have had the good fortune to think and write consistently alongside these two over the last decade. Beyond Safety also emerged in innumerable conversations with so many smart colleagues. In particular, Alissa G. Karl has heard many versions of the ideas and claims that were later elaborated in these pages. Alexander Beaumont, Michelle Chihara, Ralph Crane, Shawna Ferris, Andrew Griffin, Jeff Gonzalez, Kaley Joyes, Adam Kelly, John Marx, Stephanie Morley, Matt Mullins, Suzanne Rintoul, Kristian Shaw, Terri Tomsky, and Pieter Vermeulen have been similarly helpful interlocutors at various moments. Haaris Naqvi’s interest in and support of this project has been crucial—as was the feedback from the anonymous readers. Andrew’s willingness to read last-minute drafts of things is especially appreciated. I also want to assure Alissa, Ralph, and Terri that, while numerous trees were killed to print this book, zero mint plants died during the research and writing of it. More locally (even if some are no longer local), Dan Austen, Leonardo Cardoso, Matt DelCiampo, Sara DiCaglio, Ira Dworkin, Laura Estill, Marcela Fuentes, Maura Ives, David McWhirter, Mary Ann O’Farrell, Nandra Perry, Vanita Reddy, Sally Robinson, Mikko Tuhkanen, Jenelle Troxell, and Cara Wallis have all variously provided feedback and encouragement as Beyond Safety was written. My graduate students, Nelson Shake, Jiwon Choi, and Donnie Secreast, have all helped push my thinking in unexpected directions, as did the two groups of senior English majors who took my seminars on risk narratives (some bravely doing so mid-pandemic). The work of this book was helped in ways, big and small, by the research support provided by various undergraduate research assistants: Justin DeMois, Stephen Harrison, Mariana Melo, and Hayden Stephens. The research was also supported in numerous ways—financially and collegially—by the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for

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Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. Finally, the printed version of this book would have been impossible without the support of the Bloomsbury editorial and production assistants. I want to especially thank the anonymous copy-editors who caught my embarrassingly numerous typos and my inability to distinguish between “principle” and “principal.” This book has been enriched, in innumerable ways, by the support and encouragement of my family. Dorothy Woodman, John Johansen, and Stephanie Michaels have shown unflagging interest in this project and the questions central to it. Indeed, so many of the questions this book asks and seeks to answer about the transformation of privilege into a site of ethical and political engagement are ones that were pervasive throughout my upbringing. My sisters, Elinor and Anna, and their husbands, Antonio and Jason, have celebrated every step of this process with me. Anna, in particular, has consistently made herself available to help work through thorny sentences at the drop of a hat. Finally, while my nieces and nephews, Beatrice, Lukas, Theodore, and Lillian have limited interest in this book (the only truly healthy attitude toward academic writing), their bravery, good humor, and kindness is a constant inspiration. Earlier versions of some chapters were published in the following journals: Chapter 1: “The Political Allure of the Local: Food and Cosmopolitanism in Timothy Taylor’s Stanley Park and Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats,” Politics and Culture, 2 (2009): n.p. Chapter 4: “Cosmopolitan Risk, Neoliberal Unfreedom: Transparency and Responsibility in John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener,” Open Library of Humanities, 4.2 (2018): https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/ olh.379/. “Risky Cosmopolitanism: Risk and Responsibility in Catherine Bush’s The Rules of Engagement,” ARIEL, 42.1 (2011): 129–47.

Introduction R I SK Y C O SM O P O L I TA N I SM

On May 26, 2017, three men on a Portland train attempted to de-escalate a racist tirade directed at two teenage girls, one wearing a hijab, the other African American. The attacker turned on the men and stabbed them, two fatally. The actions of these three men, all who appeared to be white, might be understood as “risky behavior”—behavior where the outcome isn’t completely predictable and the possibility of negative consequences is high, but they trade on their white masculinity to provide a greater degree of safety for more precarious subjects. Moreover, their actions demonstrate an instance where risk, implicitly, generates and emerges from cosmopolitan connections and practices that transcend passive liberal tolerance or neoliberal biopolitical norms in favor of active forms of social justice that take the redistribution of unevenness seriously and materially. This scenario also highlights the way global everyday life is suffused with precarity for some subjects, particularly racialized and gendered people. The three men take a risk, but, for the two teenage girls, risk is far too central to their gendered and racialized movement through public space. If cosmopolitanism, on one hand, has too frequently signified a docile comfort with multicultural difference that ultimately naturalizes the middleclass comforts of whiteness and neoliberalism and, on the other hand, demands an understanding of the subject as responsible only for itself, then the actions of these three men illustrate the model of the risky cosmopolitan subject at work in this book: one that emerges out of theories of cosmopolitanism that emphasize material practices predicated on notions of necessarily shared global futures that focus on the negotiation of shared global space, resist the individualizing impulse of neoliberalism, and transform privilege into a site from which to enact change rather than reinforce itself. The violent attacks—the verbal one and the physical one—on the Portland train highlight, in microcosm, the sometimes-claustrophobic experience of global life and the subsequent dangers to which a risky cosmopolitan subject must respond. If, as I argue, such actions are central to an ethic of global interconnection, then how do such actions come to seem viable and necessary? While the strategic use of privilege is familiar to many of those who do social justice work, this

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notion of choosing precarity remains marginal in the mainstream. For many who might identify as progressive, the aim of social change (notably not the same thing as social justice) is the elimination of precarity for those who have been disenfranchised historically and more recently, violently and otherwise. While this is an understandable aim, its iteration in Global North narratives about the Global South tends to preserve a “white savior” narrative that sees proximity to white, middle-class privilege as the only path to social emancipation.1 This position is as ethically undesirable in its colonizing homogeneity as it is environmentally unsustainable. Moreover, this narrative—of both precarity and salvation—tends to only make evident the most extreme and egregious forms of both, exceptionalizing and spectacularizing this dyad. To return to the Portland train encounter: its spectacular violence works to both characterize the men as exceptional and to suggest the implausibility of this as an ethos of everyday life. It’s hard to imagine an overwhelming acceptance of self-negating violence as the path to equity. Yet Beyond Safety’s focus is on exactly how we might imagine alternative modes of engagement with global privilege and precarity, and the ideological circulation in the philosophical traditions of the Global North of safety and self-preservation as intrinsic and instinctual good. In particular, Beyond Safety considers how cultural texts narrate the quotidian existence of privileged Global North subjects as necessarily enmeshed in a global matrix of precarity that has long been discursively represented as “properly” belonging to the nations of the Global South. Invisible in these representations of spectacular risk and precarity, both accidentally and as alibi, are the more banal and everyday moments of both risk and precarity, and the choice to recognize one’s actions within this less spectacular dynamic. As the representations of risk under examination in this book illustrate, this failure of recognition and subsequent responsibility (or evasion thereof) is also a spatial one. The dynamics of risk and precarity are ultimately global and thus demand an awareness of one’s actions within a much larger spatial matrix than is immediately evident. We’re daily imbricated in racialized economies of risk, violence, and responsibility that don’t always cross our threshold of visibility on our commute to work.2 Throughout this book, then, I understand the questions of risk and precarity as fundamentally cosmopolitan ones as they raise questions about what it means to be a responsible citizen of the globe under contemporary forms of precarity. This model marks a difference from much of the current cultural studies discourse around precarity which focuses principally on American debt, and persuasively demonstrates the centrality of debt to contemporary American life and the varied ways it produces new and extended forms of precarity, increasingly expanding into the white middle classes. Works by Jane Elliott (2018), Leigh Claire La Berge (2015), and Annie McClanahan (2017), for instance, focus on specifically financially/economically framed choice, risk, and debt. While this is less spectacular than, say, the risks taken by the men on the Portland train, it remains somewhat exceptional: mortgages and student debt, for instance,

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impact everyday life but are not decisions one makes continually in the way that, say, one makes choices about the food one consumes. The questions of debt, risk, and responsibility taken in this book shift from these explicitly American economic choices and locate themselves in global ways. Instead, the texts under examination here consider the way economic choices like those outlined by Elliott, La Berge, and McClanahan have been normalized and extended into non-financial realms—a hallmark of the neoliberal everyday—as well as operate in explicitly global networks. If this body of cultural studies scholarship examines how risk and debt operate in and are represented under the economic realities of postwar American life, social science scholarship on risk tends toward greater attentiveness to the global stakes of the risks of contemporary life and a less deterministically economic use of these terms.3 However, unsurprisingly, this body of scholarship pays less attention to the broader cultural representations of both risk and the subsequent precarity these risks produce. Beyond Safety brings these scholarly threads together by focusing on deliberately transnational representations of risk and precarity, attending to the way these representations make assumptions about the nature of both risk and precarity, their global spread, and the kinds of cosmopolitan debts they produce. I have limited my focus here to Anglophone texts, principally written from and/or about the Global North. This selection principle emerges from a desire to attend to questions about risk and precarity directed toward those who have typically most benefited from global economies of risk. How, in other words, do those individuals who have typically been allowed to enter into modes of economic risk but with limited expectation of true precarity represent this globally imagined dynamic? And how might they upend this dynamic? This book proceeds, therefore, from the assumption that those who most benefit from contemporary precarity are those most responsible for undoing the system of willed inequities. Beyond Safety argues that contemporary cultural texts—principally novels, but also contemporary photography and films—link risk-taking (a practice deeply imbued with a financialized logic of profit and loss)4 and precarity (an existential state created out of global inequalities) to the prospect of a cosmopolitan life in the contemporary moment. In addition, then, to bringing together cultural studies and social science approaches to risk and precarity, this book expands our thinking on cosmopolitanism. While criticism on cosmopolitanism is often characterized as near-exhausted, it remains both over-informed by notions of multicultural diversity and under-informed by the economic realities of contemporary life. I retain the term “cosmopolitanism” throughout this book to signify forms of political belonging alongside and beyond the nation-state that are explicitly informed by transformative aspirations (realized or not). That cosmopolitan aspirations have so typically aligned with the liberal humanist aims of capital do not, to my mind, represent the only cosmopolitical horizon. As Pheng Cheah (2006), Homi Bhabha (1996), and Paul Gilroy (2005, 2010) have illustrated, cosmopolitanism has

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been a productive paradigm for a variety of decolonial projects in the Global South. This is not to say, however, that cosmopolitanism hasn’t, historically, been complicit with imperialist projects; indeed, it is this very potential for complicity that I want to retain by way of reminder. Throughout this book, it remains critical to consider the complicated links between risk, precarity, and privilege; transforming one’s privilege into precarity is hardly a straightforward predictor of equitable political potential. Instead, these texts demonstrate the complicated reality of contemporary precarity for privileged Global North residents. The representations of subjects of risk that are pervasive in a variety of contemporary cultural forms—and under examination here—are particularly attuned to the impossibility of any notion of absolute safety from risk and the global networks these risks are necessarily embedded within. I argue that these representations resist ubiquitous cultural narratives that equate risk with financial and, thus, social success or failure, all the while ignoring the forms of more radical precarity that these same risks depend upon and exploit. They index, instead, sites of discontinuity between hegemonic neoliberal narratives that see entrepreneurial risks as essential to constant financial accumulation and liberal narratives of individual responsibility and ethical humanitarian acts. While the former seems to have greater cultural currency than the latter, it is, in fact, the latter that pervades much of the cultural space occupied by the middle class, principally white residents of the Global North who understand themselves as socially aware and who are, for the most part, the subjects, authors, and audience of the representations under examination here—and, likely, this book itself. Beyond Safety investigates the narratives constructed around everyday risks that justify the preservation of privileged safety, the rejection of this, and the myriad positions in-between. I maintain that these narratives point to the impossibility of personal safety in the face of a deeply— and increasingly—precarious world, and see embracing a shared precarity as the keystone to a cosmopolitanism that isn’t simply about neoliberal multicultural diversity. Investigating contemporary narratives around risk requires attending to the discourses that surround three of the principle key words of contemporary literary criticism: neoliberalism, precarity, and cosmopolitanism. For the last two decades, these keywords have, in various permutations, shaped how scholars of contemporary literature and culture approach their various archives. However, this attention has often preceded sequentially rather than simultaneously. In Beyond Safety, I proceed by examining how these bodies of scholarship lead us to consider intersecting questions about the forms that responsibility might take in a transnational context and the potential responses that accrue from these understandings. The cultural texts I read throughout are not case studies, demonstrating “in practice” the ideas of the theoretical discourses that will be my focus in the next section of this chapter; rather, I treat imaginative texts as another venue—and perhaps a more flexible

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one—for interrogating and theorizing the subjects formed by and the systems that undergird contemporary life. Beyond Safety illustrates a broader cultural conversation about how those of us most in possession of social power and privilege might transform these as starting points for social justice work, both through the abdication of that power and by using it as a spotlight.

Thinking beyond the Individual: Cosmopolitan Precarity and Neoliberal Risk By exploring this more capacious sense of risk and precarity, I want to bring together the critical questions we ask about precarity, risk, and cosmopolitanism. To do so, I first want to disentangle these threads and highlight the contributions made by these bodies of scholarship while also accounting for their limitations as they attempt to understand the realities of contemporary risk. Contemporary cultural texts, this book posits, have had more space to bring these various threads together and, consequently, allow us to see the potential reimagining risk and safety enables. Cosmopolitanism as Practice, Cosmopolitanism as Response Renewed scholarly attention on cosmopolitanism was inescapable in the last decade of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first century, in response to the so-called “clashes of civilization” that ended with the Cold War and began anew with 9/11. This attention came clearly to the foreground with the publication of Pheng Cheah’s and Bruce Robbins’s collection, Cosmopolitics, in 1998. Cosmopolitics (particularly the separate introductions by each editor) marked a critical engagement with the term, which had resurfaced in the post– Cold War 1990s. According to Google, usage of the word “cosmopolitanism” is practically nonexistent through the nineteenth century before it spikes and then steadies around the First World War, falls throughout the 1960s, and then rises exponentially again in the mid-1980s.5 That the word becomes so prevalent in the late 1980s and onward speaks to its deployment in the face of a post–Cold War, globalized world. In the midst of the claims made about the end of history, the triumph of capitalism over communism, and the belief that the end of the Cold War would mean an end to nationalism (a belief that proved fantastical incredibly quickly), Euro-American critics looked to the cosmopolitan philosophies of the Enlightenment, particularly those of Immanuel Kant, to find language to make sense of globalization. With its origins in Kantian philosophy, modern iterations of cosmopolitanism in the Euro-American academy have, at their core, a preoccupation with not only the good life but also the safe life. Kant’s cosmopolitan hypothesis emerges from Enlightenment-era preoccupations with rationality and a resultant inquiry into the reality of and necessity for discussions surrounding questions

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of war and peace, and their implications for the burgeoning bourgeois nationstate. In its post–Cold War iteration, cosmopolitan theory has been similarly invested in questions about the relationship between the subject, the nationstate, and a broader vision of global safety and security. Much of contemporary cosmopolitan theory indicates a debt to Hannah Arendt, one of the preeminent philosophers of post–Second World War mobility and displacement, particularly to her notion of “the right to have rights” (1968). Moreover, scholars dealing with “vernacular cosmopolitanisms,” to use Bhabha’s phrase (1996), have been particularly interested in forms of coerced and forced migration, emphasizing cosmopolitanism’s connection to dangerous and precarious forms of life. This strand of cosmopolitan theory, heavily influenced by the work of postcolonial writers and scholars, has typically been skeptical of forms of cosmopolitanism too easily amenable to global capital and too quick to dismiss the contemporary relevance of the nation-state. Indeed, cosmopolitanism has often been characterized, in vernacular cosmopolitanism, as a negative force that seeks to obscure and exnominate the hierarchies and power imbalances endemic to the global expansion of neoliberalism. Cosmopolitanism has been uneasily characterized as complicit with—or even synonymous with—imperialism. Yet, as Robbins suggests, “cosmopolitanism’s original meaning—the overriding of local loyalties by a cosmic, transnational, or species-wide perspective—has tended to fade into the background, and it has taken with it the prospect that cosmopolitanism will interfere with the perpetrating of violence” (2010: 2). As cosmopolitanism has become a useful category for considering how we live now, its political implications and slipperiness have frequently been elided. Kantian cosmopolitanism’s emergence around the Napoleonic wars and imperial expansion illustrates its initial conceptual usefulness for thinking about global peace—though, via Kant, the beneficiaries of this peace and the possessors of this humanity are a narrow segment of the northern European middle class. For Kant, the urgency for this cosmopolitan peace develops out of a global cosmopolitan polis: a shared, universal polis—stemming from a universal humanity—demands the cosmopolitan peace produced by a federation of states dedicated to the eradication of conflict. Yet, like Robbins notes, Kantian and more broadly Enlightenment liberal investments in a universal humanity have consistently remained the fulcrum around which post-2000 cosmopolitan theory has focused, positively or negatively. The notion of cosmopolitanism as a strategic response to global violence has frequently disappeared, apart from the way this violence impacts identitarian claims. This is to say, then, that cosmopolitanism, to the extent it has been theorized in response to global precarity, has been focused on the mobility produced by this precarity and on the way this mobility has expanded the population for whom global movement has become central to contemporary life. Works by Bhabha (1996), Clifford (1997), Breckenridge et al. (2002), and others have helpfully refashioned the previously narrow boundaries of cosmopolitanism that had confined it to the practices and identities of already privileged white men. Yet

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this is work that has primarily limited its scope to the identification of new cosmopolitan subjects, maintaining the identitarian focus of cosmopolitanism. As a result, the political projects of this work have remained well below the surface. Given the origin of much of this critical work in postcolonial studies, we might generally classify it as broadly decolonizing in its intention but what this means for cosmopolitanism has frequently gone unstated, consolidating the sense of cosmopolitanism as a fundamentally apolitical, if not actively conservative, force. Peter Nyers’s work on “abject cosmopolitanism” points to one way of thinking through the political project of cosmopolitanism as strategy or practice, rather than identity. Via Jacques Rancière’s theorization of “dissensus,” Nyers examines the case of Algerian refugee claimants in Montreal who actively perform their “right to have rights” and points to “a problematising cosmopolitanism of the abject” rather than “a problematic cosmopolitanism for the abject” (2003: 1075; emphasis in original). Under this formulation, Nyers suggests how cosmopolitanism becomes a pointed origin for political critique. While Nyers continues to enlarge upon received notions of who “counts” as cosmopolitan, he moves beyond this to contemplate why cosmopolitanism might be worth enlarging in the first place and situates it as strategically useful in the face of global precarity. Such a move parallels Robbins’s point that “a cosmopolitan theory must insist … that power is distributed more widely and unpredictably [rather than being the sole possession of the state]. Power is never absolute, and one can never reject it absolutely. Cosmopolitanism cannot go about acquiring more power unless it begins by admitting that it already has some power” (2012: 65). Robbins notes that it has become an academic commonplace to both self-identify as powerless, and to reject all potential for power as corrupting (2010: 58, 130). Something similar is at work in the recourse to cosmopolitanism as identity that might be enlarged but which remains a principally descriptive term. By instead taking up something akin to Nyer’s “problematising cosmopolitanism,” rather than a “problematic [expansive] cosmopolitanism,” I focus on reconsiderations of the fluid power around cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan power becomes a place from which to speak that connects political struggles, not as identical or fully commensurate, but as part of a shared struggle to rearticulate the place of the human in a global system defined by capital. Cosmopolitanism becomes a normative starting point. Similarly, Paul Gilroy, in response to sociological approaches to cosmopolitanism (like that of Ulrich Beck’s “world risk society”), proposes a “reflexive cosmopolitanization” that “aim[s]‌to enrich European sociological understanding by folding the way it has been understood by its Others back in to its operations. The collaborative, dialogic mood of the project is therefore part of the process of making and sustaining an imagined cosmopolitan community” (2010: 622). Gilroy’s reflexivity is predicated on a defamiliarized view of cosmopolitanism that foregrounds “the way it has been understood

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by its Others.” Rather than the more typical philosophical expansion of cosmopolitanism to include its others, Gilroy suggests a consideration of the way its ostensible others are already engaged with it (he points, by way of example, to the Bandung Conference, and the Paris-based Pan-African journal Présence Africaine). This reflexivity as envisioned by Gilroy poses a challenge to overly simplistic valorizations or demonizations of cosmopolitanism as Eurocentric globalizing hegemony. A counter-hegemony is at work in the examples he offers, which suggest that forms of resistance to hegemonic models of cosmopolitanism have theorized their own modality of global interconnection. There are countless examples of this counter-hegemonic move, both in the past and the present; yet the enumeration of counter-hegemonic cosmopolitanisms highlights the need to bring this counter-hegemonic energy within more hegemonic forms, not as an appropriative gesture but as transformative resistance. Following Gilroy, framing the Bandung Conference as cosmopolitan entails centering decolonization at the center of cosmopolitan aspirations and practices. Reemphasizing cosmopolitanism’s political possibilities offers the chance for a reinvigorated conceptualization of the term. As cosmopolitan theory has become stalled in a vital (and revitalizing) expansionist program, the time has come to return critical attention to what cosmopolitanism can—even should—enable. This critical turn is necessarily part of a contentious and contestatory phase of cosmopolitan thinking. But given the ongoing violence of global wars, xenophobic and racist fascism, and unfettered expansion of global capitalism, the moral and ethical necessity of thinking about what an equitable and emancipatory cosmopolitanism could be becomes even more imperative. The precarity of global life—whether this precarity takes the form of an occupying military presence, rising oceans because of climate change, or a global pandemic—is omnipresent and fundamentally shapes not only our global lives but how these very global lives are experienced locally and regionally. The discourses of risk and precarity bring together the concerns of the two primary categories of contemporary cosmopolitan thought: one inspired by liberal theories of the subject as autonomous, and the other inspired by postcolonial theories of the subject’s enmeshment in complex and uneven histories and regimes of power. Attending to cosmopolitanism’s response to global precarity allows for a more complex engagement with the practices of global life, both those that produce precarity and those that respond to it. Rather than consigning it to a synonym strictly for neoliberal multiculturalism, Beyond Safety outlines a cosmopolitanism attentive to risk and precarity that enables a recognition of their global expansion and circulation. Precarity as Collective and Collectivizing Experience A growing body of social scientific theory has suggested the increased presence of risk in contemporary life. For critics such as Giddens (2002), Furedi (2006),

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and Beck (1992), something about the nature of risk has changed with the rise of contemporary forms of globalization over the last fifty years. For Giddens, risk is endemic to any “future oriented” society: “risk refers to hazards that are actively assessed in relation to future possibilities. … Risk presumes a society that actively tries to break away from its past—the prime characteristic, indeed, of modern industrial civilisation” (2002: 22). He goes on to argue that “capitalism is actually unthinkable and unworkable without” risk (2002: 25). If risk, then, is central to industrialization and capitalism—systems that long predate the accelerated globalization of the post–Cold War period—what about it has changed? Giddens proposes that it is the rise of “manufactured risks”— “risk situations which we have very little historical experience of confronting [and which are] directly influenced by … intensifying globalisation”—that challenges prior relationships to risk (2002: 26). Giddens suggests that “our age is not more dangerous—not more risky—than those of earlier generations, but the balance of risks and dangers has shifted. We live in a world where hazards created by ourselves are as, or more, threatening than those that come from outside” (2002: 34). While risk is unevenly distributed, it also, as Ulrich Beck suggests, “forces people to communicate with one another in spite of themselves, and forces a public into existence where it is supposed to be prevented” (2006: 36; emphasis in original): “instead of integration through national and universal values, the global character of dangers reflected in a world public entails a new dialectic of conflict and cooperation across borders” (2006: 35). So, while, as Engin Isin (2004) and Frank Furedi posit, risk can cause paralysis and neurosis in the individual, risk might simultaneously create a sense of oneself as a member of a larger public. What is particularly noteworthy in Beck’s observation is the inevitability, the contingency, and the antagonism endemic to risk communities. As he notes elsewhere, “global threats generate global communities—at least ad hoc ones for the historical moment” (2006: 20). Yet, it is impossible to think about contemporary risks without simultaneously addressing directly the forms of neoliberal capital that understand them as the very prerequisite for operation. As Naomi Klein argues in The Shock Doctrine (2007), neoliberalism has expanded, in part, through its reliance on “shocking” recalcitrant economies into alignment with neoliberal economic principles of reduced government and private ownership. Shocks, such as those Klein describes, are not necessarily risks. Or, they act as risks in a way that follows from Zygmunt Bauman’s definition: It is only about the consequences which we can predict that we can worry, and it is only those same consequences that we can struggle to escape. And so it is only the undesirable consequences of such a “pre-visible” kind that we file in the category of “risks.” Risks are the dangers whose probability we can (or believe that we can) calculate: risks are the calculable dangers.

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Beyond Safety Once so defined, risks are the next best thing to (alas unattainable) certainty. (2006: 10; emphasis in original)

Under this understanding, risk is something that has a (reasonably) predictable probability of occurrence. That probability can be high or low, but it forms part of the calculations endemic to any decision and resulting action. As Bauman and Klein observe, these risks become more tenable when the effects are displaced in time or space from the site of their benefit.6 Risk, then, in this formulation, demands both a spatiality and a population upon which to work. These are risks with extension. However, while these scholars all use the term “risk,” something which emerges out of deliberative, even financialized, decisions of cost and benefit, it might actually be more useful to think of these as theories of precarity which signal a larger existential reality that, in its very scale, exceeds the possibility of individual intervention. When Bauman talks about the calculation necessary for evaluating the dangers of particular risks, these are not calculations that one can make in the purview of everyday life.7 To use one of Beck’s central examples—Chernobyl—it is ludicrous to understand a single person, in their quotidian choices, as calculating and evaluating the dangers of nuclear power in such a way that it has a meaningful effect on collective precarity. Risks like those Beck and Giddens describe are calculated by vast arrays of bureaucrats and businesspeople, in small increments. What these dangers create—and what Beck and Giddens elucidate—is a particular existential reality, one that more closely aligns with what we would now describe as precarity. While the risks taken by individuals all the time (and which I discuss in the subsequent section) are necessary and endemic to the function of capitalism, these operate on a fundamentally different scale from those that Giddens and Beck outline. The distinction between risk as individual choice and precarity as collective phenomenon is clear in Judith Butler’s work on the precarity of humanity made most obvious in times of war. In Precarious Life and Frames of War, she illustrates the way large-scale risks, of the sort that Giddens and Beck focus on, create particular forms of vulnerability, both personal and social.8 Butler notes, reflecting on violence done in the name of “the war of terrorism,” that to the extent that we commit violence, we are acting on another, putting the other at risk, causing the other damage, threatening to expunge the other. In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability. … This vulnerability, however, becomes highly exacerbated under certain social and political conditions, especially those in which violence is a way of life and the means to secure self-defense are limited. (2004: 29)

This recognition of incommensurable but parallel registers of vulnerability highlights both the way that safety is often predicated on vulnerability elsewhere and that, by virtue of our corporeal vulnerability, we are all potentially vulnerable

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to violence, a recognition that should shape our recourse to violence in the first place. She goes on to observe that “mindfulness of this vulnerability can become the basis of claims for non-military political solutions, just as denial of this vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery … can fuel the instruments of war” (2004: 29). Vulnerability is not just about the political or economic interconnections endemic to empire but points to a more affective register— an “affective economy,” to use Sara Ahmed’s term (2010)—that shapes the subject’s connection to and participation in the political and economic realm. “Our affect is never merely our own: affect is, from the start, communicated from elsewhere. It disposes us to perceive the world in a certain way, to let certain dimensions of the world in and to resist others” (Butler 2009: 50); our recognition of a shared human precarity demands a shared language through which to identify and make sense of it. This recognition of corporeal vulnerability, as used by Butler, is a profoundly social experience: it emerges from the subject’s interactions with the social world and is made sense of through this same world. Vulnerability, then, which might be typically seen as the most fundamentally individual experience, is, in fact, legible as part of the subject’s social world. In her definition of vulnerability, Shameem Black foregrounds its relational aspect, noting that it offers a “critical sense of attentiveness toward asymmetries in privilege and of efforts to level such inequality, even at great cost to the imagining subject” (2010: 44). For liberal strains of cosmopolitanism, the affective possibility of cosmopolitanism is primarily—if not exclusively—one of personal sympathy: through reading about other cultures, we learn to recognize shared forms of sympathy and to feel sympathy ourselves for other cultures. Butler, on the other hand, points to a similar experience of vulnerability that structures animal (human and otherwise) life in whichever circumstances it might find itself, though not always in predictable ways. Not only does precarity reveal a profound and shared vulnerability that operates at the level of a common humanity, but it is also a force that can be directed along ethical and political lines in order to produce—and subdue or even eliminate—community. Precarity is, in Butler’s theorization, a fundamentally violent force, yet one whose immediate terrain is the existential because it determines who counts as human or not and who can subsequently be recognized as requiring protection. Nonetheless, the recognition of a shared vulnerability is not a sufficient ethical response in and of itself, for this shared vulnerability demands an action of some sort. As she suggests, the denial of this animal vulnerability leads to war in its many poses. While Giddens and Beck don’t even approach the language of vulnerability, we can see a parallel here between the forms of affective relationality Butler posits and the ad hoc risk communities at play in Beck’s work. Additionally, precarity points, as well, to the austerity practices characteristic of neoliberalism that have intensified post-2008 under the guise of a response to capitalism’s myriad crises, a reminder of the way precarity is not the accidental or unexpected result of capital’s global expansion but a calculated

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and planned occurrence; indeed, we might, following Jodi Byrd et al. (2018), consider austerity as a mode of ongoing accumulation by dispossession.9 Guy Standing links the rise of a “global precariat” to the neoliberal “theme … that countries should increase labour market flexibility, which came to mean an agenda for transferring risks and insecurity onto workers and their families” (2011: 1). Neoliberal flexibility—and its attendant preoccupation with risk, as discussed above—has led to “a new dangerous class” “without an anchor of stability” (2011: 1). Andrew Ross notes that precarity “is most often used as shorthand for the condition of social and economic insecurity associated with post-Fordist employment and neoliberal governance, which not only gives employers leeway to hire and fire workers at will, but also glorifies parttime contingent work as ‘free agency,’ liberated from the stifling constraints of contractual regulations” (2009: 34). For Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, precarity is tied to the “processes of financialization, which liquefy formerly fixed forms of capital through the introduction of devices such as derivatives [which subsequently lead to] an intensification of labor … which not only assumes increased degrees of risk but is also subject to demands for increased productivity, more flexible hours, and the payment of lower real wages” (2013: 90). In their discussion of the role of the global operation of derivatives, Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee suggest that “there seems to be no way to characterize the real effects of speculative capital on Latin America, Africa, and other points on the economic periphery other than as violence” (2004: 26). While this discussion parallels the creation of precarity in Butlerian terms, it understands precarity more pointedly as a calculated tactic for the management of capital and, especially, the rise of private equity, by focusing on its production by procedures of more narrowly economic tactics. What both Butler’s work and that on neoliberal austerity demonstrate, then, is the way precarity forms the very texture of contemporary life. This claim for precarity’s inexorability corresponds to parallel claims by Beck, Giddens, and others about risk, but Butlerian and economic work on precarity focuses more explicitly on its operation as a contemporary mode of accumulation by dispossession rather than the liberal response that claims precarity as an inevitable natural process. Nonetheless, both bodies of criticism make central the experience of precarities of various degrees and forms to contemporary life and how, subsequently, practices, identities, and ethics emerge from these constellations. Risk and Neoliberal Accountancy Despite seeming to operate as synonyms, precarity and risk, in fact, connote different kinds of scenarios and agents. Precarity, as the previous section illustrates, tends toward a focus on collective experiences (on the individual as part of a larger category) and on structural forces. Risk, though deeply enmeshed in larger structures, has become almost relentlessly individualized in its function and consequences. This has not always been the case: etymologically,

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risk is believed to derive from the Latin resicum, which suggests the maritime dangers of commercial interests. The OED also posits that the word may emerge from the Arabic rizq, which connotes the notion of a divine fate and destiny. Over time both the commercial and divine connotations have diminished. Instead, risk has grown to be attached to an individual’s actions—not, perhaps, coincidentally alongside the rise of the post-Enlightenment liberal individual. The idea that the individual is the agent of their own risk has become particularly naturalized under financialization, a mode of capitalist accumulation focused on investment and speculation rather than industrial production (though still, of course, dependent on material production and, especially, labor). As Randy Martin notes, financialization “asks people from all walks of life to accept risks into their homes that were hitherto the province of professionals” (2002: 12),10 but, as part of the expansion of financialization into all arenas of life, it “insinuates an orientation toward accounting and risk management into all domains of life” (2002: 43) and demands that “risks are undertaken not for the thrill of speculation, of winning, but to improve moral fiber” (2002: 52).11 If, historically, risk stems from the financial calculations of maritime commerce, a process that required experts and their assorted industries—accountancy, insurance, and so on—to calculate and transform decisions into mathematical equations, then this work has increasingly devolved onto individuals themselves in reference not just to their financial life but to all decisions. “To be risk averse,” as Martin points out, “is to have one’s life managed by others, to be subject to their miscalculations, and therefore to be unaccountable to oneself ” (2002: 106). Miranda Joseph similarly notes that “the combination of privatization and personal responsibilization with ‘the financialization of daily life’… requires us all to manage our own lives through financial accounting practices” (2014: xi). Paul Langley demonstrates that “neo-liberal government … stimulates, promotes, and shapes subjects who, self-consciously and responsibly, further their own security and freedom through the market in general and via calculative investment in the risks of the financial markets in particular” (2008: 55). Moreover, as Neferti X. M. Tadiar notes, “the temporality of defined benefits, wherein the futurity of the Protestant ethic promised a final settling of one’s life accounts, is now overtaken by that of defined contributions, wherein one’s mettle has to be proven one day at a time, and everyday becomes judgment day” (2013: 21), suggesting the way that calculations of risk are now a constant, quotidian practice. Tracing the autonomization of the liberal subject alongside this personalization of risk is quite straightforward then: the expectation and normalization of the fully autonomous liberal subject means that said subject takes full control of the risks to which they are exposed.12 The other side of this, of course, is that consequences become fully individualized, creating what Maurizio Lazzarato identifies as an inescapable existential state of indebtedness: “the subjective achievements neoliberalism has promised (‘everyone a shareholder, everyone an owner, everyone an

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entrepreneur’ [we might add “everyone a risk taker”]) have plunged us into the existential condition of the indebted man, at once responsible and guilty for his particular fate” (2011: 8–9). He goes on to assert that “if debt is indeed central to understanding, and thus combating, neoliberalism, it is because neoliberalism has, since its emergence, been founded on a logic of debt” (2011: 25).13 Each side of this coin, then, risk taking and debt, both depend on prediction, calculation, and rational evaluation, and they both consequently presume that subjects make principally rational decisions.14 Engin Isin, for instance, suggests that this assumption underpins the operation of biopolitics: “The modern, liberal subject as bionic citizen was constituted or interpreted as a competent subject whose conduct and government were crucial for the health, wealth and happiness of species-bodies. The bionic citizen was rational and able to calculate risks remarkably well” (2004: 222). This model of the bionic, rational citizen is, of course, Isin goes on to remind us, a fantasy because affects and emotions “are equally important in how subjects assess their probabilities and opportunities” (2004: 219)—though also a fantasy because of its always-already limited expansion as only some subjects are conceptualized as rational in the first place. For Isin, then, the distinction between “real” and “perceived” dangers is, to some degree, moot in terms of the subject’s understanding of themselves as part of the world and in their decision making; this is not, of course, the same as saying that there isn’t a material difference between “real” and “perceived” dangers, but that our ability to distinguish in rational ways between them is not always clear. Nonetheless, contemporary neoliberal financialization remains predicated on a risk-taking subject who might effectively assess the consequences of risk.15 Isin’s and Lazzarato’s neurotic, indebted subject ultimately seems a further specialization and pathologization of Foucault’s homo economicus. The social persistence of and commitment to homo economicus, however, retains a belief—however dependent upon blind faith—in the individual subject’s potential to shape and respond to the ground upon which they make decisions and, subsequently, reap the benefits of individual autonomy. I want to suggest, however, that, despite its rhetorical centrality to discourses on risk, the subject formation that is most easily and widely assumable under contemporary financialization is not the economic or enterprising self but is instead centered around risk. This centralization of the risky neoliberal subject emerges out of the sense, pervasive in all the texts under examination here, of the limited opportunities for enterprise and, perhaps more importantly, the ethicopolitical quandary of the unending growth necessary for the neoliberal homo economicus. Foucault notes that “practically since the end of the nineteenth century, more or less all liberal theory has accepted that the most important thing about the market is competition, that is to say, not equivalence but on the contrary inequality” (2008: 119). But this vision of the market still suggests the potential for turning inequality in one’s favor. For most of the texts I read in Beyond Safety, this vision of potential reward seems increasingly impossible,

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both practically and ethically: one is continually at risk, even when one believes oneself to be secure and protected. This goes beyond the “neurotic” or the “indebted,” which both suggest possible ways out—through psychoanalysis or repayment; the “risky subject” of neoliberal cosmopolitanism cannot imagine a global community characterized by anything other than risk and precarity. As predicted in foundational scholarship by Fernand Braudel (1992) and Giovanni Arrighi (1994), this uncertainty around the potential for growth seems to stem from a worry that neoliberalism has passed the point of terminal crisis. It is not a coincidence, then, that so many of the texts under examination here represent the risky neoliberal subject as emerging in speculative (though near-future) dystopias. If financialization, as the term suggests, marks a shift from mid-century material expansion to a world of predominantly speculative financial expansion, Costas Lapavitsas notes that it “has been marked by a gradual decline in the pace of accumulation punctuated by repeated crises” (2013: 175). While for Lapavitsas these are principally economic crises, Beck and others remind us that it hasn’t only been economic crises that have perpetuated a sense of a world continually in turmoil, where each person needs to look out for themselves. Indeed, the economic crises of the past forty years have only been reinforced by the threat of environmental, security, or biological threat and, thus, the presumed possibility of imminent collapse.16 The implicit understanding of risk as central to contemporary life everywhere has similarly prompted the emplacement of risk at the center of subjecthood, leading to the exponential increase in the “self-care” and “wellness” industries (principally attracting the consumption of middle-class white women), all tied to providing relief from the overwhelming, yet often vaguely nebulous, precarity of contemporary life. Risk and its consequences, therefore, perversely provide entrepreneurial possibilities, suggesting that in the Global North, at least, the separation Paul Amar notes between the market-state and securitystate subject is treated as blurry. Indeed, the individualized experience within a global risk economy has increasingly become a site for entrepreneurial development and self-promotion. The monetization of risk in a neoliberal capitalism after its terminal crisis, however, is not only the purview of the entrepreneurial individual. As Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee illustrate, the rise of the derivative as the central financial form of the same period means that risk is also structurally central to the rise of financialization—and in a form that is explicitly global in its operation. Like the security-state logic Amar articulates that “generate[s]‌ particular sexual, class, and moral subjects” (2013: 6), obscuring the social and political operation of the subject, LiPuma and Lee suggest that the derivative does similar work: “the social and political power of financial derivatives are grounded in great measure on their appearing not to be social and political at all, but to simply express the mechanisms and profit goals of the market” (2004: 29). Ian Hacking makes a similar claim when he suggests that the rise of the actuarial norm has “cover[ed] opinion with a veneer of objectivity,

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[replacing] judgement by computation” (1990: 4). And while Hacking traces the rise of the statistic and its veneer of objectivity to late-nineteenth-century eugencist race science, Jodi Byrd et al. more pointedly articulate that the biopolitical recourse to the statistical, which has become only more totalizing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, has worked to obscure the colonizing violence of financialization: In the case of stock markets rising or falling with the dropping of Israeli bombs on populations in Gaza or austerity regimes imposing regulations on populations in Greece, the human is not connected as human capital (a laboring or remaindered body from which value can be extracted) but through virtuality and numeracy, a blip in the algorithms of complex financial instruments whose outcomes, enacted through chains of derivatives, dark pooling, mutual funds, and speculation, cannot finally be correlated with nonnumerical outcomes. (2018: 8)

The rise of the statistical—the rhetoric, in other words, of risk management but also of eugenics and genocide—is now “the quantitative language of our global cultural public culture, one that we have all internalized. It is the logic and preeminent expression of late capitalism” (Woodward 2009: 208). As Kathleen Woodward notes, “to be normal is to be in a state of risk, a state that at some inevitable future time will be fulfilled as a state of disease or death” (2009: 216–17; emphasis in original). Risk is, then, both inescapable—though certainly not universally equivalent—and an epistemology that has developed out of the specific operation of financialized late capitalism. Capitalism, as it has done since its inception, proves remarkably adept at finding new justifications and alibis for its inequalities. In this context of capitalist financialization, risk provides an opportunity for economic growth, per neoliberal “shock doctrine,” and also pacifies and regenerates subjects under the umbrella of security as selfevident good. How, then, does the risky subject work within these parameters to construct the self in relation to contemporary narratives about self-protection and personal responsibility?

Representing the Risky Subject Contemporary cultural texts provide the clearest venue to imagine the possibilities, limitations, and operations of the risky subject. But what is the relation between the subjects imagined in cultural texts and the critic-reader who interprets them? What is the relation between the text and the world outside of it? Unsurprisingly, there are a wide array of critical approaches to both contemporary literature itself and what critics imagine it does in the world beyond the literary. Overwhelmingly, as Gloria Fisk and others note, the former is valued only if it approaches the latter with an attention to contemporary

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political life. Fisk posits that “the novelist’s greatness [for the critic] becomes evident in [the] cultural and political good he provides with the information he conveys, rendering literary quality inseparable from—if not wholly dependent on—the kinds and degrees of solidarity he creates among strangers” (2018: 3–4). For Fisk, this model of valuation is “a rhetorical arena where U.S.-based critics negotiate our complicated relationship to hegemonic power, locally and globally” (2018: 8). Similarly, Merve Emre notes that postwar fiction “witnessed a dramatic shift away from reading literature in elite academic institutions and toward institutions that stressed literature’s communicative and public value in a rapidly internationalizing world” (2017: 3). Like Fisk, Emre asks her readers—fellow literary critics, for the most part—to consider more attentively the way our institutional locations shape the questions we raise and conclusions we draw: “What materials can we draw on to make claims about the use of literature outside of the institutions that we—as critics—inhabit right now” (2017: 256)? In Literature and the Creative Economy (2014), Sarah Brouillette carefully illustrates the uses to which literature is put by the creative economy ascendant in the wake of the neoliberal turn of the 1970s, particularly in the metropolises of the Global North. These critics demonstrate, persuasively, the work that literature and the aesthetic, more broadly, is called to perform in service of neoliberal hegemony. These claims are familiar, as well, from the works of scholars such as Arlene Dávila (2012) and George Yúdice (2004) that focus more ethnographically on the work of culture under neoliberalism. Across this body of scholarship, then, is an attentiveness to the instrumental demands placed on literature and the work of literary scholars, familiar to all of us in the age of institutional “strategic plans” and demands for clear deliverables.17 Yet while, following Fisk and others, it is crucial that, as critics, we consider our own investments in literature’s use-value and the subsequent reinforcement of our own authority as translators of this use, it is similarly overly rigid to claim that literature does no work of its own. For Theodore Martin, attention to genre provides one way of thinking through the work of contemporary literature as it “shows us what differentiates the present from the past as well as what ties the two together” (2017: 7); in other words, attending to formal questions of this sort enables us to “historicize [and] decide what belongs to the present” (2017: 4, 5). Contemporary literature, depending on how we focalize it, then, provides a Derridean trace of the contemporary and the past. Liam Connell (2017) makes a similar claim by emphasizing how contemporary novels offer, formally, the space and time to reflect on and interrogate social and cultural values that tend to operate more nebulously elsewhere. Jasper Bernes and Brouillette make similar, though less specifically formal, claims. Bernes, for example, argues that “imaginative transformations of actually existing economic conditions become laboratories in which the emergent social relations, techniques, and ideologies of the future economy and future conditions of labor develop” (2017: 6). He goes on to note that “artists and writers … provid[e]‌tropes, motifs, and forms of articulation for a dissatisfaction that had its own vernacular. They thereby [give]

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it a certain visibility and, perhaps more important, [lend] it a new conceptual vocabulary” (2017: 16). Brouillette makes an analogous claim, stating that “literature has reflexively exemplified, internalized, and critiqued vocabularies and phenomena that are integral to our unfolding creative-economy era” (2014: 8). What Bernes and Brouillette offer, then, is a useful reminder of the way cultural texts of various types contribute to how we conceptualize the world, a task we sometimes tend to consign to “theory.” As Aamir Mufti states, “the forms of written language or textuality that we call literature have the capacity to illuminate and help produce knowledge of various aspects of our individual and collective lives in the modern world even immersed in the life of a small and exclusive class and its everyday milieu” (2016: 9); the same is true of criticism. The trick is, of course, not to forget or obscure that this “small and exclusive class” is not the same thing as the universal. I follow in this book principally from the premises and promises of this second scholarly thread, focusing on culture as a laboratory for “tropes, motifs, and forms of articulation,” as Bernes claims. The close readings in this book trace how contemporary cultural texts (principally though not exclusively the realist novel) provide a site where normative assumptions about risk, proximity, and responsibility are interrogated, reinforced, and complicated. Like Connell, I find the realist novel to be a useful form in part because of its long history of mutual imbrication with the nation-state and liberal capitalism, two ways of arranging global cultural life that underpin a number of the particular norms called into question over the last twenty years (and, obviously, long before that). Like Martin, my readings of these texts are driven by an attention to both what continues from earlier epistemic moments and what differs. My focus is more content driven, rather than the formalism that shapes Martin’s readings, but raises parallel questions about how the contemporary is a “drifting” category rather than one that has stable chronological or ideological boundaries. However, like Fisk, I remain hesitant of the (indeed, my own) impulse toward the politically prescriptive that can all too easily both accumulate in my/our readings of contemporary texts and obscure my/our professional location in a subfield and discipline that professionalizes and conceals itself through its political instrumentalization of contemporary texts. If, as Fisk notes, “every educational system consolidates the logic of the state that creates it” (2018: 198), I want to attend to the presence of the illogical as well as the normatively logical. Contemporary realist narrative, with one foot in the nineteenth century and the other in postwar postmodernism, provides a particularly useful ground for observing the tension between these two as it is, following Rachel Greenwald Smith (2014), a fundamentally compromised form, torn between its conservative concession to form and characterization and its disruptive alignment with postmodern innovation on those same fronts. How, this book asks, do contemporary realist cultural texts disrupt the logic of the contemporary? How do the seemingly illogical choices or actions that, I argue, the texts under examination here privilege call into question the logic of both

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contemporary capitalism but the institutionalization of knowledge? The very compromised nature of these texts suggests the complicated relationship that exists between a conservative affirmation of the status quo and the progressive potential of new social arrangements. The texts under examination here exist in the overlap between these two—reflecting the same compromise that pervades so many contemporary cultural texts, perhaps even most particularly those that are increasingly canonized as the contemporary. This very sense of compromise adheres to the representations of risk and precarity present in the texts this book considers; they illustrate both an investment in personal risk and a subsequent awareness of the way this risk perpetuates precarity, both collectively and personally. To seek out personal precarity is illogical under liberalism and only more so under neoliberalism, as it upends the goal of “proper” risk—which is the consolidation of wealth and accumulation of capital (both financial and otherwise). If liberalism secures the individual self through their ability to take on risk that is explicitly aimed toward generating profit, what happens when one emphasizes precarity? What happens when one imagines the individual self as something that doesn’t generate profit and, indeed, as something that might take the self out of the profit economy altogether through “bad” and “unsafe” behavior?18 While the production of precarity is an inevitable externality under capitalism, it is typically represented as the result of personal failing or civilizational backwardness— suggesting that those who are most precarious are so because of their inability or immature refusal to take the risks capital demands. The texts I examine in this book upend these discourses around both risk and precarity. While this follows, then, from a number of theoretical discourses that operate at a variety of degrees of abstraction and which, subsequently, privilege uncompromised forms of political action, the laboratory of contemporary literature and cultural texts offers an opportunity to consider these concepts in less abstracted ways. Moreover, because of the novel’s conservative allegiance to the (principally white) middle class, these texts particularly become a laboratory for examining the way the twinned questions of risk and precarity operate for those who gain most social benefit from them. While Butler’s Precarious Life, for instance, illustrates the social use of precarity in consolidating national identity, her focus is on those people made precarious (such as the prisoners of Guantánamo Bay). But what of those subjects who benefit from this precaritization? Their concrete absence from so much of the work on precarity allows them a comfortable amnesia. I, for instance, can read Precarious Life and imagine myself as the helpless subject in-between the precarious and the nefarious agents of capital, here the American military and government. As so much of the public discourse around privilege lays bare, those who most benefit from this privilege often can only see it elsewhere or in its most visible abuses, something that offers a clear alibi for the individual. The compromised form of the contemporary realist novel, then, reflects a parallel and increasingly compromised state for the

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typical middle class, Euro-American reader of these novels. Jack Halberstam observes that “today in the university we spend far less time thinking about counterhegemony than about hegemony” (2011: 17). While I don’t want to go quite so far as to say that these texts imagine counter-hegemonic practices, I do want to suggest that they not only offer both the beginnings of them but also make visible the clunky operation of the hegemonic rationalities that surround notions of risk, precarity, and the logics of individually made, rational choices. Halberstam’s embrace of failure as potential anticipates the claim this book makes about the operation of precarity, and its production through selfconsciously and deliberately risky behavior. But as so much of the critical work on neoliberalism reminds us, the experience of late capitalism’s market centrality extends beyond the scope of the obviously financial. Questions, then, of risk and personal choice extend into cultural forms that aren’t necessarily—or even at all—focused on financialized risk and precarity. McClanahan demonstrates how “crisis [is] an invaluable historical hermeneutic, compelling us to anticipate limits, to imagine alternatives, to welcome collapse, and thus to resist the ‘end of history’ triumphalism characteristic of late capitalist ideology in boom times,” suggesting that “this sense of crisis has become both the ambient context and the manifest content of cultural production, social experience, and economic life in the United States” (2017: 15). She “claim[s]‌that debt is such a ubiquitous yet elusive social form that we can most clearly and carefully understand it by looking at how our culture has sought to represent it” (2017: 2). The debt that is central in McClanahan’s and others’ persuasive demonstrations, however, is explicitly financial, focusing on, say, the post-2008 credit crisis or the savings and loans crisis of the 1980s (in Leigh Claire La Berge’s Scandals and Abstractions). Financial speculation produces particular forms of both debt and subsequent precarity, forming, as McClanahan notes, the very fabric of contemporary culture, encompassing the various definitions of culture— aesthetic and otherwise. Following, then, Halberstam’s emphasis on the potential of staying with failure, that which all good neoliberal subjects are supposed to avoid, this book considers representations of bad risks, risks that never presume the possibility of leading to the accumulation of capital. Liberal and neoliberal cultural messaging is overwhelmingly in favor of modes of risk as a mode of generating personal capital (cultural, as well as the more literally financial): characters “risk it all” in order to “gain it all.” Deeply enmeshed in that most liberal of narrative forms, the bildungsroman, this narrative of development that requires risks and the transcendence of failure in order to generate social possibility naturalizes “entrepreneurship [as] the primary model of American [and, more broadly, Global North] identity” (Sandage 2009: 3). As Scott Sandage reminds us, “the expression [“I feel like a failure”] comes so naturally that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul” (2009: 4–5). Sandage’s work and its historical focus is a useful prompt to remember that so much of what critics, myself included, have to

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say about the neoliberal logic of success and failure is not actually so new, after all—it is merely intensified or more inescapable for more people. A distinction, perhaps, from the nineteenth-century representations of failure that Sandage examines and the pervasive debt of twenty-first-century culture that McClanahan examines is both the impossibility of social mobility and debt’s constant operation as potential. In other words, for many, the level of personal debt is one of persistent precarity and, thus, its potential failure. Personal debt is so much the state of things that even seemingly astronomical amounts of it are often carried from month to month, year to year. As McClanahan notes, debt is “no longer simply a means to enhance ‘discretionary’ spending, [but] the means through which many working and middle-class families, as well as households experiencing persistent unemployment or underemployment, [are] able to continue to survive” (2017: 11). If Sandage’s “I feel like a failure” signals a familiar, though exceptional, state of affairs, one might be hard-pressed to find a contemporary individual who doesn’t feel this— or the threat of this—constantly. It is the other consequence, then, of debt as “the ambient context” (McClanahan 2017: 15) of twenty-first-century life. But if indebtedness is the result of bad risks—risks that one chooses, consciously, or that one is simply required to take as part of contemporary economic life— and this leads one to “feel like a failure,” how might we rewrite or reinterpret this relentlessly linear narrative? What other narratives are available, both as speculative reformulations or defamiliarizing hegemonic forms? This reimagining requires, in part, examining how contemporary cultural forms naturalize global risks as inevitable, something that is both reflective of data but also dependent upon imaginative speculation. As Louise Amoore observes, “what matters is not so much a question of whether or how the world is more dangerous, more uncertain, or less safe but how specific representations of risk, uncertainty, danger, and security are distinctively writing the contours of that world” (2013: 7). Beyond Safety proceeds, then, by first examining different representations of three categories of risk: food, viral, and climate; in considering these risks, I interrogate the forms of relationality that emerge from what, initially at least, seem to be individual choices or, in the case of climate change, resolutely nonindividual choices. How, for instance, does the food we eat require us to realize and respond to our cosmopolitan linkages? How does viral infection offer a new model for imagining what it means to be a cosmopolitan subject in a time of widespread and inescapable precarity? How does the impending climate catastrophe demand a reevaluation of the spatiality of risk? Across all three chapters are questions about the scale of risk and precarity—and our responses to and maneuvering between the same. Chapter 1 focuses on food and food security. In this chapter, I examine novels about food production and circulation: Marina Lewycka’s Strawberry Fields (2007), Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998), and Timothy Taylor’s Stanley Park (2001). All three of these novels emphasize the particularly global circuits of production and

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representation that food operates within. Indeed, as all three demonstrate, food tends to be something that, through its very ubiquity, appears to reflect locality, yet in its actual globality is a source of risk both for producers and consumers. Food sits at a nodal point between the global and the local; yet our understanding of it too often replicates forms of global invisibility. Alongside these novelistic representations, I examine food journalism by Anthony Bourdain (2006) and Tom Parker-Bowles (2008) and their differing rhetorics around risk and security, which are particularly framed in globalizing terms. I argue that representations of food security depend on (sometimes false or myopic) distinctions between the global and the local, slipping easily into an anachronistic provincialism in the name of local sustainability and safety or forms of global neo-imperial adventure where food operates as currency for forms of global sophistication. Representations of the risks that surround food, then, tend to imagine global connections as inherently both detrimental and inescapable. Cosmopolitanism here, then, acts as marker of global failures and impossibilities. Chapter 2 shifts the focus to viral risk and its circulation through networked culture. Here I examine novels about viral infection (Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2005), and Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City (2018)) alongside films about zombie viruses (Marc Forster’s adaptation of World War Z (2013)) and multimedia projects about global data circulation (Shuli Hallak’s Invisible Networks and TeleGeography’s annual Submarine Cable map). Viral insecurity (whether biomedically or technologically), following from Priscilla Wald’s work on contagion, points to connections we’re often either unaware of or reticent to acknowledge. In a world increasingly shaped by “wireless” interconnectivity, viruses remind us of the infrastructures that make this contact possible. As viruses move between bodies, computers, and across time, they neither remain the same, nor do they operate neutrally. While viruses are hardly sentient, agential vectors, these texts, in using the virus as a metaphor for, among other things, cosmopolitan connections and practices, suggest that they hover on a knife’s edge, with both positive and negative potential that is contextual and ever-changing. The viral cosmopolitanism found in these texts also rejects the teleological vision embedded in liberal models and the separateness that tends to operate in the distinction between subaltern and elite cosmopolitanism found in postcolonial models. By understanding cosmopolitanism as akin to a viral infection, these authors open up ways of formulating new cosmopolitan practices and, significantly, drawing to the surface the global connections and practices that are already in place, sometimes below the threshold of visibility. If both Chapters 1 and 2 focus on risks that are made most immediately visible at the level of the individual plate, body, or computer, Chapter 3 turns to risk that exists at a much larger scale: those produced by global climate change. In this chapter I examine photographic projects by Edward Burtynsky, Sebastiaõ Salgado, and Robert van Waarden. These projects reveal much about

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what “enters the frame” when we imagine climate change, with consequences for how we imagine who counts, and who does not, as cosmopolitan. In subsequent sections of this chapter, I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012) and its similar preoccupation with the lived spaces of climate change, particularly their impact on the rural poor who bear a disproportionately high share of the material consequences, with few of the benefits. The protagonist’s narrative of development points to a burgeoning eco-cosmopolitanism that emerges out of both territorialized experiences and an awareness of the financial constraints that limit cosmopolitan potential. In the final section, I examine Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), a speculative novel that addresses a post-catastrophe world and interrogates the consequences of current models of transnational interconnection. Chapter 4 moves from examining representations of different global risks to thinking through representations of how understanding oneself as a risky cosmopolitan subject shifts one’s sense of cosmopolitan practices. The first three chapters map out different interpretative models for reading the world and global connections; this chapter shifts, then, to consider the potential implications of these models. What, in other words, should one do when one realizes one’s position in a global economy of risk? In this chapter, I examine Catherine Bush’s The Rules of Engagement (2000) and John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener (2001) and the way each imagines the changing actions of their privileged protagonists in the face of their acknowledgment of global risk and their ability to navigate them more easily and readily than others. They imagine, then, what risky cosmopolitan actions might look like, and how they might respond to global inequalities and uneven access. Beyond Safety closes with a brief and necessarily tentative afterward considering how the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic might inflect how we imagine risky cosmopolitanism in the midst of inescapable risk. Across Beyond Safety, I suggest that the various texts under examination posit a “risky subject” at the heart of contemporary life, infused with a series of interconnected—though sometimes antagonistic—impulses toward accumulation, consumption, and ethics. I examine the various representations of risk and precarity that operate under the neoliberal contemporary and the kinds of subjects and practices that might be imagined to mitigate and disrupt what we take for granted as inevitable. Like any ideology, notions of risk and safety are dependent upon their operation as self-evident and commonsensical. The texts under examination here work to unravel these apparently self-evident operations to conjure new possibilities for arranging global connections.

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Chapter 1 R I SK A N D P R OX I M I T Y

Thinking of ourselves as global citizens can lend itself to an abstract, even potentially alienating, disconnect between the local spaces that necessarily shape our everyday lives and the almost-sublime scale of the global. How do we reconcile, then, these differences in scale and space, particularly in relation to the precarity we increasingly associate with global connection? If globality is perhaps more readily associated with the biomedical and technological risks to individual bodies of global interconnection or the large-scale repercussions of climate change, the corollary is, thus, often that more local interactions and production are characterized by greater security and small-scale consequences. Similarly, despite the resolutely material effects of climate change or biomedical viruses, the choices and data that shape global risks can often feel both immaterial and speculative: they exist somewhere in the ether of “the global” or hidden within the body (whether human or technological). The local, by contrast, cannot escape its physicality and, subsequently, its presumed connection to tradition and the past. The global is, therefore, insecure and ahistorical, while the local is safe and traditional. This is, obviously, to speak in broad generalizations but, as this chapter illustrates, these connotations attached to the global and local do significant imaginative work in shaping how and where we recognize both the scope and consequences of cosmopolitan risk and the geography of contemporary neoliberal life. When precarity is experienced at the level of the local, for instance, it can be, on one hand, readily reduced to poor or deliberately unsafe individual choices or practices or, on the other hand, used to justify reactionary critiques of technology and globalization. This obfuscates the relationship between middle-class residents of the Global North and marginalized laborers both far away and nearby. In this chapter, I argue that the representations of food, risk, and globality under examination here point to the complicated and oscillating pattern of recognition and disavowal of cosmopolitan responsibility embedded in daily practices such as the consumption of food and the networks of labor necessary for its production. These texts raise complex questions about the classed, gendered, and racialized practices that categorize some risks as the result of agency while others are seen as emerging out of predetermined pasts and presents. Across these various food

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narratives, fictional and otherwise, is the tension—explored throughout this book—between discourses of personal risk-taking and collective experiences of precarity. As these texts make particularly clear, by understanding the risks we undertake everyday as inevitable, unchangeable, and divorced from larger systems of extraction, we preclude imagining alternative arrangements of global life. I begin by reading travel narratives about adventurous eating and their construction of risky food as the imperial purview of masculine white adventurers who endanger themselves through the consumption of “real” (read: exotic and foreign) food. The imperializing gesture of these travelers is certainly not new, with their echoes of colonial adventures and the Grand Tour. The cosmopolitan aspirations of these texts, however, work to draw to the surface the link between contemporary leisure practices that promote the development of the neoliberal cosmopolitan self and their replication of longstanding imperial and capitalist values and practices. Yet, as my reading of Timothy Taylor’s novel Stanley Park suggests, the championing of local foods can often, in its rejection of the exotic adventurism of the traveler, work to reinforce a naïve moral superiority that imagines the local as disconnected from any larger responsibility to global labor, paralleling liberal paradigms that view the autonomous individual as the true site of freedom—beliefs only accelerated and intensified under neoliberalism. Both sets of texts, which imagine food as resolutely global or local, end up transforming cosmopolitan risk (whether by its pursuit or rejection) into a fetish reifying the self-consciously entrepreneurial neoliberal subject as a global sophisticate, in possession of global cultural capital that allows them to transcend the petty parochialism of the nation. I move, then, to read Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats and Monica Lewycka’s Strawberry Fields alongside the manifesto-like mission statements of pop-up restaurants like Pittsburgh’s Conflict Kitchen and Detroit’s Peace Meal Kitchen, which serve menus featuring the cuisines of nations and cultures that are the target of American global imperialism. While nearly twenty years and a good deal of intervening history separate Ozeki’s novel from Lewycka’s and the pop-up restaurants, they all highlight the work food does to mediate our sense of ourselves in relation to global conflicts. In other words, the intervention Ozeki makes in response to the first Gulf War of the early 1990s resonates with remarkable ease with the long and ongoing second Gulf War of the 2000s; food across all of these texts is initially assumed to be inescapably bound to a familiar/ foreign dichotomy but, instead, works to unsettle it. These texts highlight, in contrast to the travel texts of the first section, the inescapable enmeshment of local and global interests at play on our dinner plates. Moreover, these texts all tend to emphasize the collective elements of food, in contrast to the typically individualizing focus of the texts of the previous section. As Lewycka, Ozeki, and the chefs of these restaurants make clear, food cannot be divorced from the labor of its production (at multiple locations) or the way it gets represented. Food instantiates in these texts the intersection of numerous histories and

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contemporary realities that might initially seem divorced from the banal materiality of the food we eat. While this setup might seem to suggest that the first section operates as a straw man, disproved by the texts of the second section, I am, instead, more interested in the varied and complicated ways both sets of texts call into question the expectations and responsibilities believed to extend (or not) from cosmopolitanism. Both sets of texts demonstrate the ambiguity that surrounds notions of both cosmopolitanism and the risky choices it can be associated with, the spaces both are presumed to occupy, and the everyday interpellation of neoliberal values into that most mundane of actions: eating. The productive tension between these two sets of texts highlights the inescapability of speculative decision-making in contemporary neoliberal life and subjecthood. If middle-class Euro-Americans might sometimes want to console themselves by imagining the consequences of risk as either personal or on too large a scale for them to intervene, the texts in this chapter suggest the magical thinking necessary for such a view. We all engage with global risk and precarity every time we sit down to eat; these texts, then, ask their readers a variety of questions about how we acknowledge this and how we might respond to it.

The Global, the Local, and Imperial Risk Consuming the food from a culture different from one’s own has long been emblematic of a sophistication that is conflated with both metropolitan life and cosmopolitanism. Food, understood as the heart of a culture, operates as a site from which to recognize both the familiarity of another culture (“they too have food rituals that parallel my own”) and the distinctness (“they use ingredients/ forms of preparation that are unrecognizable to me”). Universality and alterity are, thus, paradoxically, simultaneous partners when we participate in unfamiliar foodways. The consumption of unfamiliar food is unsurprisingly then one of the practices that we might first consider when thinking about the production of a cosmopolitan blasé attitude. The oversimplification that food as cultural synecdoche produces and requires is reasonably straightforward: any “ethnic” restaurant tends to be regional in its focus, though sometimes a hodge-podge of different regional cuisines, despite its nominal connection with a national culture.1 Cuisines not only emerge out of transnational interconnection, but are living and mutable entities, shaped by their location in new contexts. Eating the food of another culture produces interactions of the most superficial sort— patronage of ethnic restaurants tends to be one of the shibboleths of criticism of multiculturalism for its limited production of significant and meaningful engagement with difference.2 These criticisms notwithstanding, food remains a key part in the performance of a cosmopolitan stance. While the normative suggestion that simply eating “the food of the world” is symptomatic of a particularly narrow mode of cosmopolitanism, is it worth writing off eating

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global food as a potential cosmopolitan practice altogether? Put differently, how might we articulate the elements of risky cosmopolitanism this book enumerates in such a way that accounts for the forms of food-based or -centered travel but that resists a reductionist view of the same? How might we attend to the risks endemic to food consumption without, on one hand, reiterating historical narratives of exploration and conquest but with, on the other hand, a recognition of a shared (yet not always commensurate) human vulnerability? The subtitle of Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour (the book that accompanies the television show) proclaims that it depicts “global adventures in extreme cuisine.” One of the most popular food writers operating in the travel mode, Bourdain clearly positions the book and television show as interested in risky endeavors: “extreme cuisine” deliberately evokes other modes of “extreme” leisure activities. Bourdain offers an origin story for the show in the introduction: that after the success of his first book, Kitchen Confidential, and his subsequent redundancy in his previous job, he needed “another idea— preferable while [he] was still in good odor from the last one” (2006: 6). He proposes the following: “I travel around the world, doing whatever I want. I stay in fine hotels and I stay in hovels. I eat scary, exotic, wonderful food, doing cool stuff like I’ve seen in movies, and looking for the perfect meal” (2006: 6). He “wanted magic,” the magic that is found when the humble is transformed into the sublime (2006: 8). He equates, like so many contemporary food writers, this magic, this transformation, with “traditional” methods of preparation and parts of animals usually understood as waste by American cooks and eaters.3 Indeed, he argues, that this magic is increasingly difficult to find in Euro-American spaces; the magic is “to be found elsewhere in the world—in Vietnam, Portugal, Mexico, Morocco—because they had to. It was not—in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France—as it is not today in much of the rest of the world, an option whether to use the nasty bits. You had to” (2006: 8). “Extreme cuisine” scenarios are not to be found, then, just in another place, but, ultimately, in another time altogether, even if that past-ness can be found contemporarily. Risk, in these meals, runs the gamut from the banal (it doesn’t taste good/is difficult to eat) to the serious (food safety has been compromised/ what one eats is poisonous). Risk is also here associated with crossing class, as well as ethnic/national, boundaries: the food Bourdain rhapsodizes over is primarily (though not exclusively) associated with working-class cooks. While he remains interested in the highest of high cuisine, the focus is centrally on the everyday food— where “everyday” is synonymous with working-class authenticity. This inadvertently reveals the assumptions that underpin notions of searching out risk in one’s leisure time: risk emerges when middle-class residents of the Global North encounter precarious authenticity, associated with the labor of the global poor and working class, particularly those who reside in the Global South. Bourdain contrasts the desirability and “extremeness” of global cuisine with the homogeneous banality of middle-class American food,

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“plastic-wrapped fluffy white chicken breasts [that denies] even the existence of legs or giblets, secure in the certain knowledge that sirloin, filet mignon, and prime rib were really the only ‘good’ parts of the steer, that everything else was hamburger” (2006: 9). This is food that has been denuded of any potential for risk (at least theoretically) and simultaneously dissociated from its very fleshiness, echoing very familiar critiques of the banality of suburban life that have existed practically as long as suburbs themselves. It ignores, for instance, that, increasingly, suburban life is populated by a variety of “ethnic” restaurants, however predictable and commodified they might be. In other words, while these restaurants might not meet the standard of “authentic,” whatever we might mean by that (and why Bourdain or his readers are judges of that in the first place in certainly another question), Bourdain repeats a familiar claim that middle-class whiteness is without either access to difference or culture of its own. These claims make invisible the complicated ways that alterity is experienced in suburban places and, in claiming its acultural status, whiteness becomes further reified as the seemingly natural benchmark, against which all others are compared. The actions of whiteness are normalized as steady and secure, in contrast to the exciting risk potential of all other permutations of race and ethnicity.4 Consequently, whiteness—in its very security and presumed separation from the adventure of the risky—doesn’t offer a site from which to navigate personal cosmopolitan exceptionalism. Cosmopolitanism, in this modality, requires sites for adventure and danger. Bourdain’s romanticizing of a risky aesthetic is front and center in the text: I wanted the perfect meal. I also wanted—to be absolutely frank—Col. Walter E. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Lawrence of Arabia, Kim Philby, the Consul, Fowler, Tony Po, B. Traven, Christopher Walken. … I wanted to find—no, I wanted to be—one of those debauched heroes and villains out of Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, Francis Coppola, and Michael Cimino. I wanted to wander the world in a dirty seersucker suit, getting into trouble. I wanted adventures. … I wanted to see the world—and I wanted the world to be just like the movies. (2006: 5)

Bourdain’s performative self-reflexivity acknowledges the link between the demands of toxic forms of masculinity and colonial patterns of contemporary travel in search of adventure and reward. He rehearses here a familiar critical gesture: acknowledging all the ways one is complicit in perpetuating power structures as a move to inoculate against these criticisms altogether. This list of characters (primarily fictional, but not entirely) and its investment in colonialera masculinity reveals a good deal about how travel self-consciously in search of risk intersects with much older notions of how to frame non-Western places. The louche virility of Bourdain’s heroes suggests that there is something somewhat dubious about aspiring to this kind of cosmopolitan exploration: it is for neither the morally upright nor the politically correct. While Bourdain

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frames this list of antiheroes as aspirational, Tom Parker-Bowles in his My Year of Eating Dangerously evokes Bourdain himself as a contrast to his own inability to fully live up to this role: “I’m not a six foot two, achingly cool New York chef who’ll devour anything in his sight. As much as I want to be Anthony Bourdain, it ain’t going to happen. I’m a rather windy, five foot eleven and a half toff ” (2008: 4).5 Parker-Bowles makes explicit, however unselfconsciously, the demands masculinity places on men who travel: “Some might see this as some chest-thumping quest to prove my virility, a masochistic voyage of endless ego-fluffing” (2008: 3). Just as Bourdain frames authenticity as the purview of working-class cuisines, Parker-Bowles emphasizes the real labor of the various cooks and experts he encounters, in contrast to his own dilettantish simulacrum of work. For instance, in his pursuit of fugu fish in Japan, he describes an expert on dangerous fish in the following way: “Dr. Bruce is a man of some import, the Director, World Life Research Institute, no less. And Lieutenant Commander United States Naval Reserve. And Formerly Instructor in Tropical Medicine, Division of Preventative Medicine, US Navy Medical School, Bethesda, Maryland. And not just an expert on all peril in the sea, but a man of admirable directness too” (2008: 160). Compare this to Parker-Bowles’s later response to entering the restaurant where he intends to eat fugu for the first time: “I duck sheepishly into the small doorway and find myself assailed by an instrumental version of ‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight’. Please God, I pray, don’t make this the last melody to ever fill my ears. A sixteenth-century haiku I read earlier sprang to mind. … And another joined the chorus, this time penned by Basho” (2008: 167). Dr. Bruce’s masculine competence and labor is jarringly in contrast with Parker-Bowles’s ludicrously cerebral and, implicitly, feminized elitism. While this contrast is framed most frequently in terms of gender performance, it’s also framed via risk as prelude to or subject of labor. Parker-Bowles’s search for high Japanese art might more closely resemble travel that seeks to find the best of a national culture, in Arnoldian terms; Dr. Bruce, by contrast, seeks to promote knowledge and preserve global health. There is a purpose to travel in search of knowledge about risky things—dangerous animals; tropical disease—that has practical results, both specifically (for military purposes) and generally (the knowledge Dr. Bruce produces circulates beyond military uses). While Bruce, like Parker-Bowles and Bourdain, is not an authentic insider, authenticity beyond personal rootedness, authentic cosmopolitanism, as it were, emerges from use-value. Bourdain and ParkerBowles revel, on one hand, in their inutility but, on the other hand, consistently draw their readers’/viewers’ attention back to those whose labor is properly useful, in a variety of contexts or scales. Cosmopolitan travel in search of risky food, then, as framed by narratives such as Bourdain’s and Parker-Bowles’s seeks to reinforce the traveler’s performative masculinity (or, self-effacingly, to highlight their failure on this point), which requires, apparently, colonial-era patterns of encounter and mastery. The viewer’s relationship to such performances is unclear but, at some

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level, these narratives are exercises in self-mythologizing to which the reader or viewer is, ultimately, like the strangers the traveler encounters—superfluous. Cosmopolitanism, in this mode, is deeply individualized and divested of any notion of social consequence or justice, but is there to demonstrate the entrepreneurial adventuring of the traveler; as Bourdain notes above, he undertakes the travel narrated in the book and television show to capitalize on and extend his brand. Yet, for neither of these men does this cosmopolitan movement represent anything akin to a telos of personal enlightenment or evolution; instead, it acts as a prop for already existing fragile masculinity and white privilege, suggesting the ways neoliberalism is, ultimately, an ideology and set of practices that reinforce existing systems rather than signaling a radical break. While Bourdain’s and Parker-Bowles’s travels are mediated by particularly contemporary forms of global interconnection and audience and, simultaneously, older modalities about risk as adventure, they illustrate how both become forms and sites of personal branding and investment. In contrast to the explicitly global scope of food travel narratives, conversations around local practices, particularly local food, often seem to reject (explicitly and otherwise) cosmopolitanism and its associated global expansion, often understood as narrowly coterminous with capitalism. Debates surrounding sustainable food production, distribution, and consumption have often typically been articulated around the idea that the more local these processes are, the better—an idea, by now, made exhaustively normative for grocery shoppers who imagine themselves progressive. Yet this idea—that local food is a more sustainable environmental choice that has positive economic repercussions for local food producers and communities—has often and all too easily become synonymous with the idea that the global is something to be wary of, a zone dominated by the values of neoliberal capital and beyond the reach of politics as such. A dichotomy emerges that naturalizes the assumption that the local is the site of responsible political action and the global that of irresponsible corporate greed. This has tended to fetishize the local at the expense of the global and sets up an untenable binary that suggests, at best, a highly romanticized yet anachronistic longing for an imagined past where the global did not intrude on daily lives.6 The local, often equated with rurality, is posited as a refuge from cosmopolitan dangers—whether that danger is produced by the abandonment of these places by global capital or the intrusion of global pollutants into local foods and cultures. Timothy Taylor’s 2001 novel, Stanley Park, is preoccupied with these questions and tensions that surround the relationship between local and global commitments and the adventures of consumption. In the novel, food, its production and, especially, consumption form a point from which to particularly interrogate neoliberalism’s spatial operation and assumptions. The novel’s protagonist, Jeremy Papier, returns from French culinary school and opens a restaurant that serves primarily local food, financed by Dante (the CEO of Inferno, a Starbucks-like coffee chain). For a variety of reasons,

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the restaurant goes under—principally due to Jeremy’s inability to escape the various debts endemic to contemporary life, particularly contemporary entrepreneurial life. Dante offers to invest further funds and save the restaurant, with the caveat that Jeremy take the advice of the designers who Dante brings in to make it profitable and who demand sophisticated food from no clear national cuisine. At the same time, Jeremy begins to spend more time with his father, the Professor, an anthropologist living with the homeless in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. The juxtaposition between the resolutely neoliberal demands of Dante and his employees (who include Jeremy’s opportunistic girlfriend, Benny) framed as post-nationally global, and the thoroughly local affiliations of Jeremy’s anthropologist father, the Professor, and his friends/ethnographic subjects who live in Vancouver’s Stanley Park lead Jeremy to cook an opening meal at the revamped restaurant consisting entirely of scavenged food from Stanley Park. The novel was selected in two prominent Canadian literary competitions: it was the One Book, One Vancouver selection of 2003, and, more prominently, one of the finalists in the 2007 iteration of Canada’s state-funded public broadcaster’s, CBC’s, widely popular Canada Reads competition. Stanley Park’s media prominence was further enhanced by its au courant (and, at the time of its publication, prescient) subject matter. Taylor’s novel addresses many of the issues that preoccupy cosmopolitan, risk, and food theory: the ethics of locality, globality, physical place, and the way these get imbued with forms of precarity (both financial and biological). Yet the novel occupies an ambivalent position in relation to these discourses: namely, it understands risks that emerge out of engagement with locality as laudable (and maybe not risks at all) and about personal investment in culture, while risks that are associated with the global are positioned as soulless, compromising, and irredeemably financial. Stanley Park works in a vexed space where it uses the protagonist’s fluency with the commodity trappings of cosmopolitan sophistication—expensive food and drink—to reveal the sensibility that undergirds Jeremy’s and his father’s localized passions and to simultaneously denounce the equally cosmopolitan financialized sensibilities of Dante and Benny. On the surface, the novel seems to suggest a territorialized cosmopolitanism where the global and the local are interconnected. Instead, the novel fetishes the local in a way that further reinforces an inflexible binary between the global and the local. The novel consequently illustrates the discursive operations that consign risk to, on one hand, the global financial elite and, on the other hand, the locally destitute: risk is not the proper territory or responsibility of the middle class, as demonstrated in Jeremy’s aspirations to risky food that are simply poor copies of either of these categories of risk. This very ambiguity, and the novel’s concerns about authenticity and responsibility, offers a useful way of considering how risk and precarity are represented in discourses about local food. Stanley Park raises two compelling and topical concerns that are intertwined throughout the narrative. Firstly, with the general emphasis given to the global as the sign of newness in an era of

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accelerated globalization, the only space left for the local is overdetermined by nostalgia and authenticity. Authenticity is understood in the novel as contemporary repetitions of long-standing ethnic traditions and as a protection from the precarious vagaries of contemporary life—echoing the use of the word by Bourdain and Parker-Bowles; tradition, to be worthy of approbation here, is to be emphatically unchanging and connected with the labor of the working class. Hybridity is something to be wary of; indeed, part of what makes Dante such a menacing figure is his hybrid nature, imagined here as inauthentically performative. Secondly, there is an uncertainty about the possibility of ethical responsibility when affiliations exist at numerous different scales. In Stanley Park, ethical responsibility exists exclusively at the level of the local and individual choice and feeling. The national is nonexistent in this novel and the global is characterized only by corporate finance and “post-national” sophistication (Taylor 2001: 63), leaving the local the only site possible for ethics. Dante’s gangster-like persona is emblematic of the ethical bankruptcy perceived to exist at levels beyond the local. And Dante becomes especially menacing once he takes an interest in Jeremy’s local restaurant, suggesting the seemingly inevitable danger to local places when the global becomes involved. There is, then, a simultaneous critique of Dante’s predatory neoliberal values and the erasure of Jeremy’s own commitment to conventionally liberal values surrounding the individual as the proper, perhaps only, unit of autonomy. Stanley Park replicates, then, a familiar repudiation of the excesses of capital while encouraging a kinder, more authentic capitalism like that represented by Jeremy and, more especially, his college friend, Olli who has become a Bill Gates–like computer mogul.7 Jeremy’s commitment to local food—a commitment that would suggest global environmental responsibility—is never articulated in terms that suggest any notion of the political. Instead, it is fully privatized, marking his personal/ psychological commitment to local place and an attempt to understand his position within an authentic tradition and paralleling the similar libidinal investments with the risky pursuit of authenticity as a form of masculinity present in Bourdain’s and Parker-Bowles’s narratives. Early in the novel, Jeremy is asked to explain why he prefers local food; he is unable to put words to his desire and falls back on the language of nostalgia: “I was trying to remind people of something. Of what the soil under their feet has to offer. Of a time when they would have known only the food that their own soil could offer” (2001: 23). Jeremy is uninterested in, to the point of seeming oblivious of, the politics of eating local food. For him, it is the “good” thing to do, but only to reclaim a seemingly stable and authentic subjectivity. His ethical commitment, which is unclear and centered around personal authenticity, is, thus, only to the local. While we are perhaps increasingly aware of the global consequences (whether in terms of labor or the environment) of the food we eat, these consequences do not enter into Jeremy’s choice—nor, too frequently, in the discourses surrounding local food. Food is only ingredients, components in

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the expression of traditional models of food preparation; food as something that emerges from biological processes, cultivated by farmers and enmeshed in complex economies, does not exist in the world of Stanley Park (despite the seeming fetishization of this very context).8 Indeed, the only food-related labor that the novel addresses in any depth is that of the chef, a highly trained and privileged individual, aligning with notions of the neoliberal creative class and Bourdainian hyper-masculinity. Jeremy’s preparation of local food is presented throughout the novel as analogous with his father’s residence in Stanley Park alongside some of the city’s inhabitants experiencing homelessness. Like its attitude toward food, Stanley Park approaches the precarity of residents of Stanley Park with “great deference” (2001: 14)—but it remains a deference that retains a vision of the local as outside of politics. The Professor sees the residents of Stanley Park as the spiritual descendants of North America’s First Peoples: “There had been a First Nation, of course. Squatters later. Men who lived in trees. But this generation was the homeless, the new Stanley Park people” (2001: 14). This is tellingly a spiritual descent, not an actual descent, despite Indigenous peoples being disproportionately represented in the ranks of Canadian homeless populations; Indigenous peoples are occasionally seen to make up the numbers of the larger community of people that the Professor or Jeremy encounters, but they always remain silent and unnamed, echoing the persistent belief of white Canadians that the continent’s Indigenous population has been made extinct. The homeless people who are named in the novel are all men of European descent. Later the Professor posits those experiencing homelessness as a symbol of what contemporary culture in its entirety has lost: “In our rootless day and age, our time of strange cultural homelessness—and worse, our societal amnesia about what used to constitute both the rewards and limitations of these roots—I wonder if we might look to these homes … to find an emblem of the deepest roots of all” (2001: 136). Both attitudes toward the precarity experienced by those living in the park reduce them to an ahistoric symbol and disavow the real contemporary presence of Indigenous people in Stanley Park and Vancouver. The parallels here with Bourdain’s search for the “perfect” meal, uncorrupted by corporate influence, are transparent: Jeremy and the Professor make themselves precarious (or what they understand as such) in order to search out authenticity, which can only be discovered through engagement with traditions not their own. The individuals in actual states of precarity in these scenarios (the residents of Stanley Park or the working-class cooks) are located outside of global risk economies in states of frozen tradition. This representational mode when narrating homeless figures is in keeping with the text’s more general refusal to approach its commitment to the local in any terms beyond the personal. Both Jeremy’s and his father’s respective investments in locality and romanticized precarity are understood in the text as a response to the death of Jeremy’s mother, a no-longer nomadic Roma woman. Jeremy’s father explicitly connects his decisions to live and study in Stanley Park,

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not only to her death but also to the end of her lapsed nomadism: “It was as if she put down roots and they did not take … when it became apparent to her, she fell back into a place of no place. Unrooted but constrained, celebrating neither. And stranded in this way, she became the key to all of what has consumed me, capturing the universe of my studies in the small frame of a single, very beautiful person” (2001: 231). The failed rootedness of the mother and wife becomes the determining factor for the son’s and husband’s obsession with locality. Their commitment to the local, then, is framed as a personal choice invested in the economy of both heterosexual romance and the conventional assignment of emotion and rationality to women and men, respectively, rather than part of a self-conscious commitment to the local as local or as part of a larger global system. Just as Jeremy falls back on the rhetoric of nostalgia to describe his commitment to local food early in the novel, the text uses similar rhetoric to explain his feast of local (scavenged) food at the close of the novel: In this brave new world of post-national cuisine, Chef Jeremy left his little reminders about what he thought had been lost. He had a whole list of nostalgic examples: regional tastes, local ingredients, passed-down recipes, family farms. … And more: embedded in this cuisine … were messages about knowing the earth’s bounty and your connection to it. Understanding where one stood, understanding loyalty and the sanctity of certain soil. (2001: 389)

Not only does this make explicit use of nostalgia, but it is also a nostalgia that is rooted in personal experience and authenticity, with no other particular goals and without a clear referent. Jeremy is nostalgic for the past but only in the most generic sense. The feast invites the possibility of risk—consuming scavenged food—but only as a way to connect to the past, rather than as a marker of futurity. Jeremy’s local cuisine (like the homeless in Stanley Park) and the risks it implies, then, is a symbol that denotes a slippery connection to a local and hazy past, understood as authentic and traditional, but one that doesn’t actually refer to anything in particular; his vision of authenticity is a postmodern historicity without referent. This connection to an authentic past is also echoed in the immediate precursor to Jeremy’s Vancouver restaurant, the rural French restaurant where he worked as an apprentice. The chef of this restaurant serves, on Sundays, local farmers—whom Jeremy terms the “rubber-boot people. The people from here” (2001: 40; emphasis added). This informal and local service acts as an epiphany for Jeremy. At the first Sunday meal that he participates in, Jeremy becomes romantically involved with Patrice, a local waitress. Significantly, this meal and relationship is juxtaposed with the immediately preceding scene where Jeremy’s father meets and falls in love with Jeremy’s mother over dinner (2001: 38–9). This juxtaposition further connects locality with personal and family history as mediated through heterosexual family romance exclusively (a pattern echoed at the close of the novel with the return

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of Jules, the alienated pastry-chef with whom Jeremy feels a familial connection, and the acceptance of initial funding from Olli). Jeremy’s epiphany, then, about local food is removed from any connection with global politics; his interest in the “rubber-boot people” is that they are local and like family to the restaurant’s chef, not, say, that they are farmers or less wealthy than the restaurant’s typical patrons. That the feeding of local farmers on Sundays has to do with both their precarity and their centrality in the operation of farm-to-table dining, say, rather than a romantic idyll of family does not seem to cross Jeremy’s mind. This local and family-centered vision of food is contrasted most clearly throughout the novel with Dante’s vision for Jeremy’s restaurant after he assumes ownership of it. Like Inferno, his coffee chain, Dante wants the restaurant to be “post-national” (2001: 256) and evocative of but interchangeable with any other restaurant in the world. This desire is made material in a black pudding bruschetta Jeremy creates for the menu: “Here we show it to reference all of these cultures [that ban blood products]. Named and seasoned for North Africa, garnished for France, presented for Spain. Our tribute to the polyglot, post-national, transgressive dish.” Philip finally smiled a little, liking the semiotics. “Provocative,” he said. “Millennial,” Jeremy answered. “Teotwawki [an acronym for ‘the end of the world as we know it’].” (2001: 309; emphasis in original)

This placeless, and yet paradoxically homogeneous, hybridity is coded as cosmopolitan sophistication, but also, according to Jeremy, as an apocalyptic sign (echoing the connotations of Inferno): the restaurant, like his coffee shops, will belong nowhere and everywhere—and all bring about the end of the world. Dante’s protégé and Jeremy’s girlfriend, Benny, rejects Jeremy’s initial idea to remake the restaurant as a French bistro, saying, “I think of French bistros as belonging in France. … Not the hippest option” (2001: 252). For Benny and Dante, the most prominent characters to espouse a form of cosmopolitan sophistication, local and traditional forms of dining are inherently limiting, decidedly “unhip,” and, ultimately and most importantly, present a bad return on investment: “Our power-alley demographics, the twenty-five to fortyfive-year-old, new economy, urban, food enthusiasts—what we’re calling the fooderati—they want something wired, post-national, with vibrant flavours. They want unlimited new ingredients, they want grooviness and sophistication, and both purple and gold score very well” (2001: 256). Jeremy dismisses, rightly so the novel implies, the focus group’s ludicrous desire for purple and gold food. This purple and gold food is in direct contrast to the simple food that Jeremy’s mother cooked. The meal that prompts Jeremy’s parents to fall in love is “an old recipe, an open tribute,” a lamb stew with yogurt and lemon (2001: 38) and Jeremy, his father, and the inhabitants of Stanley Park cook simply—over open fires. For Benny, Dante, and the other sophisticates, newness is everything and tradition, or rootedness, is undesirable—aligning with neoliberal desires

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for constant speculative, forward momentum toward the global and with the predictable outcomes prescribed by norms and focus groups. Stanley Park frames food as a site of risky potential: whether as an investment for neoliberal entrepreneurs (both good and bad, as conceptualized in this novel) or as a potential contaminant (whether literally in terms of food safety or more abstractly in terms of cultural authenticity). These oppositions are mapped onto a spatial opposition as a way of making sense of the realities of contemporary neoliberal life and its attendant risks. The local is the site of tradition and rootedness, offering a form of protection from the predations of the global—the site of corruption and threat. Both the production and consumption of food, as well as space, are deeply discursive spaces that navigate the complicated—and often contradictory—orthodoxies of late capitalism. While the novel clearly rejects the predatory corporatism of financialization, it remains tied to its investment in the individual above all else, seeing a humane liberalism as a (paradoxically) redemptive force. As a result, and like with Bourdain’s and Parker-Bowles’s travel narratives, Taylor ends up in an ideologically circular bind, where that which he critiques is, in fact, borne out of that which is valued. What these narratives illustrate, then, is the difficulty in imagining alternatives to contemporary realities when we remain tied to notions of risk, choice, and responsibility that are personal rather than collective. Because none of these narratives can or is willing to name the real subjects of precarity, centering instead an all-too-familiar heterosexual white man as the risk-taker, they’re stuck reaffirming the very dynamics they wish, at some level, to critique.

Territorializing Risk and Collectivizing Politics While the language of exploration and masculine virility pervades, perhaps unsurprisingly, travel writing about “risky” food and the rhetoric of tradition and “slowness” surrounds those around local food, risk nonetheless remains elsewhere and individualized; other places are sites of risky foodways that the intrepid explorer must navigate at great potential cost to himself. But is thinking about encounters with unfamiliar food as risky necessarily doomed to reiterate long-standing hierarchies? What about sites of risky food encounters that both occur “closer to home” and that orient themselves more explicitly to cosmopolitan social justice? Two such examples of this are Pittsburgh’s Conflict Kitchen and Detroit’s Peace Meal Kitchen. As the name of each restaurant suggests, these are places that are explicitly interested in the links between risk, safety, and the preparation and consumption of food. Conflict Kitchen, as described on their website in 2019, “serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict [and creates] a constantly changing site for ethnic diversity in the post-industrial city of Pittsburgh, as it has presented the only Iranian, Afghan, Venezuelan, North Korean, Haudenosaunnee and

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Palestinian restaurants the city has ever seen.” Peace Meal Kitchen bills itself on its website in 2019 as “an experiment in gastrodiplomacy” and is “dedicated to educating diners on regions that are either misrepresented by the U.S. media or are struggling with political conflict.” Central to the mission of both restaurants is educating patrons about “the geography, culture, and people of the country of focus.” Risk, as conceptualized in these places, is not about the embodied potential of consuming food understood to be dangerous. Instead, the risk is an epistemological one: where the threat posed is by the way in which the world is currently divided into zones of safety and precarity. The customers at either restaurant aren’t personally at risk (or, at least, no more than anyone would be at any moment eating food prepared by a restaurant kitchen) but must confront a world where precarity and safety are unevenly distributed. Moreover, as the cuisines celebrated at the Conflict Kitchen highlight for what are likely to be primarily American customers, the arrangement of global precarity emerges out of American neo-imperialism and unresolved colonial pasts. For Bourdain and Parker-Bowles, “dangerous eating” inheres in cultural tradition; some cultures, so their implicit argument would seem to go, are just “riskier” than others. Conflict Kitchen and Peace Meal Kitchen would suggest something more complicated. In a Vogue article about Conflict Kitchen after the earliest 2017 iterations of former President Trump’s travel bans that prohibited entrance into the United States from a handful of mostly Muslim-majority nations, Tiffany Leigh notes that “only time—and the current presidency’s foreign diplomatic conduct—will dictate which other countries’ cuisines could be featured” (2017). Not only does this highlight the constructed nature of precarity, but it also implicitly suggests that it is American culture that is, in fact, the risky one. Global precarity is suggested to be exacerbated by the American presidency rather than, say, a culture needing to evolve into maturity (with attendant concern about “personal” and global safety) or “naturally” inhering in particular foodways. This upends, or at least reworks, popular ways of assigning risk. This is certainly not the same thing as eliminating or even mitigating risk, but it points to an alternative discourse on food’s situation within both global risk economies and the uneven distribution of precarity.9 In addition to reframing the discourse of risk away from one focused on the consumption of unfamiliar food, these restaurants challenge the mode of spatiality at play in most models of “risky” travel, whether centered on food or not. Reminders of risk are here embedded in cityscapes that might typically forget, intentionally or otherwise, their enmeshment in global risk economies. These restaurants work, thus, as aide-memoires. Conflict Kitchen, by having a physical space in Pittsburgh that is rebranded according to its different cultural iterations (though it is now closed), uses the script and visual signifiers of the culture, in addition to the food itself, to signal a visible insertion into the city-space (see Figure 1.1). If travel is too frequently about the privileged ability to move through global spaces, then these restaurants challenge this

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Figure 1.1  Image of Palestinian iteration of Conflict Kitchen Source: Conflict Kitchen.

dynamic. Peace Meal Kitchen is a pop-up restaurant, making it still dependent on insider forms of knowledge and access. Nonetheless, restaurants such as these offer one potential model for introducing epistemological modes of risky cosmopolitanism into everyday life, in ways not reliant on either travel or legitimately perilous activities. Such places offer opportunities for thinking through the varied everyday connections between global subjects. Rather than consigning risk to the exceptional (a thing that one encounters only when undertaking large-scale movement), this mode of risky cosmopolitanism emphasizes the precarious: emphasizing potential solidarities in the face of quotidian precarity, rather than individual autonomous decision-making. Indeed, the food these restaurants serve deliberately isn’t fine cuisine, but everyday food served in such a way that it remains quotidian. Put differently, when Bourdain, Parker-Bowles, or equivalents search out risky, but everyday, food, they still treat it as exceptional: the food and the experience are out of the ordinary. What Conflict Kitchen and Peace Meal Kitchen offer is a way to both highlight narratives of risk that are ascribed to specific ethnic cultures and to retain its unexceptionality. This is the tension that thinking about food as an entry point to risky cosmopolitanism foregrounds: that the risk we associate with cosmopolitan interconnection is, fundamentally, ordinary. Moreover, while the temptation is to understand precarity as outside the everyday, thus

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requiring large-scale response to overhaul the dynamic of danger and safety, attention to risk and safety around food travel points to the smaller-scale moments where we might attend to the dispersal of global precarity. Ruth L. Ozeki’s 1998 novel, My Year of Meats, similarly queries how the quotidian nature of food allows for elisions of the precarity and labor that surrounds it, privatizing actions and reinforcing the centrality of the neoliberal subject as the global subject par excellence. Unlike Taylor’s novel or food travel writing, however, My Year of Meats focuses this discussion on an examination of the production of food rather than the preparation of it and demonstrates an awareness of the discursive shaping of the cultural values that surround preferences for certain types of foods and places. My Year of Meats is told primarily from the perspective of Jane Takagi-Little, a Japanese-American documentary filmmaker, who is hired by an American lobby organization called BEEF-EX that “represented American meats of all kinds … as well as livestock producers, packers, purveyors, exporters, grain promoters, pharmaceutical companies, and agribusiness groups” (Ozeki 1998: 9–10). The lobby, in an attempt to sell American meat in Japan, produces a television program called My American Wife! which is a hybrid documentary and cooking show featuring idealized American housewives preparing featured American meats, principally beef—essentially acting as an infomercial for the American meat industry. Interspersed with Jane’s travels throughout rural America to find suitable wives to appear on the show is the narrative of Akiko Ueno, the wife of Joichi, a Japanese producer of My American Wife! Akiko’s bulimia and Joichi’s verbal, physical, and sexual violence are connected throughout the novel to Akiko’s role as a Japanese viewer of My American Wife! and its transformation of her views about femininity, motherhood, and the eating of meat. Like Akiko, Jane undergoes a similar (though somewhat less violent) process of development as she grapples with her infertility, the result of her mother having been prescribed DES (a synthetic estrogen believed in the first half of the twentieth century to prevent miscarriage) while pregnant with her. Not only was DES prescribed to expectant mothers and menopausal women, it was also used to control the growth and fertility of livestock. The novel, then, sets up a complex relationship between gendered risk, nation, capitalism, and the production and eating of meat. What I want to specifically focus on, however, is how Ozeki considers this intersected set of relationships as a starting point for envisioning potential forms of cosmopolitan responsibility and disrupting the individualism of neoliberal globality. My Year of Meats actively takes up what it means to be both a global and local citizen, and the linked ethical and political responsibilities accruing from both. Stanley Park and the food travel writing of Bourdain and Parker-Bowles, as I have argued, avoid the question of politics at all costs, positioning individual enrichment as the telos of global connection and the only meaningful context for food choices. By contrast, My Year of Meats, while suggesting that individual choices are important, places them in the context of

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the necessity of larger collective choices. If Taylor’s novel principally conceives of food as the materials of a chef ’s artistry and the catalyst for self-realization, then Ozeki’s novel emphasizes the complex interconnections between the global and the local, and the producer and the consumer that shape and delimit the consumption and production of food; labor, in other words, comes more substantively into the picture. Throughout My Year of Meats, Ozeki depicts Jane’s developing realization of the various global risk economies that she perpetuates and into which she is interpellated—a realization that is intimately connected to her role as someone who labors (for BEEF-EX, but also as an autonomous cultural producer). Indeed, it is not just that Jane transitions from non-cosmopolitan to cosmopolitan subject but that there is a shift from a global sophistication and risk as individualized identity politics to a form that recognizes that her ability to mitigate some risks provides her with the ability to think differently about the structural limits placed on global risk management. Jane is initially attracted to a superficial and hyper-individualized cosmo-multiculturalism that echoes what is at play in both the travel writing and Stanley Park. Ghassan Hage defines the cosmo-multiculturalist as “an essentially ‘mega-urban’ figure: one detached from strong affiliation with roots and consequently open to all forms of otherness” and “just as important as his or her urban nature, the cosmopolite is a class figure and a White person, capable of appreciating and consuming ‘high-quality’ commodities and cultures, including ‘ethnic’ culture. That is, it is a class figure in a cultural sense” (2000: 201; emphasis in original). Her relationship with her sometimes-lover Sloan maps onto the novel’s changing attitude toward cosmo-multiculturalism. Sloan, who arrives, randomly, at the various locations where Jane films is described in ways that echo the cosmomulticulturalist: “[Jane] started to realize that the world Sloan roamed was much larger and richer than [hers]. … He took [her] to exquisite restaurants, where [they] ate rich urchin roe that melted like butter, and paper-thin fugu with chili ponzu sauce, and a thimbleful of black-market caviar, wrapped in a translucent skin and tied with a chive, then covered with trembling pieces of gold leaf ” (Ozeki 1998: 159). Indeed, Sloan’s “larger and richer” world echoes Bourdain’s, Parker-Bowles’s, and Dante’s in Stanley Park where food is ostensibly dislocated from any kind of labor or tradition, as well as its economic context— suggesting the analogous nature of cosmo-multiculturalism and conspicuous consumption. However, while Sloan’s life of global sophistication and mobility would suggest a corresponding investment in the risky, his sexual encounters with Jane point to something different: “He always wore not one but two condoms, the heavy-duty kind that seemed to be made out of synthesized latex and Kevlar, which he would secure in place before anything resembling a penetration took place … there was something disturbingly neurotic about that second condom” (1998: 91). Although Jane deliberately and consciously fetishizes her exotic erotic potential to him, setting the stage for their phone sex by

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describing herself as an “exotic Eurasion of ambiguous gender … sort of postVietnam nostalgia-porn” (1998: 52), Sloan’s second condom positions Jane as the vector of risk: he needs to protect himself from her mobility. However, as Jane’s pregnancy, the result of Sloan abandoning both condoms, reveals, it is Jane, not Sloan, who must bear the bulk of the consequences of their risky, condom-less sex. Sloan is the actual vector of risk, as becomes more visible as their relationship proceeds. Indeed, while his cosmo-multiculturalism is initially appealing and enticing to Jane, she begins to view it as empty, sterile, isolating—and a site of potential danger. This becomes particularly evident to her once she visits his Chicago apartment: “There is nothing soft about Sloan’s apartment. It is all polished surfaces, acute angles, hard glass, cold chrome, and leather. Like an abattoir, it could be hosed down without too much difficulty if anything unsightly, like an attachment or a sentiment, happened to splatter the walls” (1998: 220). As Monica Chiu notes, this description suggests that it is Jane “who has come to be slaughtered” (2001: 113). Their changing relationship also marks a shift away from the superficial and hyperindividualized cosmo-multiculturalism that Jane, through Sloan, begins to adopt toward the socially responsible cosmopolitanism that she espouses by the close of the novel. Jane’s footage from the Dunn feedlot, revealing the illegal and ongoing use of DES, is in demand from “every major television news program and talk show in the country” as well as from Japanese and European news outlets (Ozeki 1998: 355–6). The demand for Jane’s footage seems, in many ways, to be a wish-fulfillment happy ending, yet it nonetheless suggests a new kind of global orientation for Jane. In her earliest engagement with Sloan, Jane is both the risk-taker and the bearer of responsibility for all risk; as the novel progresses, she begins to understand that risk emerges in a broader global context than the self. This is a shift that leads Jane to her own complicated position in a global economy of risk—to recognize ethical and political responsibilities to people other than her, locally and globally, and to recognize that she herself holds local as well as global affiliations. Through developing an increasingly cosmopolitan worldview that sees her actions and choice in relationship to global others and larger structures of power and knowledge, her responsibilities become more conscious and explicit. Jane recognizes her own global culpability as a documentarian—a culpability that she had previously ignored or misunderstood: “I have heard myself protesting, ‘I didn’t know!’ but this is not true. … I knew enough. But I needed a job. So when My American Wife! was offered to me, I chose to ignore what I knew. … Maybe this exempts me as an individual, but it sure makes me entirely culpable as a global media maker” (1998: 334–5; emphasis in original). Jane’s new sense of responsibility as global media maker is distinct from her earlier acknowledgment of her own ethical disengagement from the results of her job (1998: 176). Moreover, Jane’s new articulation of her own responsibility to global others is explicitly framed through her position within the web of global labor.

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Shameem Black suggests that “in contrast to words such as ‘transnational’ or ‘global,’ which can describe both progressive and hegemonic phenomena, ‘cosmopolitanism’ … suggests a provisionally viable way of conceptualizing and forming communities across cultural borders. As a way of envisioning other people and imagining affiliations among them, cosmopolitanism attempts to encode an elusive ideal within imperfect histories” (2004: 228). Black further argues that, particularly, in My Year of Meats this elusive ideal centers on technologies of female fertility—highlighting how, like Bourdain’s and ParkerBowles’s narratives, risk and gender are deeply intertwined. However, Jane is situated as a global and local citizen at a number of different points, not all of which are solely reducible to questions about her fertility (though this certainly plays a central role in this narrative). Ozeki’s attention to genre and form, and its role in shaping ethics and politics, is particularly global in focus— despite her attention on two of the most prominent nation-states of the Global North (Japan and the United States)—and frames Jane as an actively laboring participant in a global risk economy. As David Palumbo-Liu writes, Ozeki “is especially interested in the different ways in which people might be affected by literary texts and by media images so as to act ethically and with a sense of being together” (2005: 52). The operation of Jane’s role as creative laboring subject is particularly evident in the novel’s attention to how this work produces an audience who is affected by the produced texts and images in Akiko’s story line; “her story traces a shift from a passive audience to an active one, detailing her ability to read subversive (if romantic) lessons between the lines of television corporate messaging” (Black 2004: 233). While Joichi’s violent rape of Akiko is ultimately what leads her to leave him and move to the United States, it is the episodes of My American Wife! that he demands she watch and the recipes from the show that she prepares that establish the conditions of possibility for her to leave him. In a fax that she surreptitiously sends to Jane at work, whom she only knows from her husband’s communications and the television show she produces (Joichi is Jane’s boss), Akiko articulates (in her limited English) how central the program has been to her changing sense of herself: “I feel compelled to writing for the reason of your program of the Lesbian’s couple with two childrens was very emotional for me. So thank you firstly for change my life. Because of this program, I feel I can trust to you so that I can be so bold” (Ozeki 1998: 213–14). Once Akiko arrives in the United States, she goes to visit two of the families featured on the show. The lesbian couple she mentions in her fax to Jane help her find an apartment of her own. Once Akiko is on her own, she begins to frame herself as a writer; she becomes a producer, rather than consumer, of culture: “She had to write, otherwise it would never end” (1998: 347). This creative labor takes the form of a letter to Joichi to make clear the reasons why she left him; she “had plenty of very good reasons for leaving, and she wanted him to know each one” (1998: 347). Her use of the list as a genre echoes the excerpts from the medieval Japanese author Sei Shōnagon’s

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The Pillow Book that frame each chapter of My Year of Meats, which both Jane and Akiko read from frequently. If Akiko’s “prose becomes exuberant, fluid, and exhibits a style much different than Shōnagon’s and inflected with a new confidence” (Chiu 2001: 118), it nonetheless remains connected to the generic format of Shōnagon’s work—and to the documentary genre central to Jane’s role as cultural producer—linking Akiko to a genealogy of women’s creative work. While Akiko’s development in My Year of Meats does not conclude with the same self-conscious ethical and political awakening that Jane’s does, it nonetheless maps a journey from individual risk management, experienced in isolation, toward an awareness of a shared community. Akiko’s writing now has an audience, even a small audience, demonstrating a shift from its previously private nature when she hid her poetry under her mattress. Jane queries the audience of her own work, asking, “Who would want to see it?” (Ozeki 1998: 335), yet sends it on to those who have acted as pedagogical guides for her. Akiko’s writing follows a similar trajectory, though on a somewhat different scale. While Jane’s text seems to grapple more explicitly with questions of ethical and political responsibility, Akiko’s text demands similar sorts of responsibility from Joichi: it demands that he consider his ethical failings and responsibilities to her and other women. What Akiko’s text then makes visible is the nearimpossibility of confidently producing a specific response from an audience. Joichi might read Akiko’s letter and learn something, but he might not (indeed, based on what we know of him, he likely will not). Similarly, the viewers of Jane’s documentary might learn the lesson she intends it to produce, but they might not. What is important in My Year of Meats is the attempt to teach these lessons without any particular assurances of the outcome; “how do stories do their work? Once affect has been installed, how is it supposed to be harnessed to an ethical action” (Palumbo-Liu 2005: 58)? Similar questions about the work that narrative does are raised in the formal structures of Ozeki’s novel itself. My Year of Meats is a notably hybrid text stylistically, using a number of different formats and rhetorical styles: there are faxes, letters, articles, “documentary interludes,” a television script, footnotes, a list of further reading at the end provided by “Jane,” the excerpts from Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, and then the narrative itself—which follows a relatively straightforward realist pattern (it progresses in a linear fashion and attempts a kind of verisimilitude in a recognizable world). These hybrid formal qualities perform the majority of the text’s pedagogical function. Not only does Jane begin the work to develop an explicitly global conception of social justice, but the content of the text itself attempts to provide the same kind of education for the reader that Jane receives as she films My American Wife! This marks a significant difference from Taylor’s Stanley Park, which satisfies itself with a more straightforward narrative style and much less explicit pedagogical project. As Julie Sze suggests, “the novel … connects meat production with global consumption, including advertising, that functions to create and shape the needs and desires of individual consumers in national and global

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markets” (2006: 806). The bulk of these connections are made through the narrative itself. Jane acts as audience stand-in/witness to “international crimes and explores how women combat them [articulating] new forms of personal, political, and narrative organization that help to build a cosmofeminist future” (Black 2004: 231) but also serves as a reminder of readers’ enmeshment in precarious networks of labor that intersect with unexpected aspects of our daily lives. Through the use of documentary interludes, footnotes, and the list of further reading, Ozeki (acting as ventriloquist through Jane) demands that her readers act as witnesses to the immense local and global physical and environmental costs of the global meat industry and to the less quantifiable costs of global media. In other words, Ozeki seeks to make actively cosmopolitanizing subjects of her readers, encouraging them to see their own local enmeshment in global precarity through the very food they eat. The effectiveness of this in My Year of Meats in comparison to the failed political challenge of Stanley Park lies in the fluidity between the individual and the collective, the fictional and the extra-fictional (here I mean the world outside the novel, rather than just the nonfictional elements of the novel itself). One of the criticisms of the novel is its (seemingly too tidy) happy ending: Jane and Sloan tentatively restart their relationship, though its ultimate status does remain ambiguous; Akiko has left the abusive Joichi and creates a community of women for herself in the United States; and Jane’s damning footage of the Dunn feedlot has garnered a great deal of media interest. Ironically, the close of the novel has Jane observing that “I don’t think I can change my future simply by writing a happy ending. That’s too easy and not so interesting” (1998: 361). Yet Ozeki suggests in the interview included in the trade paperback edition of the novel that “happy endings satisfy the emotions, and I wanted to provide that type of satisfying narrative closure in the hope that it would free the intellect to continue its trajectory beyond the story line, pondering the issues the book raises” (1998: 13). For Ozeki, then, the pedagogical work of the novel (and cultural product, more broadly) is not limited to the educational process but must include the transformation of that learning into global and local political action. Shameem Black claims that “the governing assumption behind her explanation suggests that the emotional paralysis and ambiguity of ambivalent narrative endings directly translate into intellectual and political stasis. Complex, open endings, she implies, mire the reader within the social space of the novel and prohibit the translation of affect into action” (2004: 247). In Stanley Park, it is primarily an aesthetic and emotional response that is demanded. This form of affect is certainly at work in My Year of Meats yet it is explicitly connected, through the narrative itself and its formal elements, to thinking self-consciously about the operation of neoliberal global life. My Year of Meats theorizes that an engagement with the circumstances of and values behind food production can lead to a real sense of commitment to the other global citizens and places and points to the political potential of taking local and global commitments and translating them locally

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or globally. Ozeki usefully argues that possibilities are foreshortened when we ignore our roles as both global and local citizens. In her 2007 novel, Strawberry Fields (published as Two Caravans outside of North America), Marina Lewycka shifts Ozeki’s focus on the discourse surrounding food production and the risk of consumption to emphasize the violence surrounding the labor force necessary for the production of food, highlighting its particular operation as commodity under neoliberal capital. Strawberry Fields tells the story of a group of (predominantly) Eastern European workers who come to England to do agricultural work in the summer. The two most prominent characters, Andriy and Irina, both young Ukrainians, arrive with romantic ideals of success, financial and otherwise, of which they are disabused as they spend more time as laborers. As the novel progresses, they shift from picking strawberries to restaurant work, while secondary characters work in poultry-processing plants and, what is implied to be, sex work. Throughout the novel, there is the suggestion that Andriy, Irina, and the others they work alongside represent both a growing presence of Eastern European labor in the UK but also a shadowy, yet invisible, Europe more broadly. At one point, Andriy and Irina are served strawberries by a well-meaning, upper middle-class Englishwoman, and which Irina “[forces herself] to eat … out of politeness, for how could she know the truth about her strawberries?” (2007: 172; emphasis added). This question is the foundational question of this novel: How could those who enjoy the (literal) fruit of the labor of marginalized others know the truth of this labor and continue to consume it? Irina asks this question, seemingly sincerely, but we might read the novel as offering a second reading of the question, which is with a layer of ironic incredulity (How could she not know the truth about her strawberries?). This double reading of the question of awareness can’t help but underpin the discussion of representations of food risk (and the other risks under examination in this book): these representations seek to educate or inform, but, simultaneously, express skepticism that their audience doesn’t/shouldn’t already know this information. One element that novels like Strawberry Fields, as well as popular nonfiction texts like Fast Food Nation, repeat is the spatial distancing at play, both globally and locally, with food production and processing, which corresponds to a parallel discursive occlusion. In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser describes visiting one of “the nation’s largest” slaughterhouses, observing that it “is an immense building, gray and square, about three stories high, with no windows on the front and no architectural clues to what’s happening inside” (2001: 169). As Schlosser highlights, the westward move, facilitated by the mid-century expansion of the interstate highway system, of slaughterhouses out of urban areas into rural ones, closer to feedlots, both changed the makeup of the labor force and removed slaughterhouses from the sight of middle-class American consumers (2001: 149–66). Similarly, in Strawberry Fields, Lewycka emphasizes the spaces that occur beyond the typical view of Englishness. Indeed, even while portions of the novel take place in London, Dover, and Sheffield, she

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focuses on spaces that are characterized by labor, rather than heritage or expected landmarks, transforming these densely discursive spaces as generic non-places (to follow from Marc Augé’s definition). The overlap between the laborers who populate this novel and “real” English citizens is, more or less, nonexistent. Apart from brief intrusions by English subjects who control access to agricultural sites, this novel is populated exclusively by laboring subjects from Europe and Africa.10 Not only are the strawberry fields and the poultryprocessing plants geographically removed from urban centers here, but the temporary workers who occupy these spaces move through an almost entirely different England. The risk borne by these subjects seems, therefore, to occupy a different, yet parallel, world—analogous to the differently conceived but still present spatial concerns at play in both Stanley Park and My Year of Meats. Risk, thus, is a spatial category, not just an embodied or metaphysical one. Infrastructures are in place that shape the ability to recognize risk as such. Risk demands, then, a theory of place, not just a model of thinking or acting. This does suggest an interpretative element for those who most benefit from the risks and precaritization of others: that they/we learn to read place in such a way that those infrastructures breach the threshold of visibility. The implied necessity in these texts of reading space differently isn’t, however, just about seeing the infrastructures that have been deliberately obscured. If we return to the question raised by Irina—“How could she know the truth about her strawberries?”—another spatial vector comes into play: the immediate, daily proximity of ourselves to the food on our plates. While the novel emphasizes a parallel England, populated with temporary workers, it also highlights, implicitly, the intersection between these multiple experiences of the nation. The plate transforms, or, more accurately, is revealed to be a site of potential contestation that expands beyond taste or personal preferences. While the long global histories of vegetarian and vegan eating demonstrate that the plate has never been neutral, those debates have typically been framed around questions of cruelty to animals or of cleanliness—thus making particular political and cultural claims on eating practices. Further, there is a similarly long history of muckraking journalism and novels, revealing the reality of slaughterhouses (see, e.g., Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle) and suggesting that North American audiences have been long aware, however unreflexively, of the treatment of animals and workers in the meat-processing industry.11 Yet, while omnivores may have accepted, however warily, the violence that attends eating animals, the consumption of fruits and vegetables is often imagined to be outside of this violent economy. While this, in part, stems from the sense of the pastoral that accompanies representations of this mode of agricultural production (which I will discuss below), we might also see it as a place where the tensions between the necessity of eating, concerns about health, and the labor necessary to produce food (both at the level of the agricultural and the domestic) come to a head. We don’t think about the violence that accompanies food that isn’t visibly dead flesh because we don’t want to interrogate any further

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the violence that goes alongside simply existing under industrial capitalism. Indeed, this point is made by the poultry facility manager to Tomasz when he observes that they refer to the chicken as a crop: “It’s what [we] call ‘em. Funny, innit? You’d think it was vegetables or somefink. Not somefink alive. But vegetables is alive, ent they” (Lewycka 2007: 115)? This disinterest, at best, in acknowledging the violence that is part of everyday life in order to ensure its smooth operation is paralleled in the McKenzie family’s careful negotiation of the alcoholic father (the mother of the family is the woman who unwittingly serves Irina and Andriy the strawberries). The family is paralyzed by an inability to act because they want to avoid upsetting Mr. McKenzie, whose alcoholism produces a state of constant potential violence. While “eating strawberries” and “negotiating an abusive spouse/parent” hardly seem like equivalents, we might acknowledge something akin here to a parallel mode of dealing with both. In both cases, the threat of violence is only barely subsumed below the surface of daily life; disrupting this equilibrium brings it to the surface with unpredictable results. In his discussion of the novel, Oliver Lindner observes that “despite material wealth, the English lead unfulfilled lives in broken families. On the other hand, although having to survive under [the] harshest conditions as economic migrants, the Eastern Europeans [in the novel], with the exception of their criminal elements, enter into honest relationships and retain their optimism” (2010: 470). While this claim seems to possess the same romanticized and idealized point of view that Irina, the principal narrator, has, it does highlight the argument running through the novel that the violence of the migrants’ lives is different by degree, rather than kind, from that of English lives. Lindner’s claim that the Eastern Europeans “enter into honest relationships” is certainly debatable: they certainly find moments of affective connection but the bulk of these characters are comically and almost willfully naïve and idealistic, making it difficult to see them as models of “honest relationships,” whatever that might mean. Instead, we might understand these relationships based on proximity and contingent connection, like the McKenzies’ marriage, as suggesting that interpersonal relationships cannot straightforwardly be the correction to or the inoculation against the structures that demand violence, as we saw with the limits (acknowledged or not) of heterosexual romance as a catalytic force in both Stanley Park and My Year of Meats. While this is hardly a new claim, the insistence of, for example, the paratextual material on the paperback edition of the novel in reading Strawberry Fields as a novel where ultimately “mutual irritation blossoms into some seriously passionate love” suggests a lingering desire to read romantic relationships as one of “the rewards, like strawberries, while surprisingly hard to pick, [that] prove[s]‌awfully sweet.” While the back cover refers to Andriy’s and Irina’s tentative romance, Yola’s pragmatic romantic interest in Tomasz—she believes that his flaws can be improved through her attention and that he’ll act as a considerate stepfather to her son who has

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unnamed cognitive disabilities—offers a harsh corrective to overly idealized notions of romantic love. This tension between romantic love as seen through rose-colored glasses and the messy realities, taking the form of both pragmatism and sublimated violence, also circulates around questions of both agriculture and place. The novel begins with a pastoral description of strawberry fields: There is a field—a broad south-sloping field sitting astride a long hill that curves away into a secret leafy valley. It is sheltered by dense hedges of hawthorn and hazel threaded through with wild roses and evening-scented honeysuckle. In the mornings, a light breeze carries up over The Downs, just enough to kiss the air with the fresh salty tang of the English Channel. In fact so delightful is the air that, sitting up here, you might think you were in paradise. (2007: 1)

Yet, as the passage continues, the bucolic paradise begins to come into question: “And in the field are two trailers, a men’s trailer and a women’s trailer. If this were really the Garden of Eden, though, there ought to be an apple tree, thinks Yola. But it is the Garden of England, and the field is full of ripening strawberries. And instead of a snake, they have the Dumpling [the farmer who owns the land]” (2007: 1). As the explicitly Edenic language makes clear, appearances cannot be trusted here; evil lurks in this land, yet it takes the seemingly banal form of an overweight and middle-aged Englishman. This warning acts, effectively, as a form of dramatic irony, given that most of the characters only learn to recognize the snake much later. Yola, the only character who most readily sees through the view of England as land of upward mobility (she has no plans, for instance, to stay in England; her “real life” is back in Poland), can mostly see through the claims of both the landscape and the market that promises quick money. But while the Devil takes the form of a snake in Eden, he doesn’t impose his own will unilaterally; instead, he operates through temptation and desire. While it is difficult to classify the Dumpling’s/Farmer Leapish’s sexual exploitation of her (and implicitly others) as “temptation,” Yola recognizes the double movement of attraction and repulsion at play in the agricultural rhetoric used to recruit temporary workers to the UK and the more unpleasant reality at play. Moreover, while Farmer Leapish exploits his workers in a number of ways and offers them the barest minimum in terms of accommodation, he is less mercenary than the managers of other strawberry fields and industries the characters become involved with subsequently. The continuum of abuse offered by the novel is, in many ways, both problematically irreconcilable and useful in its acknowledgment of the complicated interpretative work needed to understand the way risk and precarity operates for the characters in this novel. Typically, we want to understand risk as an either/or proposition: something is either risky or it’s safe.

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This binary, thus, allows us to characterize a subject’s behavior as admirable or not, as reasonable or not. It allows for the seeming calculability of risk as it imagines a clear dividing line between risk and safety. Moreover, seeing risk in these absolute terms suggests that it is always fully recognizable. For example, Vulk, the Polish recruiter who steals Irina’s passport and tries repeatedly to rape her is a clear threat to her safety. Trusting him would therefore seem to be to give herself over to a risk from which she cannot possibly gain—though this requires fantasizing that this is a scenario where migrants have full autonomy over their actions; this is a version of what Jane Elliott terms “suffering agency,” where the subject has choice, and thus agency, but between two awful choices. Seeing the danger Vulk poses requires little to no interpretative work: he is straightforwardly villainous and a threat to the safety of Irina and others. More difficult is recognizing the danger posed by Farmer Leapish and, more insidiously, Vitaly, who begins as one of the strawberry pickers but becomes one of the recruiters who ends up trafficking the two Chinese women into sex work. This requires more complicated forms of reading and interpretation. Farmer Leapish, while exploitative, is less so than others; Vitaly begins as a friend, part of the familial community formed in the first strawberry field. Strawberry Fields implicitly asks its readers to recognize that risk and safety are rarely recognizable in simplistically oppositional ways. Another key similarity, however, between Farmer Leapish and Vitaly, and emblematic of the real danger they each pose to the characters, is their role as gatekeepers to labor. Not only, then, does Strawberry Fields work to reveal a parallel England where fruit is harvested and poultry is processed, connecting the plate to labor, but it also closely links this labor to both discourses of global upward mobility and the dangers attached to it. The upward mobility presumed to be attached to this labor—and which Yola, for instance, explicitly understands as her reasons for undertaking this work—is shown to come not just at the cost of massive amounts of (often physical) labor, but that it demands a constant state of precarity. Precarity is not here shown to be either incidental or circumstantial, but inescapable—and at its most inescapable when it can’t be fully recognized or articulated. Farmer Leapish seems to provide well for his workers, in comparison to other farm owners; Vitaly seems to have good and interesting jobs available for them. Readers, like the characters, might want to believe the narratives of upward mobility that Vitaly offers, want to believe that their middle-class comforts are available to migrant workers who are willing to both work hard and take the necessary risks. However, Vitaly’s stories of social potential are revealed to be clearly that: they put a promising gloss on brutal and violently dehumanizing tasks. While discussing Lewycka’s first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Heather Fielding demonstrates the way Lewycka makes use of the forms and tropes of the ethnic bildungsroman, only to highlight the “melancholic exclusions that have made conviviality possible” (2011: 202). Fielding defines the ethnic bildungsroman as one where “an ethnic character

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‘grows’ along a trajectory that culminates in his or her assimilation to the nation” (2011: 201). In that novel, the narrator’s, Nadezhda’s, assimilation into a model of paradoxically homogenizing British multiculturalism requires the expulsion (via deportation) of Valentina, “the gold-digging Ukrainian who comes to England to marry [her elderly] father” (2011: 204). Nadezhda “becomes” British by learning to police good and bad immigrants. As Fielding highlights, A Short History puts forward, implicitly, a deeply conflicted vision of British national identity. I want to continue this argument into Strawberry Fields and its extension of the question of national identity to regional identity and, implicitly, though not simplistically, cosmopolitan global identity. Farmer Leapish and Vitaly provide the framework for neoliberal narratives of upward mobility as personal development and a subsequent entrance into global economic life. However, if A Short History ends with an awkward sense of the incongruent demands of national life, then Strawberry Fields offers a much more pessimistic sense of the end point of personal development. If Nadezhda’s assimilation comes at an ethical cost, it’s still available; Andriy and Irina do not appear to have any such access to assimilationist models of citizenship, whether national, regional, or global. Indeed, the only model of shared community they have access to is that of the laboring global precariat. This very possibility raised by the novel is its most compelling and politically useful: reframing the cosmopolitan subjects in the novel as not the upper middle-class English citizens, but the laboring migrants. The global community in this novel is made up of global laborers, not elite subjects shaped by shared high cultural pursuits. For instance, Darren, the foreman of the poultry-processing plant, emphasizes to Tomasz the global makeup of the workforce, suggesting that he is interchangeable with any number of others: You don’t have to do it. There’s always plenty that do. Ukrainians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Brazilians, Mexicans, Kenyans, Zimbabweans, you lose track. Jabber jabber jabber around here. Day and night. It’s like United bloody Nations. We used to get a lot of Lithuanians and Latvians, but Europe ruined all that. Made ‘em all legal. Like the Poles. Waste of bloody time. Started asking for minimum wages. Chinesers are the best. No papers. No speekee English. No fuckin’ clue what’s goin’ on. (Lewycka 2007: 110)

The racist assumptions underpinning the treatment of labor are here right on the surface, in ways that are perhaps not particularly believable (it seems unlikely that a foreman would explain quite so directly the oppression at play to a potential employee). What Darren reveals inadvertently, however, is the cosmopolitan makeup of this labor force, in contrast to the resolute whiteness of Englishness in the rest of the novel. While Englishness is by no means exclusively white, either historically or currently, the racial homogeneity of its depiction here works to emphasize its more general boundedness. Global

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heterogeneity is the purview of migrant communities—though, as Darren’s “jabber jabber jabber” suggests, this is a Tower of Babel scenario, representing the limits placed on connectivity rather than already existing community. The limits to shared experience as catalyst for cosmopolitan community is seen, for instance, when Yola and Marta find themselves residents of “The Majestic Hotel,” a mid-century hotel-turned-accommodations for laborers, and forced to share a room with two Slovak women “who are not particularly welcoming to the newcomers, having previously had it to themselves, and who have spread their stuff out and hung their wet underpants to dry all over the place, making the room steamy as well as cluttered” (2007: 90). There is a brief glimmer of something approaching cosmopolitan solidarity in the brief strike action that happens after a Chinese slaughterman slices off the end of his thumb. This moment where the physical danger of this work materializes most visibly acts as a catalyst, leading Tomasz and others to shut down the conveyer belt and, thus, the processing plant. Not only do the workers abandon the plant but the chickens are also set free: the “whole yard is full of chickens running and flapping everywhere, except some which have broken legs can only crawl, really these chickens are in very poor condition” (2007: 140). The injured chickens are clearly set up as analogous to the workforce—something made explicit when, earlier, Tomasz observes that “he is already losing his sensibility of the chickens as living sentient creatures and, through the same process, of himself also. … Tomasz feels his own soul is like a dying bird, fluttering in the mire” (2007: 121). This moment of cross-species empathy introduces the possibility of forms of solidarity. But this is not just a moment where Tomasz feels with the chickens, but where he recognizes himself as part of “the same process.” This is empathy as the beginnings of labor solidarity. Andriy, inadvertently corralled by Vitaly to be a strikebreaker, similarly acknowledges this: “Andriy is beginning to feel uncomfortable [about what Vitaly asks him to do]. It’s something his father had said that had struck in his memory … it was something about solidarity, the essential fellow-feeling of man—his father had drummed it into him—something about self-respect” (2007: 144–5). There are two particularly significant arguments brought to the surface in these moments. The first is Tomasz’s cross-species empathy, which resists a homogenizing anthropocentric cosmopolitical community. The violence done to both humans and animals suggests not just that they are part of the same consumption circuit here, but potentially a more metaphysical connection defined by desires for both corporeal freedom and autonomy. The violence done to Tomasz and the chickens creates a communitarian bond that demands a different conceptualization of what cosmopolitan communities might look like or what they might aspire to. Put differently, a cosmopolitanism that is defined by elite sophistication or greater fluency in human difference is necessarily limited and still dependent upon violence if animals are still subject to the excessive violence represented here. This is also seen throughout the book in

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the sections from the point of view of the stray dog who gets adopted by the strawberry pickers. This broadens the cross-species identification beyond the habitus of labor and immigration to include a more expansive notion of social exclusion that unites these cosmopolitan subjects. While Dog’s empathy for the humans he joins up with is not so explicitly returned, by offering a formal narrative for him, the novel provides parallel opportunities for the reader to empathize with him as with any of the other, human characters. While Lewycka cannot help but anthropomorphize the dog, this remains another thread in the novel that proposes that cosmopolitan communities might, perhaps even should, be composed by a less exclusionary dependence on a singularly human universality. Alongside this argument about cross-species empathy and its expansive potential for cosmopolitanism is another argument that sees cosmopolitan connections emerging out of labor practices and positionalities, rather than identity. If cosmopolitanism has historically been centered around a notion of shared, essential humanness, this is put aside in Strawberry Fields in favor of a model that echoes that of the trade union. Indeed, while Irina might be the primary protagonist in terms of the percentage of the novel told from her point of view, her naïveté makes her not a fully reliable narrator—signaled, in part, by her acceptance of the neoliberal “third way” through her support for the Ukrainian Orange Revolution. It is, instead, Andriy’s faith in unions and the need for solidarity with workers that, while acknowledged as utopic thinking, might be seen to provide a more aspirational cosmopolitan future. The neoliberal cosmopolitan futurity imagined by Irina replicates not just class hierarchies but the associated cultural and ethnic connotations: despite her belief in progress, for instance, she is initially repulsed by Andriy’s workingclass language and behavior. Cosmopolitanism, by this standard, is simply about the homogenizing imperialism of middle-class norms and behavior— and, given Irina’s fascination with “classic” British writers, these are as much British guidelines as they are Ukrainian. Despite Irina’s belief in the universality of her values and conventions, they initially alienate her from the rest of the strawberry pickers—making her more vulnerable to the violent advances of Vulk. Middle-class respectability, then, is hardly the stuff of an idealized cosmopolitanism; tellingly, in these different instances, this respectability comes at the cost, among others, of eliding labor and one’s position as a laboring subject. If Irina imagines the upwardly mobile possibilities of middle-class English life that emerge out of literature and language-learning textbooks as the path to the good life, Andriy locates this possibility in English union politics. His first visit to England was as a small child “accompanying his father on a fraternal delegation to visit the mine workers’ union in the city of Sheffield, which is twinned with his home town, Donetsk” (2007: 21). His father enjoins him to “learn about the beauty of international solidarity” after a speech from the city’s mayor “about solidarity and the dignity of labor” (2007: 21). Later, when

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Andriy tries to articulate why he wants to go to Sheffield, it is the “gentleness of [the mayor’s] voice when he spoke of the welcome that awaits strangers in his city” (2007: 70–1) that most deeply resonates with him. This promise—real or imagined—of cosmopolitan openness, tied to labor solidarity, is in stark contrast to both the oppressive isolation that has characterized his time in England and the dangerous realities of mining in Ukraine, after his father is killed in a mine collapse. The possibility of the union, here, provides a way of thinking about one’s labor as part of a shared community that works to mitigate precarity that models other forms of collective thinking. Labor under the conditions that these characters experience is precarious and alienating, over and above the ways in which humans under capitalism are always already alienated by their labor. Yet, where Irina’s vision of social mobility is ultimately characterized by further forms of hyper-individualism, Andriy sees glimmers of cosmopolitan possibility through the language of labor solidarity. He recognizes that solidarity often fails—indeed, it is the limits of international solidarity that lead his father and other miners to work in unsafe conditions that lead to a mine collapse—but that it is the only way to fashion a life of “selfrespect” (2007: 145) in the dehumanizing face of cosmopolitan migrant labor. This is a vision of solidarity not categorically far removed from the transnational community of women at the end of My Year of Meats, though one with more already established infrastructure. The texts under examination in this chapter, whether focused on food as the site of adventurous travel, the symbol of authentic tradition, or as the intersection of discursive and labor practices, all ask their readers to attend to the complicated links between the global circulation of food and culture more broadly and necessary and everyday practices. By focusing on food, these texts all highlight the inescapability of the questions of risk, safety, and the implications for both global and local citizenship. These texts not only challenge the physical separation from risk and precarity in ways that echo similar patterns in the other texts read in this book, but also suggest that the risks that structure global life are part of everyday life, neither exceptional nor on a sublime scale. As these texts illustrate, however, these risks are obscured as such in a variety of ways, naturalizing their categorization as existing elsewhere or as the domain of self-reflexive autonomy. Contemporary life, as these texts remind us, is overdetermined by a series of choices that are connected to structures of precarity—whether one’s own or of global others. Precarity—and the decisions that both reify and reproduce it—cannot be assumed to exist elsewhere or as the organic expression of non-Western culture; these texts all provide examples of the complicated cultural operation of these attitudes and how we might defamiliarize them.

Chapter 2 R I SK A N D E M B O D I M E N T

The description of the multimedia project, Invisible Networks (founded by photographer Shuli Hallak), notes that the power of the Internet is derived from its intangible, invisible properties. The ability of information to scale and traverse in an instant is transformative, and the application of that power can be used in multiple ways, some good and some not so good. Because we can not [sic] see these systems that we rely on—the hardware (routers, switches, data centers, fiber cables), and invisible properties (spectrum, wireless networks, protocol)—we are as a whole, left in the dark and unaware of how our own data exists in these networks.

The project, a combination of photography, data visualizations, and visual glossaries, aims to consider how “if we can see the Internet as a whole, we can build visual concepts and language around it, and we can understand where to place our trust. We can understand where and how common infrastructure breaches happen, and we can begin to understand how our data is used as a commodity. We will be equipped to properly secure the future of the Internet” (see Figure 2.1). Similarly, TeleGeography, a telecommunications market research and consulting firm, conducts research on international networks, undersea cables, service providers, and wholesale circuit pricing; International Internet networks, service providers, capacity, traffic, and IP transit pricing; Enterprise MPLS VPN, Ethernet, dedicated Internet access, and international private line service providers and pricing; International long distance traffic, service providers, cost, and pricing; Retail mobile, broadband, and fixed-line service providers and markets.

While their research is primarily directed at private and public sector clients, they release an annual “Submarine Cable Map,” which “depicts active and planned submarine cable systems and their landing stations. Selecting a cable on the map projection or from the submarine cable list provides access to the

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Figure 2.1  Shuli Hallak, “Facebook Data Centre” Source: Shuli Hallak.

cable’s profile, including the cable’s name, ready-for-service (RFS) date, length, owners, website, and landing points” (Rogers 2020). While TeleGeography does not have the same articulated pedagogical goals of Invisible Networks, both are invested in highlighting the material connections that are so central to everyday network life in the Global North—and the way that these connections traverse the entire planet (see Figure 2.2). These connections, both inescapable and invisible, point, in some ways quite obviously, to the continued necessity of thinking through cosmopolitanism, but also demonstrate the infrastructure necessary for the free-flowing capital of financialization. Indeed, while techno-utopians might float the idea that the global connectivity that emerges from changes in telecommunications posits the potential for a new polis, separate from the constraints of nationality and individual markers of difference, this has increasingly proven to be untrue as the internet has promoted narrower, rather than more expansive, sites of identification. As well, the massive system of undersea cables that TeleGeography maps is not in place for utopic aims but to support the demands of the financial system, not substantially distinct from the global routes of container ships that transport commodities globally. Moreover, as Invisible Networks makes clear, increasing accessibility to wireless networks has introduced new anxieties about personal, corporate, and national security (and in many other venues and levels). Indeed, one of their data visualizations maps out the levels of confidence (using Pew Research data) consumers have in the security of their

Figure 2.2  Telegeography, “2020 Submarine Cable Map” Source: www.telegeography.com.

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records by a variety of organizations. The categories “not too confident” and “not at all confident” are overwhelmingly the majority in all cases. This suggests that, at the level of the individual, one does not expect the privacy that typically denotes security in any of the organizations that they interact with most (such as phone companies, government agencies, social media, email providers, and credit card companies). To exist as a wireless cosmopolitan, then, is to feel precarious; yet the risks deemed essential to digital life are determined, by all but the most anxious user, to be inescapable and inevitable—suggesting that they are taken without choice, even without full awareness. The other side of technological insecurity, as Nicole Shukin notes, are anxieties about “biomobility” where “the substance of virtual communication reappears in the pandemic potential of communicable disease. Biomobility names, in other words, the threat of telecommunications’ pathological double, the potential of infectious disease to rapidly travel through the social flesh of a globally connected life world” (2009: 182; emphasis in original). Priscilla Wald similarly links disease and globalizing technology: “Communicable disease compels attention—for scientists and the lay public alike—not only because of the devastation it can cause but also the circulation of microbes materializes the transmission of ideas. The interactions that make us sick also constitute us as a community” (2008: 2). Indeed, these are merely two examples of the large body of criticism highlighting the overlap between the biomedical and the technological. It is not, therefore, my intent here to further reflect on either form of interconnection as they relate to discourses on security or health as this is well-trodden ground; instead, I want to interrogate how cultural producers make use of the productive and proliferating discourses around the virus (both biomedical and technological) as a metaphor and model for thinking through the transformation of the body as a site of financialized operation and for contemporary cosmopolitan practices and possibilities that necessarily place self-consciously bad risks at the center of human interconnections.1 As discussed in Chapter 1, representations of food security depend on (often false or myopic) distinctions between the global and the local, slipping easily into an anachronistic provincialism in the name of local sustainability and safety or of reproducing and perpetuating imperial patterns under the guise of adventure lifestyle travel, both working to elide the labor necessary to sustain contemporary life. The representations of viral security under examination in this chapter shift their attention to the specific dependencies, and resulting intimacies, between local bodies and global networks of transmission and exchange. Put differently, one might grow their own food; one cannot create their own individual internet or economy. To network computers, and bodies, is to necessarily put them in danger of infection. The potential for myriad contaminations, thus, is an inescapable part of communities, of whatever size or technological advancement. Yet, at the same time, viral infection carries with it the double connotations of infectious as both negative and positive. The primary set of definitions for “infectious,” found in the OED Online, speak to the spread

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of disease (“Of a disease: capable of spreading from one individual to another; occurring in epidemics; transmissible, communicable; spec. transmitted by indirect means, as by contaminated water or food, arthropod vectors, etc., rather than by close contact with an infected individual”) with attendant moral implications (“Tending or liable to infect or contaminate character, morals, etc.”). However, there is also the more neutral suggestion of the spread of sympathy (“Of an action, emotion, etc.: having the quality of spreading from one to another; easily communicable. Also (of a person): attractive, compelling”). The indirect, and thus infectious, nature of the virus has, on one hand, the potential to spread negative consequences (disease, destruction, and moral decline) but it also speaks to the imaginative and collective links brought about through the sympathetic sharing of emotions. While we might be infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus or have our computers compromised by a virus, we might also find ourselves joining in with someone’s “infectious laughter”— suggesting the implicit pleasures at stake in infection. To think about infectious cosmopolitanism, then, is also to consider the libidinal economy at play in our connections with global others. Nonetheless, as a metaphor and motif for imagining cosmopolitan connections in a financialized world, the ambiguous connotations of the virus and its indirectness, its infectiousness, point to the potential for increased precarity at the heart of cosmopolitanism: when someone crosses a border, they might be either friend or foe or, more likely, a complicated combination of the two. Indeed, as Wald notes, the healthy human carrier of disease becomes a particularly fraught figure because they might not even be aware of their status: “When carriers unwittingly caused an outbreak of a communicable disease, the nature of the violation was as uncertain as the locus of blame. They represented the question of culpability in the absence not only of intention but more fundamentally of self-knowledge” (2008: 16). Similarly, healthy carriers make “visible the contact that people did not necessarily know they had had … as well as those they may not have wished to make known” (2008: 16). The discursive role self-knowledge (or lack thereof) plays in narratives of viral security points to the particular ambiguity that surrounds viral infection. Again, if food narratives emphasize personal and local risk over global ones and, as I’ll discuss in Chapter 3, climate change narratives emphasize global risks over personal and local ones, viral narratives and their emphasis on networked connections are dependent upon the mutual imbrication of the local and the global. To think through “network culture,” Tiziana Terranova notes, “is to try to think simultaneously the singular and the multiple, the common and the unique” (2004: 1; emphasis in original). Similarly, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker argue that “networks exist in a kind of global universalism, but one coextensive with a permanent state of internal inconsistency and exceptionalism” (2007: 22), reminding us that “to have a network, one needs a multiplicity of ‘nodes.’ Yet the mere existence of this multiplicity in no way implies an inherently democratic, ecumenical, or egalitarian order. Quite the

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opposite” (2007: 13). This tension between zones of contact and impact that emphasizes oscillating and ever-present multiplicity marks a different way of representing and constructing global connections. Galloway and Thacker suggest that “inside the dense web of distributed networks, it would appear that everything is everywhere—the consequence of a worldview that leaves little room between the poles of the global and the local” (2007: 4; emphasis in original). Galloway and Thacker’s parallel with cosmopolitan rhetoric is noteworthy, suggesting the ways that network culture offers another frame for considering these connections. Yet where they imply a skepticism about cosmopolitan thinking and possibilities, the virus, which necessarily interrupts and disrupts a network provides, for many writers and cultural producers, a key site from which to both critique and reimagine cosmopolitanism in the contemporary moment. The ambiguity of the virus, then, is at the heart of the texts under examination in this chapter: the virus as representation of the libidinal economy of global connection, the virus as threat to preexisting modes of protection and safety, and the virus as a model of creative rejection of constant accumulation as the only model of success. What underpins the understandings of viruses in all of these texts, however, is the mutability and transformation of its form and outcome. In these texts—Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2005), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City (2018), and the film adaptation of World War Z (2013)—viruses mutate, transforming and transformed by the sites where they “touch down.” As viruses move between bodies, computers, and across time, they neither remain the same, nor do they operate neutrally. While viruses are hardly sentient, agential vectors in these texts, these authors, in using the virus as a metaphor for, among other things, cosmopolitan connections and practices, suggest that they hover on a knife’s edge, with both positive and negative potential that is contextual and ever-changing. The viral cosmopolitanism found in these texts also rejects the teleological vision embedded in liberal models and the separateness that tends to operate in the distinction between subaltern and elite cosmopolitanism found in postcolonial models. By understanding cosmopolitanism as akin to a viral infection, these authors open up ways of formulating new cosmopolitan practices and, significantly, of drawing to the surface the global connections and practices that are already in place—sometimes below the threshold of visibility. As this book demonstrates in a variety of different contexts, selfconscious risks prove to be an effective defamiliarizing agent in terms of cosmopolitan goals, financialized life, and the quotidian experience of both. The viral cosmopolitanisms under examination in this chapter go further, beyond revelation, to place precarity and danger at the heart of the cosmopolitan subject themself, not just as its catalyst or consequence. These novels remind their readers of the risk necessary in “infecting” oneself with cosmopolitanism—a risk that, like all infectious diseases, has polymorphous effects.

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Embodied Risk, Space, and Thinking of Others Thinking through the cultural operation of immunity and inoculation, Eula Biss observes that “those of us who eschew the herd mentality tend to prefer a frontier mentality in which we imagine our bodies as isolated homesteads that we tend either well or badly. The health of the homestead next to ours does not affect us, this thinking suggests, so long as ours is well tended” (2014: 21). While the appeal of “frontier mentalit[ies]” circulates most vividly—yet also subliminally—in settler-invaded colonies such as those in North America, Biss gestures to the spatiality at play in discourses surrounding concerns about viral threats that circulate far more broadly; North American narratives of the frontier offer only one culturally prominent paradigm for articulating these concerns. Central, moreover, to this spatiality is one’s awareness, or lack thereof, of a relational spatiality: herd migration patterns necessarily imply others; the frontier implies isolation, with others only appearing as incursions on one’s autonomy. Similarly, in her discussion of the outbreak narrative, Priscilla Wald notes that part of the threat of the viral outbreak is, on one hand, the intimacies it makes visible that one is unaware of or seeks to obscure and, on the other hand, the possibility that one is unaware that they might, in fact, be a vector of infection themselves. If the risks posed by both food and climate change are principally external to bodies (though, obviously, with internalizing possibilities), the risk of the virus blurs, even eliminates, the distinction between external and internal: it both emerges from elsewhere and works from the inside out. Viral infections make especially clear that our bodies themselves do not exist in transcendent relation to the rest of social life, but are fundamentally and foundationally immanent to it. Yet, because bodies seem to be uniquely individual, the language of personal responsibility is often understood to be particularly appropriate in this scenario. Indeed, the biopolitical turn, accelerated under contemporary neoliberalism, depends upon this notion of the body as a discrete unit in its deployment of liberal ideologies.2 Simultaneously, consumer capitalism encourages the subject to understand the pursuit of personalized pleasures as the route to self-actualization and liberal modes of self-discovery. Viral risks and their consequences, therefore, occupy a hyper-individualized discursive position in comparison to the other risks under examination in this book. Yet, as the books under examination in this section—Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake—illustrate, the truly viral producer of precarity in each case is the values and infrastructure of late capitalism (which are infectious but nearly invisible as such) but other viruses (AIDS, Crake’s plague), because of their morbidity, are made to bear the brunt of responsibility, acting as scapegoats and alibis. In other words, these novels demonstrate the usefulness of the rhetorics of viral risks in both excluding populations and naturalizing the operation of late capitalism. The Line of Beauty and Oryx and Crake complicate the operation of personal risk and its repercussions by demonstrating the way the respective

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protagonists, Nick and Jimmy, are most dangerous to the social order when they most seem to accurately accept its strictures. Like the uncertainty mimic men introduce into colonial power relations (where they are understood to both reaffirm and mock or threaten the colonizers), both Nick and Jimmy are understood as ambiguous threats to the social order in their access to the signifiers of social power, highlighting the equivocal potential of viral contamination. They represent both the origin and destination of the virus; they are threat and they are consequence, suggesting an intrinsic hesitation at play in these novels about the operation of viral risks. Each text is at pains to highlight the imbrication of neoliberal forms of capital and the biomedical; moreover, libidinal economies are suggested as both transgressive interruptions of these overlapping and repressive social modes and a means of pacifying marginalized subjects. The risks Nick and Jimmy take—and derive pleasure from—are markers of their relative ability to evade personal responsibility and their social irrelevance (which can turn, quickly, into a perceived malevolence). They highlight, therefore, the oppositional potential that inheres in the notion of infection as negative; however, in these texts, this potential is used to reinscribe liberal values around personal responsibility and autonomy and, ultimately, the hierarchies that the virus seems to momentarily breach. The consequences are simultaneously mundane and apocalyptical, and, ultimately, at the expense of the possibility of radical coalition-building. In the subsequent section of this chapter, I’ll consider two texts that see similarly mundane and apocalyptical results of viral infection, but in ways that begin to conceive of creative and collective possibilities (if not yet fully realized). The Line of Beauty, with its protagonist’s, Nick Guest’s, attempts to negotiate his place as, on one hand, resident in the home of the Thatcherist Feddens and, on the other hand, his identity as a gay man in the early days of the AIDs crisis, sets up this link between the biomedical and the financial, and the subsequent ambiguity around the discursive operation of both AIDS and finance.3 This linkage is shown most explicitly during a lunchtime conversation Wani and Nick have with the two American financiers behind the film adaptation of Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton, for which Nick has written the screenplay. Taking place immediately after “Black Monday,” the 1987 stock market crash, the conversation demonstrates the active slippage Wani encourages between his health and the economic health of the market: “I can’t drink any more,” said Wani, “but when I hear that [the Black Monday themed drink that Treat, one of the Americans orders], I don’t mind.” There was a brief pause. Treat ran his finger along his fringe, and Brad sighed and said, “Yeah … I wanted to ask. …” They both of them, nicely enough, seemed relieved the subject had been brought up. Wani tucked in his chin. “Oh, a disaster,” he said, frowning from one to the other. “Quite unbelievable. One of my bloody companies lost two-thirds of its value between lunchtime and teatime.” “Oh … oh, right,” said Brad, and gave an awkward laugh. “Yeah,

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we had it real bad too.” “Fifty billion wiped off the London stock exchange in one day.” Treat looked at him levelly, to show he’d registered but wouldn’t challenge this evasion … “Oh fuck that,” said Wani. “Anyway, it bounces back. It has already. It always recovers. It always recovers.” … And after that it was impossible to approach him on the subject of his fatal illness. (2005: 377)

Wani’s AIDS-stricken body here is actively envisioned as a stand-in for the global economy; the risky sexual encounters he and Nick have participated in are paralleled with the risks of increased financialization and the rise of an investment economy.4 Wani implicitly seems to suggest throughout with his seemingly placid acceptance of his HIV status (paralleled by the end of the novel where Nick similarly placidly faces the positive test result he believes himself about to receive) “the cost of doing business.” Here, discussing the stock market allows for the evasion of Wani’s visible ill-health but, at the same time, there is the suggestion that this isn’t strictly or only an act of evasion. Wani’s cavalier attitude toward his own health stems, at least in part, from his similarly cavalier attitude toward a shifting stock market.5 Of course, both Wani and, to some degree, Nick, are able to face their diagnoses in the knowledge of relative social and financial comfort: the Ouradis’ wealth allows them to provide high levels of care and to cushion the social import of his status. The market can absorb these fluctuations (“it bounces back … it always recovers”) with no overall damage to the system; individual bodies, like individual portfolios, bear the cost but they also have the pleasures that accompany the initial risk to cushion it, or so Wani seems to suggest. Nick’s status—financial, social, viral—is more broadly precarious and, thus, complicated in different ways. His ability to act as a mimic of upper-class gentility allows him forms of circulation that would not be available to him otherwise— both through his investment income and his potential ability to evade the consequences of the risky sex he enjoys. Indeed, it is (a drunk and high) Nick who is able to ask the prime minister (an unnamed Thatcher)6 to dance when the Feddens host her, leading him to feel “a deeper liveliness, a sense he could caper all over the floor with the PM breathless in his grip” (2005: 336)—a feat for which Gerald Fedden, the patriarch of the family who has taken Nick into their home, and other Conservative Party luminaries can’t generate the audacity. The juxtaposition of Nick dancing with Thatcher and the immediately subsequent scene of his drug-fueled threesome with Wani and the Portuguese waiter reveals the novel’s insistent reminder that Nick’s ability to evade consequence is dependent on his concurrent ability to “infiltrate” the conservative world of the Feddens. As Nick notes of the cocaine and champagne-induced confidence that leads him to ask Thatcher to dance, “the sense of risk nonsensically heighten[s]‌ the sense of security”; yet, immediately following this statement, he says that this simultaneous sense of risk and security gave him “the new conviction he could do what he wanted with Tristão [the Portuguese waiter]” (2005: 332). This feeling seems to parallel the very same sense of entitlement and risk

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that underpins Gerald’s own affair with his assistant, Penny. The puritanical moralism of Thatcher and the Conservatives would suggest that AIDS is the cost of queer promiscuity and immorality—illustrated by a business contact of Gerald’s, Maurice Tipper’s cruel and callous response to the death from AIDS of a college friend of Rachel’s, Gerald’s wife (2005: 296). But Hollinghurst carefully complicates, even deconstructs, this punitive model by highlighting the parallels between Nick’s actions and Gerald’s, and reminding readers of the way Nick is able to forget his own precarity beyond its pleasures because of his ability to mimic the various sites of social power—a mimicry not fully available, for instance, to Leo, Nick’s Black lover who contracts AIDS after their relationship. Even more so than Wani, Nick transforms precarity into a site of libidinal investment that off-loads responsibility onto people more vulnerable than him, mimicking the patterns of global capital rather than the threat to the status quo that Gerald and his friends—and even Nick himself—imagine him to be. As Dion Kagan notes in his discussion of the novel, “life conditions of unacknowledged exploitation, risk and precarity are upheld by a network of material, affective and labour arrangements that reproduce themselves by creating perverse pleasures” (2014: 798). Nick’s ambivalence about his ability to balance his mimicry of the Feddens’ privilege and his sexual desires means that, at the start of the novel, he is desperate, on one hand, to obscure his homosexuality from the Thatcherist Feddens and, on the other hand, to pursue sexual experiences with men. But this ambivalence also ensures that he can neither fully acknowledge, or even recognize, the risks he takes in being subsumed by the Feddens nor acknowledge the pleasure derived from flouting their expectations. In the midst of halfheartedly writing a dissertation on Henry James, Nick describes this project to Rachel’s brother as focused on style, with his particular interest in the way “style … hides things and reveals things at the same time” (Hollinghurst 2005: 50). Later, at an extravagant birthday celebration for Toby Fedden, idealized object of Nick’s desire, Nick finds himself in a large group of his and Toby’s mostly male college friends, all high and drunk; Nick observes that he “felt the charm as well as the threat of the group” (2005: 77). Readers are repeatedly reminded throughout the introductory chapters of the novel both by the narrator and by Nick (who is not always conscious of the implications of his observations) of the precarity, as well as the pleasure, that surround his imbrication with the Feddens and their social circle. Their lives appear to Nick as the epitome of the aesthetic style that he fetishizes but, as the novel makes clear, the family and all it stands in for produces risks that emerge both from Nick’s choices and, more substantially, from his liminal social and familial position. He understands the risks that he takes—the potentially dangerous sex and drug use that characterize, particularly, his secret relationship with Wani—as being choices he makes, which emerge from his identity as a gay man. These choices are not without consequence in the novel, though the secrecy and risks of these choices, as well as the generalized sense of precarity that encourages these

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individual behaviors, can’t be divorced from the heteronormativity of British society, but what is clearly the more significant risk for him is his obliviousness about the poison at the heart of Thatcherist ideals: he believes that, at some level, his worship and imitation of the Feddens will protect him. Nick’s orientalizing and fetishizing fixation on both Leo and Wani understands and constructs their bodies as pleasurable vectors of risk and, ultimately, disease as they both develop AIDS, yet Nick himself is also understood by the Feddens as a pathogen that had remained dormant, until late in the novel when his affair with Wani is revealed alongside Gerald’s own extramarital affairs and, perhaps more damningly, financial mismanagement. Barry Groom, Gerald’s noxious fellow Tory MP, exhorts Gerald to disavow Nick as quickly as possible, framing Nick’s queerness as an infection waiting to strike: “They hate us, you know, they can’t breed themselves, they’re parasites on generous fools who can. Crawling to you, crawling to the fucking Ouradis. I’m not remotely surprised he led your poor lovely daughter astray like this, exploited her, there’s no other word for it. A typical homo trick, of course” (2005: 416–17). In seeking to defend himself from Gerald’s accusations of the latent threat he posed, Nick claims that “I’m just me, Gerald! I’m not some alien invader” (2005: 419). The Ouradis’ wealth protects them from Gerald’s and Barry Groom’s outright rejection and Leo is invisible to the structures of power; it is Nick’s ability to blend into the family that makes his threat most seemingly potent. Gerald expands on Barry’s homophobia to highlight the class threat at play here: I mean, didn’t it strike you as rather odd, a bit queer, attaching yourself to a family like this? … You can’t have a real family, so you attach yourself to someone else’s. And I suppose after a while you just couldn’t bear it, you must have been very envious I think of everything we have, and coming from your background too perhaps … and you’ve wreaked some pretty awful revenge on us as a result. And actually, you know … all we asked for was loyalty. (2005: 420)

Nick’s queerness is parasitical—but so are his lower-middle-class origins, again blurring the line between viral and economic threat in their operation in the novel. Moreover, it is the economic and social effects that Gerald is worried about, not the biomedical. Both Gerald and Barry reconfigure the question of precarity from the bodies that are actually being used—as Nick replies to Gerald, “You could just as well say that the family attached itself to me” (2005: 420)—to sustain an upper middle-class self-representation as free from the hierarchies and values of the past and thus under threat in a variety of ways to place themselves as the true subjects at risk.7 We can see an echo here, for instance, of post-9/11 Islamophobic discourses where Euro-American nation-states are the innocent hosts under attack from barbaric guests who abuse their hospitality.8 Nick’s scapegoating as the cause of Gerald’s downfall

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acts to off-load consequences onto a body that already operates under a degree of precarity because of his queerness and his lower-middle-class origins and simultaneously works to preserve Gerald’s and the Feddens’ invulnerability. The viral threat of AIDS—represented by Leo and Wani, principally—is thus shown to operate in the mind of the Thatcherist establishment as equivalent to the threats of queer people and social mobility that operates outside of an entrepreneurial mode (after all, Nick hasn’t, in Gerald’s mind and others’, “earned” his right to the class privilege he enjoys as a member of the Fedden household). The threat of the virus, thus, disrupts the justificatory narratives central to both neoliberalism and heteronormativity. Yet Gerald’s espousal of Thatcherist values here is actually an old-fashioned model of fortress risk management, reliant on the preservation of a discourse that posits dangers as always outside—especially of the home; the threat is something that comes from outside to endanger the inside. As Nick learns with the Feddens, locks, and the buildings they protect, can be changed, keys can be taken back, but real safety from precarity comes, paradoxically, through risky investments and the accumulation of liquid capital.9 In addition to Wani’s proposed gift of a building to Nick in his will, which would allow him to “live on the rent for the rest of [his] life” (2005: 383), transforming him into a rentier, it is the five thousand pounds that Wani gifts him early on in their relationship that truly gives Nick the ability to imagine life beyond both the Feddens and Wani himself.10 Indeed, Nick reminds Wani of this when the question of the building first comes up, saying that “your little start-up present [the five thousand pounds] has grown and grown, you know” (2005: 382).11 In the closing pages of the novel, when he runs into Penny, Gerald’s mistress, as he removes his belongings from the Feddens’ home, he assures her that “I’ve done all right, actually, in the past year or so. … With a little help from my friends” (2005: 434). His characterization of his investments as a modest expression of kinship parallels the fantasy of the rentier, as Walter Benn Michaels describes it: “the fantasy of someone who experiences himself as neither investing his capital [because it is Wani’s capital, technically] nor selling his labor and who can thus imagine the world itself transformed into the utopian image of his experience” (2015: 102).The description he shares with Penny is utopian in that it transforms his income into, simply, the byproduct of his libidinal investment in his various relationships. The consequences—investment income, AIDS— are, ultimately, beside the point or so Nick wants to believe (or represent himself to others as believing). Yet at the same time, his investment strategy, as managed by a school friend of his, is designed to “go for maximum profits [to] see how far [he] can go” (Hollinghurst 2005: 180). This suggests that “doing all right” wasn’t, in fact, desirable or a sufficient form of protection from his uncertain social position. Nick’s safety from social and economic precarity is one where more personal financial risk produces more security, but it is a security predicated on mimicking the behaviors of Gerald and his cronies. If Gerald’s friends believe Nick’s threat to be his sexuality, then it is, perhaps, more

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truly due to his ability to practice the same sorts of investment principles as they do. By linking so consistently the threat posed by AIDS and the practices and ideologies of financialization, Hollinghurst highlights the complicated discursive algebra characteristic of life under late capitalism that works to complicate not only the recognition of threats but also the directionality of responsibility. Oryx and Crake and its narration of the lead up to and aftermath of a catastrophic (in this case, human-made) and genocidal virus is similarly invested in exploring viral risk’s infrastructural reliance on the pathways provided by the global circulation of goods, people, and capital and the subsequent consequences for life under capital. Indeed, Atwood suggests the impossibility of imagining interpersonal connections that are explicitly unmediated, in some fashion, by the operation of capital: Crake and Jimmy, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, respectively, are friends after meeting in the same corporate compound as children; they first “meet” Oryx on a pornographic website; Oryx leaves her rural hometown and, later, her unnamed South Asian nation of origin, after she is sold into various human trafficking rings. There is no zone that even pretends to be outside capital in the world of Oryx and Crake. Unsurprisingly, then, the idea of risk as, on one hand, emerging out of personal choices and preferences alone and, on the other hand, producing only personal consequences, positive or negative, is shown to be a naïve belief, even a form of magical thinking. Risky choices, like, all choices in this novel cannot exist outside of the connections and relationships that capital puts into place. The web of relationships that emerge between these three characters are all ones where Crake, effectively, demands that Oryx and Jimmy both pay the price of his speculation—prices that range from the emotional to the embodied: culminating in Oryx’s death in the compound from the plague that Crake has released on the world, and Jimmy’s responsibility, after the plague, to shepherd the Crakers, the genetically modified humans created by Crake that are designed to be the post-plague future of humanity. Crake can only conceptualize his relationships with others as sites from which to manage the fallout of his speculative futurism, to say nothing of the web of relationships he, like all global inhabitants, necessarily has with global others by virtue of cohabitation of a shared planet. The libidinal economy at play here, at least in terms of Crake, is one that has entirely transformed into one of use-value and cost-benefit analysis. Beyond providing the framework for interpersonal interactions and the subsequent off-loading of the consequences of risk onto those one knows personally, Oryx and Crake uses transnational webs of commodity circulation to provide a pathway for the spread of infection beyond those one knows or interacts with directly. Indeed, the plague is spread through “BlyssPlus” pills, actively advertised as both a prophylactic against sexually transmitted diseases and providing “an unlimited supply of libido” (Atwood 2003: 294). The pills, however, are, secretly, sterilizing those who take them and, ultimately, lead to the spread of the virus that kills the majority of the planet’s human inhabitants

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(2003: 346). The virus’s circulation, then, depends on the operation of global trade pathways and the lure of advertisements, which manipulate the consumer into imagining that they are being responsible—protecting themselves from sexual risk. The plague circulates throughout the world in the Viagra-like, BlyssPluss pills into which Crake has bioengineered it—pills that Oryx travels the world to offer samples of: “She was an expert businesswoman. … He’d given her a slice of the BlyssPluss trials: she had useful contacts in the pleeblands. … For that reason she had to make a lot of trips, here and there around the world” (2003: 313). As the plague erupts, globally, Oryx realizes that they map onto the sites she visits: “Then the next one hit, and the next, the next, the next, rapid-fire. Taiwan, Bangkok, Saudi Arabia, Bombay, Paris, Berlin. The pleeblands west of Chicago. The maps on the monitor screens lit up, spackled with red as if someone had flicked a loaded paintbrush at them” (2003: 324). As global catastrophe follows Crake’s plague and “the end of a species was taking place before [Jimmy’s] very eyes” (2003: 344), the novel suggests the fantasy behind rhetorics of protection and risk avoidance. There is no outside here; instead, there are only places where risk might be more pleasantly managed for a time—indeed, even Crake’s inner sanctum eventually becomes uninhabitable. Like Oryx’s role in Asian sex tourism as a young child, the novel subtly—yet constantly—reminds its readers of the global reach of most, if not all, of our actions.12 Where A Line of Beauty is principally focused on risks whose results can be traced along pathways of individual and embodied actions, Oryx and Crake suggests that the vectors of behavior are too diffuse to be traced so conventionally. In Atwood’s novel (and the larger trilogy that it belongs to) the forms of risk management in place to sustain class privilege are profoundly spatial and material, reflecting long-standing historical patterns of similar spatial organization. What is striking about the operation of space in these novels, particularly Oryx and Crake, is the emphasis on the fixity of these spatialities and a unidirectional permeability. Again, the trilogy works to emphasize and extend already existing trends and realities. As the novels illustrate in a variety of ways, this illusion of separation and distance allows for risky decision-making to appear to both belong elsewhere and to be disconnected from the responsibilities of those who figure themselves as the center. Space and its management (both materially and rhetorically) prove central to how risk is understood and handled. If risk is typically preoccupied with futurity (for something to be a risk, it requires a contemplation of future potential effects), then Atwood demonstrates the way this futurity is tightly imbricated with distance. Risk and its effects, in other words, are not just calculated in reference to another time, but another place. Security in the face of potential catastrophes in Oryx and Crake and the other novels is dependent upon isolating oneself behind defendable walls. This occurs both before the plague (protection against the angry pleebs) and after (protection against the violent predations of genetically manipulated animals and the hyper-violent criminals

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created by pre- and post-plague lawlessness). The full-body condoms used in the pleebland brothels suggest that this model of risk prevention as effectively armored protection extends beyond literal walls. Yet, as Wendy Brown notes, “it is the weakening of state sovereignty, and more precisely, the detachment of sovereignty from the nation-state, that is generating much of the frenzy of nation-state wall building today. Rather than resurgent expressions of nation-state sovereignty, the new walls are icons of its erosion” (2010: 24). The new walls, Brown posits, “often function theatrically, projecting power and efficaciousness that they do not and cannot actually exercise and that they also performatively contradict” (2010: 25). If the walls Brown discusses are, she argues, the last, desperate outposts of nation-state-driven sovereignty, then Atwood suggests the way the logic of fortress sovereignty continues in other venues and discourses. Sovereign power, then, has not only dissipated into governmentality and biopower but, the world of the MaddAddam trilogy suggests, has off-loaded the “power to kill” into corporate hands. This is a world where Halliburton and Blackwater control not just spaces far away from their Euro-North American headquarters and shareholders, but the spaces they physically inhabit themselves.13 The question Atwood appears to follow through to its conclusion here is, what if the “risk management” currently undertaken by private security firms in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other “dangerous” places began to operate in North America? What if the risks private security firms are supposed to protect North Americans from are geographically proximate rather than distant? What, in other words, if the experience of living in North American suburbs echo, even more closely than they already do, the experience of living in Baghdad’s “green zones”?14 The speculative future Atwood envisions is one where all middle-class North Americans live with the same risk precautions as American business interests in war zones. Naomi Klein argues that “the Green Zone emerges everywhere that the disaster capitalism complex descends, with the same stark partitions between the included and excluded, the protected and the damned” (2007: 523). Yet where Klein illustrates the emergence of green and red zones as emerging out of quite literal crisis, Atwood imagines a world similarly characterized by “disaster apartheid” (Klein 2007: 530) that doesn’t require the actual disaster part, just the anticipation and fear of it. Precarity, in other words. Yet while the intensely securitized experience of risk management operational in global “green zones” is by no means at ideological odds with the logic of gated and surveilled communities of contemporary suburban life, Atwood imagines a world where the privatized military-industrial complex, corporate economic life, and domestic space overlap far more aggressively and visibly. Emphatic awareness of precarity is inescapable at home, work, and the state at large (to the extent that such a polity even exists in the world of MaddAddam), the intensity of which her readers might tend to understand as both exceptional and distant. Totally inescapable precarity is the cost of life in war and/or disaster zones, not in contemporary North American cities.15 In the North America of the novel,

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then, middle-class white subjects, like the majority of Atwood’s readers, must “dislocate” their assumed right to lives of peaceful security. If suburban lives are predicated on the elimination of fears and anxieties through gated entrances, home security systems, and policing home owners’ associations, it is with the assumption that there is a surface tranquility and serenity. Indeed, these spaces depend on the creation of Engin Isin’s “neurotic citizen.”16 The “compounds” of Oryx and Crake (a word far more suggestive of militarization than “suburb”) refuse the sublimation at work in contemporary suburban life—or, at least, hint at its impossibility and instability. Moreover, as the trilogy continues past Oryx and Crake, focusing on characters who grew up and currently reside outside of the compounds in the “pleeblands,” creating sympathetic connections with the lawless outsiders of God’s Gardeners and MaddAddam, both understood by compound security as something akin to terrorist organizations, the teleological logic of suburban responsibilization and security begins to be complicated as Ren’s, Toby’s, and Zeb’s lives (the point-of-view characters in the subsequent books in the MaddAddam trilogy) become more dangerous by virtue of the zoned sense of zero-sum security. Yet it is their previous exposure to expectation of precarity that, arguably, ensures their survival at the end of the trilogy, suggesting a quasi-Darwinist view of precarity as a way of encouraging adaptation and survival. The novel insists on an awareness of the active and uneven territorializing attached to seemingly ephemeral values like “security” and “insecurity,” and the simultaneous reification this process produces. Precarity is a spatial concern here, not just a personal choice, juxtaposing personal security and social risk and their material articulation. Nonetheless, questions of responsibility remain palliative in the MaddAddam trilogy—responsive, but never preventative—suggesting the limits of a model of cosmopolitanism that does or will not imagine its own potential for reworking the status quo. Throughout the “before” chronology of Oryx and Crake, Jimmy is characterized by a consistent inability to see the connections between his own life and the larger systems that he inhabits. Locked in his own sense of personal loss and abandonment, he is contrasted with a variety of other characters, most notably Oryx, Crake, and his mother, who all, to varying degrees, highlight his own solipsism. Jimmy’s inability to see past his own experience is perhaps most visible in his romantic entanglements where he is shown to be most compelled by women whose pasts are typified by violence and trauma in varying ways. While Oryx is the most prominent example of this in the novel, Jimmy’s post-college girlfriend, Amanda (who reappears in The Year of the Flood as a childhood friend of one of the protagonists, Ren) occupies a similar role for Jimmy. Readers are informed that her name, Amanda Payne, was “an invention, like much about her. … She’d had to reinvent herself [because] the original Barb [had] been so bulldozed by her abusive, white-trash, sugar-overdosed family that she’d been nothing but a yard-sale reject, like a wind chime made of bent forks or a three-legged chair” (2003: 241). But it is this very past that “had been

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her appeal to Jimmy, for whom ‘yard sale’ was in itself an exotic concept: he’d wanted to mend her, do the repairs, freshen up the paint. Make her like new” (2003: 242). The palliative impulse that echoes through Atwood’s trilogy is at its most visibly and selfishly manipulative here: Jimmy’s savior complex is not here about helping Amanda come to terms with past trauma in a productive way, but is about his desire, on one hand, for a project and, on the other hand, to appear magnanimous in the face of Crake’s megalomania. Amanda, a performance artist, is shown, however briefly she appears in the novel, to be aware of the exploitative operation of the compound system—something that Jimmy cannot see. When Jimmy gets his first job out of college, working for the AnooYoo corporation, Amanda cautions him, telling him about “a friend who’d signed up for an AnooYoo five-month plan, touted as being able to cure depression, wrinkles, and insomnia all at the same time, and who’d pushed herself over the edge—actually, over the windowsill of her ten-story-up apartment—on some kind of South American tree bark” (2003: 247). Jimmy can merely joke in response to this anecdote that his only options are taking this job or “join[ing] the ranks of the permanently unemployed” (2003: 247). That he cannot see the consequences, often violent, of corporate experimentation and commodification is here part of his refusal to understand himself as, in any way, part of this system and, as a result, responsible for its effects. In fact, once he starts working for AnooYoo, writing advertising copy, he begins to invent words “but he never once got caught out. His proprietors liked these kinds of words in the small print on packages because they sounded scientific and had a convincing effect” (2003: 248–9). His response is to become depressed by the “semi-literacy” (2003: 249) of his employers, failing to allow space for his own active role in duping consumers—something which, as Amanda’s cautionary anecdote highlights, can produce monstrous outcomes. His work with AnooYoo is demonstrably more than just simply benefitting from the various middle-class privileges he has enjoyed previously; he is now an active component in the perpetuation of the compound system—yet he remains insistent on his own emasculated irrelevancy. His sexual encounters while he works at AnooYoo are all with married women, only further confirming his sense of himself as superfluous to the normative structures of capitalist patriarchy. He absolves himself of responsibility because he is unsuccessful by the standards of the compounds, paling in particular comparison to Crake’s fast rise to power. Jimmy, like Nick and so many others, understands social power and responsibility as a zero-sum game: one either has all the power, or one has none of it. Like Nick in The Line of Beauty, who understands himself as more closely aligned with Leo than the Feddens, this concerted misrecognition of the complicated web of social responsibility and one’s place within it allows both Nick and Jimmy to, at least initially, refuse to act. Both these novels, therefore, demonstrate, on one hand, the comforting appeal of narratives of social irrelevancy and, on the other hand, the way these narratives act principally as alibis for political quietism.

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However, where The Line of Beauty keeps its narrative focus on characters who seek to evade their responsibility to others, even toward their own health in biopolitical terms, Atwood in Oryx and Crake introduces a parallel narrative point of view with those who bear the consequences of others’ actions (a narrative trend that continues, even expands, throughout the MaddAddam trilogy). Those who most fully bear the brunt of Crake’s plague in the trilogy are, of course, dead and, thus, unable to narrate their post-plague realities and, in the last two books of the trilogy, the focus is on characters who have no personal interactions with Crake. However, in Oryx and Crake, with its single, though chronologically bifurcated, narrator, the novel offers a more direct engagement with the burden placed on others by Crake to manage the results of his genocidal plague. Oryx and Crake, thus, expands more explicitly the conversation around risk and responsibility that The Line of Beauty introduces by highlighting the multiple layers at which responsibility is evaded. In other words, while it can be easy to see the way that anonymous global others are made precarious as the result of personal choices, setting up an opposition between the global and the personal, Jimmy operates as an intermediate step. Crake chooses Jimmy to deal with the fallout of his plague—principally ensuring the survival of the Crakers—meaning that, while Crake is insensitive to the lives of the global others whose deaths he is responsible for, he is also deliberate in ensuring that Jimmy must take personal responsibility for Crake’s actions. This parallels the dynamic in The Line of Beauty where Catherine, the Feddens’ daughter and Nick’s friend, in her desire to make Gerald pay for his actions, throws Nick under the bus. Enforcing a recognition of mutual precarity, then, isn’t just about asking others to pay for choices made far distant from themselves—suggesting distance, metaphorically or otherwise—but about the way precarity is produced in closer relationships than sometimes recognized. And while it is easy, perhaps, to dismiss Crake’s actions as those of a sociopath, Catherine’s actions are not evidently or fully intentional. Which is to say, while readers may not easily see themselves in Crake—Jimmy is more clearly set up in this novel as the stand-in for the reader—Catherine’s actions are harder to dissociate from. Catherine might not be the principal site of reader sympathy in The Line of Beauty, but Hollinghurst is at pains throughout to shade both her and the rest of the Feddens as complicated but potentially sympathetic characters. In these particular scenarios, both Jimmy and Nick must shift to consider how to manage risks that are not simply their own but, at the same time, not principally directed at them either: they are affected but, especially in Jimmy’s case, not as profoundly as others. Yet it is this very in-between space occupied by Jimmy and Nick that most readily resembles the location of the bulk of both novels’ readers: readers, like Jimmy and Nick, are called to account for behavior that they may not be personally responsible for, in the terms that straightforwardly linear notions of cause and effect would suggest, but for which they must take on the consequences. By centering the experience of risk in both of these novels around the transmission of viruses, Hollinghurst and Atwood

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drastically compress the spatial separation that risk under late capitalism relies so heavily upon. Yet, in both cases, viruses principally act to highlight the connections both between subject and economy and between self and other, but this is generally reactive: they realize these links after the fact. In the next section, I turn to texts that make use of viruses intentionally and creatively as a vehicle for building community, rather than seeing the limits of it.

Viral Risk as Creative Possibility In their “Zombie Manifesto,” Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry observe that the zombie, “through its simultaneous occupation of a body that is both living and dead, creates a dilemma for power relations and risks destroying social dynamics that have remained—although widely questioned, critiqued, and debated—largely unchallenged in the current economic superstructure” (2008: 90). They claim, nonetheless, that, because “the zombie is anticatharis,” a “ ‘zombie manifesto’ is one that cannot call for positive change, it calls only for the destruction of the reigning model” (2008: 91). Tim Lanzendörfer makes a similar point in his discussion of Max Brooks’s World War Z (the film version of which I will discuss below) when he claims that the novel’s “hesitant progressivism points to the limits of its—and the liberal—utopian imagination” (2014: 122). Jeff May also suggests that the living characters in zombie films typically “attempt to retain pre-zombie spatial organizations” (2010: 288). As these critics all suggest in several ways, along with most critics of this genre, zombie texts (in a variety of forms and genres) have, since their inception in Haitian Creole folkloric narratives, provided potent critiques of violent power relations and have also “become phantasmal stand-ins” for multiple forms of supposed threats (Saunders 2012: 81). This would seem to fall in line with my discussion in the previous section of how narratives of viral risk (a broader category that could also include most zombie texts) diagnose the cosmopolitan connections that striate contemporary life. However, in this section, I want to think through Lauro’s and Embry’s “future possibility of the zombii” but not as “the only imaginable specter that could really be posthuman” (2008: 88; emphasis in original); instead, this section (which continues to broaden the viral infection scope beyond zombies) considers the idea of purposeful selfinfection, self-zombification, to follow Lauro and Embry, as a site of both cosmopolitan critique and new cosmopolitan possibilities. In the previous section, the texts under examination queried the limits of preexisting methods of risk management and containment when viral risks (metaphorically or literally) suffuse contemporary life. Implicit in both Oryx and Crake and The Line of Beauty is the normative centrality of safety and risk prevention. The texts under examination in this section, by contrast, pose that the only way to imagine a safer, and more emancipatory, global society is by purposefully infecting oneself. The film version of World War Z and

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Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City both suggest that escaping infection is no longer possible; instead, one must pursue forms of infection and transmission that disrupt the global status quo. Both texts continue to make a distinction between “good” and “bad” viruses, suggesting an ongoing, though varied, investment in the forms of liberal utopias that Lanzendörfer highlights. I’m hesitant to accept Kyle Bishop’s optimism about the film as providing “an optimistic future and reaffirmed sense of shared human experience and triumph” (2015: 55) as, alongside Lena Jayyusi (2018), I find it impossible to dismiss the film’s neocolonial imagination. However, the very tension between complicity with and rejection of homogenizing global imaginaries that these texts highlight is exactly what makes them so useful as models for thinking through contemporary cosmopolitan possibilities. The ease with which cosmopolitanism has been made complicit, historically and contemporarily, with a string of reactionary and conservative ideologies is something we must grapple with if we want to continue to understand cosmopolitanism as a set of practices worth pursuing, as this book argues that we do. This means, then, that we cannot proceed to imagine contemporary cosmopolitanisms without considering the knife’s edge on which they necessarily exist. Central to the anxiety diagnosed by Oryx and Crake, The Line of Beauty, and, following Wald, contagion narratives more generally, is the unexpected proximity that viral infection reveals: Crake’s virus brings global subjects into a kind of proximate unity; Nick’s ability to “pass” as part of the Fedden family is ultimately what makes him seem like a threat to them. What these narratives reveal then, in part, are the fantasies of distance that persist in a world that continues to trumpet the erasure of geographical distance: subjects—especially upper middle-class Westerners—believe themselves to be separate from the rest of the world and, thus, the consequences of their actions are revealed to be much less distant than they had hoped. By contrast, World War Z and Blackfish City reveal the persistent gulfs that exist even in the face of proximity. Yet, whether through Gerry Lane’s global search to find the cure for the zombie virus in World War Z or through Ora’s understanding of the breaks as radical possibility, both these texts suggest the need to seek out more proximity—not less. Viruses, then, also, paradoxically, reveal distance at the same time as they reveal proximity. What these texts both consider is what, on one hand, one does with this newly revealed distance and, on the other hand, what kinds of proximity can be cultivated. The ambiguous potential of closeness brings forms of critique and imaginative potential to the surface. One of the ways World War Z and Blackfish City illustrate this tension between proximity and distance is through their deliberately cosmopolitan scope—what Berthold Schoene terms the “tour du monde” of the cosmopolitan novel where “nothing less … than the world as a whole will do as the imaginative reference point, catchment area and addressee” (2009: 13). Indeed, it is this very form of cosmopolitan content that leads Bishop to claim that World War Z represents the “current zenith of the American zombie Gothic film’s transition

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from a localised siege narrative to an international kind of ‘road trip’ movie” (2015: 51), in contrast, he suggests, to “the established Gothic conventions of fixed locations” (2015: 42). This is, perhaps, a limited reading of the implicit internationalism endemic to the gothic from its inception. Nonetheless, as Fred Botting notes of what he terms the “globalzombie,” the contemporary gothic—zombie or otherwise—“replicat[es] the transnational flows of capital and commodities” and, thus, “hold[s]‌up a mirror to a world rewritten, its differences of culture and history reformatted by the context of globalization, suggesting a new, dark age shadowing the new world order of homogenised consumption and corporate cultural and economic control” (2013: 189). What Botting and Bishop both note, then, is the increasingly cosmopolitan scope of the zombie novel or film; however, as Schoene and others remind us, of course, this is not particularly unique to variants of gothic novels and films. Nonetheless, the very deliberate cosmopolitan scope of both World War Z and Blackfish City distinguishes these texts from the more limited geographical focus of The Line of Beauty and Oryx and Crake. Beyond the title itself, World War Z foregrounds the global scope of its zombie virus narrative right from the beginning, with the array of global cities and news stories shown during the opening credits of the film.17 As the film unfolds, Gerry Lane, the film’s point-of-view character, travels from North America, to a boat on the Atlantic, to South Korea, Israel, Wales, and ends the film in Atlantic Canada. Blackfish City, though less linear in its narrative unfolding, has a similar tour du monde in its settings: North America, Greenland, Eastern Europe, and an artificial island created in the north Atlantic. While Blackfish City is not a gothic novel, its focus on the global trajectory of viral infection parallels what viewers are shown in World War Z. The threat of infection in both these texts, therefore, works to foreground its emphatically global impact rather than its more localized and individualized effects. Botting suggests that the “globalgothic registers—albeit anxiously and without reassurance— the shifts and ruptures that disturb all contemporary zones, be they psychic, social, geopolitical or virtual” (2013: 189–90). However, as these two texts illustrate, this particular mirror is not solely held up by the gothic but by the risky cosmopolitan text that, in both these cases, raises parallels between the circulation of viruses—both biomedical and digital—and that of capital itself. The different spatial scales of The Line of Beauty and Oryx and Crake, on one hand, and Blackfish City and World War Z, on the other hand, make particular cases for the kinds of connections and intimacies that create and respond to viral infections. The emphasis on proximity—both geospatial and emotional— and libidinal risk economies in Hollinghurst and Atwood contrasts with the distance and explicitly professionalized and financialized risk economies in World War Z and Blackfish City. I am not suggesting that one or the other of these structures of thought and feeling is preferable or more effective than the other; instead, I want to argue that linking these two together is key for imagining responses to viral forms of risky cosmopolitanism. The Line of

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Beauty and Oryx and Crake both demonstrate, in different ways, the limitations of the libidinal, particularly in terms of its expansion beyond the self; personal pleasures cannot be dissociated from social structures and arrangements yet, as these texts illustrate, can blur the distinction between self and society in such a way that can end up reinforcing the individualizing tendencies of contemporary neoliberal paradigms. In other words, despite the critique both texts levy against the empathetic limits of neoliberalism and its enticements to ignore personal responsibility toward others, both novels end up featuring characters who cannot seem to find a way to get beyond themselves. World War Z and Blackfish City, by contrast and by focusing on the professional rather than the libidinal, display the myriad ways the cosmopolitan limits and possibilities can make use of already existing infrastructures, both interpersonal and physical. The global spread of the zombie virus in World War Z speaks particularly to the infectious concerns surrounding the infrastructure of contemporary global life. In one scene, an infected individual is found in the bathroom of an airplane that is intended to transport the uninfected out of Jerusalem; as a result, the whole plane becomes infected. The explicitly cosmopolitan scope of the zombies in World War Z echoes the universalism that Galloway and Thacker connect to visions of network culture—a universalism that is decidedly destructive in this case. But, while the global spread of the zombie virus hastens a sense of the postapocalyptic, it is only when Gerry ends up at a World Health Organization (WHO) facility in Wales that he realizes that the only way to camouflage, and thus temporarily protect, the uninfected from the infected is through infecting the self with other communicable diseases (the zombies can, apparently, only see the healthy, not the ill). This self-infection reverses, quite literally, the optic of acknowledgment: if the infected are previously in the film rejected as inhuman, here is a way to make infection human again. Invisibility becomes a benefit, even the aim. If infection is the downfall of humanity, it is also its salvation. The film, therefore, differentiates between “good” and “bad” infections; one leads to destruction while the other leads to the (theoretical) re-creation of community. The final line of the film is Gerry affirming that “our war has just begun,” reminding viewers that camouflage is hardly the same thing as eliminating the threat (distinguishing, then, between inoculation and eradication). Yet, nonetheless, Gerry’s discovery of the stopgap solution of self-infection illustrates a particular vision of cosmopolitan risk worth considering: the necessity of infecting oneself with something typically understood as “bad,” in order to prevent worse. But this temporary infection is exactly that: temporary, unintended, even unable, to be a permanent feature. This suggests that the cosmopolitan infection present here cannot be presumed to be an ongoing form of identification. The temporariness also suggests to viewers the possibility of a return to the preinfection status quo. Unlike the zombie virus, the viruses that Gerry infects himself with, then, are assumed to not fundamentally alter the carrier at a cellular level. After the immediate crisis

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has been averted, the “natural” order of things can be reclaimed; viral infection is a temporary state of precarity, a temporary state of affairs. The film ends with the consignment of cosmopolitanism to a temporary tool to prevent the annihilation of global culture and civilization (they make sure to save great works of art from destruction/desecration) but, in the cozy multiracial domesticity at the end of the film, points to a cosmopolitanism that has been evacuated of its larger, more expansive ethical and political content into a form of personal humanitarianism. If proponents of cosmopolitanism have long considered it to represent a liberal telos, it is strikingly utilitarian in this film. Gerry is simply performing the steps of his former job as a UN investigator, which he agrees to do only to protect his family; this is hardly the fleshed-out narrative of the ethical agent but, instead, the act of the pragmatic and militarized bureaucrat. Indeed, the fact that the United Nations—so often operating colloquially as the stand-in for a cosmopolitan federation and, thus, collective politics—is only interested in Gerry to the extent that he is useful to them suggests the ethical preference for the individual over the collective in the film. This parallels the skepticism directed toward cosmopolitan globality endemic in narratives of food security, with its assumption that local means awareness/knowledge in contrast to global duplicity. Cosmopolitanism is something to be wary of and, like the communicable diseases Gerry must infect himself with in order to evade the zombies, is something to take on only as a last resort; it’s a sign of pragmatic professionalism, rather a particular commitment to global ethics or redistribution of power. While World War Z sees the potential, however temporary, in self-infection in order to stave off greater catastrophe, the virus still remains a somewhat inert medium in the film: it provides the hinge and catalyst for global communal action, but the virus itself (whether zombie or Gerry’s self-infection) is inconsequential. Indeed, when Gerry infects himself in the WHO Cardiff branch, he chooses diseases at random. Sam J. Miller’s novel, Blackfish City, also imagines a world where a destructive virus runs rampant. “The breaks,” sexually transmitted, leads to dissociative breaks in the sufferer, leading them eventually to a totally dissolved sense of self: No one knows where or when they got the name. The origin story is something banal, most likely—they caused nervous breakdowns, full psychiatric breaks, irrevocable shattering of identity. Oldest known usage is found in transit camp correspondence, refugees using it colloquially enough to imply it had already existed in spoken dialogue. … Epidemics do not have medical causes; they have social ones. (2018: 192)

However, the experience of the breaks isn’t just an individually centered set of dissociations. Instead, these moments of interrupted consciousness are the intrusion of the memories of others: Fill, one of the multiple point-of-view characters in the novel, explains his experience of the virus as feeling “like

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memories. So vivid. But nothing I experienced. Stuff that happened a long time before I was born” (2018: 51). Like AIDS in The Line of Beauty, the breaks is principally focalized in the narrative through a genealogy of gay men and is clearly intended to echo HIV/AIDS. Indeed, it is an older gay man, Ishmael Barron, who first offers Fill a potential history of the breaks—positing that the breaks have been around longer than people suspect. … Fifteen years, twenty. It went unnoticed, or was mistaken for schizophrenia or adolescentonset Alzheimer’s because the symptoms were psychological. [Ishmael’s] theory is that it’s not one disease but several, originating in a number of different locations, and when one person becomes infected with multiple strains, a new, hybrid strain is formed. Far stronger than the two that created it. (2018: 52)

Unlike World War Z, then, which remains tied to a “patient zero” model, at least at the beginning, where Gerry must trace the zombie infection to its origin in order to figure out the best response to its destruction, Ishmael here suggests the impossibility—echoed in the later description quoted above—of pinning down origins so concretely. And, indeed, more than impossible, it is, ultimately, beside the point. Moreover, in this description of the breaks, it is not even “one disease but several” that become amplified as they are transmitted and altered by the host body. Blackfish City, then, like World War Z and Oryx and Crake, understands viral spread as necessarily global in scope—a spread that is implicit in The Line of Beauty but not narratively central to its operation in the novel. Even though the novel is set in one space alone (the post–climate collapse island city, Qaanaaq), all of its residents arrived (and continue to arrive) from elsewhere as Qaanaaq is a fully artificial city. Yet, unlike all the other viral infections under examination in this chapter, which are either based on real viruses or used principally as metaphors for intimacies, global and otherwise, Blackfish City makes the intimacy substantially more literal. Indeed, Fill mentions that one theory of the breaks holds that “the visions you get from the breaks come from the person who infected you. Or the person who infected them … or someone somewhere along the chain” (2018: 52–3). The breaks, therefore, doesn’t just have physiological and psychological effects, but empathetic ones. In other words, the virus doesn’t just reveal intimacies but creates them. However, empathy with neither meaningful outlet nor rubric for making sense of it is here meaningless. Fill, for instance, has access to all of these memories of others in both synchronic and diachronic relationships to him, but they exist for him only in snapshot-like fragments. Another point-of-view character, Kaev, who appears to have a much more progressed case of the breaks, illustrates the personally and socially destructive and alienating effects of these fragments with no ability to make sense of them. Fighting in a betting ring and acting as sometime muscle for a local crime boss, Kaev’s life is violent and

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all but nonsensical to himself. Kaev’s virus-induced empathy then has limited opportunities, at best, to act as productive, communal force. Indeed, Blackfish City is at pains to highlight the limited potential of empathy. Masaaraq, a nanobonder and later revealed as one of Kaev’s mothers, tells of the people who came to bear witness to the genocidal destruction of the nanobonders and their inability to move beyond a humanitarian voyeurism, centered in their attempts to empathize with the nanobonders: None of us bothered to explain it. They wouldn’t have understood, wouldn’t have believed. They wanted so badly to think that what they were doing would make a difference, that once they Told the Whole World something would happen, someone would save us. We were a Good Story. They thought that was enough. … They didn’t understand, these pretty kids, but they’d find out, sooner or later. And there was no point in befriending them, opening up our hearts, because sooner or later they’d be leaving. And never coming back. (2018: 139)

Narrative attempts at inducing empathy, then, are principally fetishistic attempts at making those whose precarity is more readily managed feel good about themselves. Blackfish City sets up, then, two categories of transmissible empathy (or attempts thereof): the fragmented and internalized version of the breaks, and the fetishizing voyeurism of the humanitarian witness. However, at the end of the novel, a third model is introduced that seeks to both transform and extend both of these categories. This is Ora’s (Masaaraq’s wife and Kaev’s other mother) experience of the breaks and her ability to transform her access to the memories of others into actionable information. This becomes visible as Kaev, Masaaraq, and Ankit (Masaaraq and Ora’s daughter) break Ora out of the Cabinet, Qaanaaq’s penitentiary for the mentally ill. In the chaos that ensues, Ora must convince a member of Safety, the Cabinet’s security guards, to let them go—something she is able to do via her access to the guard’s father’s memories. Empathy becomes both utilitarian and a vehicle for creating tentative communal links: she tells the guard that “the breaks isn’t a disease. It’s just incomplete. Once the missing piece is in place, it’s a gift. An incredible ability. I can share it with you. Answer all your questions about your father. About the circumstances behind your family leaving. I see it, too. I see everything” (2018: 283). The guard allows them to leave, but Ora has also set up the possibility for future connection; at the very least, Ora’s memories of the guard’s father establishes an empathetic link between the two that unites two people who might seem to be on opposing sides. While this has a situational utilitarianism, it speaks to the larger method of Ora’s mode of response to the crisis of Qaanaaq: she finds a way to transform the breaks into a gift, into something that allows for the creation of new social formations. Unlike Gerry whose viral self-infection is decidedly temporary, Ora sees this as a permanent

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shift in the self that makes for a fluidly collective self rather than a bounded individual self. The incompleteness that surrounds the break that Ora mentions refers to the process of nanobonding: linking a human and an animal consciousness. Fill describes nanobonding and his childhood fascination with it in the following way: “People emotionally melded with animals thanks to tiny machines in their blood” (2018: 4). Later, Masaaraq emphasizes that “we shouldn’t have existed. We were proof that somebody had been up to something terrible” (2018: 141). Yet, while the nanobonding process is a decidedly artificial one, and one dependent upon futuristic technology, Ora understands it as a way of preserving generational knowledge (2018: 143–4). Miller takes the creative potential of shared knowledge further than World War Z; here, the virus isn’t a response to another, deadlier virus, but to a system predicated on amplified accumulation and exploitation18 and it links not just humans but animals, in the past and present. The virus is the response, not the crisis; indeed, the crisis created by the virus is directly tied to the consolidation of power and wealth out of which Qaanaaq was born: namely the genocide of all nanobonders.19 Fill’s grandfather, one of Qaanaaq’s oligarchs, gained his position and wealth from his participation in nanobonder massacres, as well as other violent modes of postcrisis primitive accumulation—something that leads directly to Fill’s murder by Ishmael Barron. Go, the crime lord who employs Kaev and, later, is revealed to be Soq’s mother, seeks to overturn the oligarchs’ control of the city, but only to install herself in their place, suggesting that Blackfish City is not particularly interested in a change in social power without an accompanying change in social structures and forms. It is only the breaks—which, as discussed above is so named in response to its dissociative breaks in consciousness, also creates a break in the social order—that has the potential to truly allow for a total realignment of life in Qaanaaq. This realignment is most clearly signaled at the close of the novel by, on one hand, the reassembling and revelation of the familial links that connect all the point-of-view characters and, on the other hand, the creation of a decidedly nonnormative model of family. The queer matriarchs are, perhaps, the most straightforward evidence of this but this is further compounded by Soq’s murder of their mother, Go, in order to prevent her megalomania, Soq’s pregnancy via Fill, and the inclusion of nanobonded animals as key presences. Soq, the nonbinary messenger who seems to skate around the power centers of the city early in the novel, is ultimately the ethical center and linchpin of the developing queer family. The vision of family that they actively pursue is one where biological ties are less important than a shared investment in social justice. Soq takes, in other words, an ethos emerging out of empathetic connections to others as central to family, rather than the coincidence of genetics. While Soq’s pregnancy would suggest the reaffirmation of genealogical futurities, the origins of the pregnancy in a drug-fueled interaction between Soq and Fill when they squat in one of his grandfather’s empty apartments hardly aligns

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with procreative normativity. Moreover, Fill’s murder, to say nothing of his ignorance of Soq’s pregnancy, further severs the future child from genealogical links. Except that Fill’s transmission of the breaks to Soq means that they have access to his memories—and all the memories of other people that he had access to—forming an empathetic genealogy as much as a biological one. Further, Soq’s access to Fill’s feelings and memories are transformative as it leads them to change their views on City without a Map, effectively a podcast that Ora masterminds from within the Cabinet: “I hated it, at first. … Didn’t know what you were trying to do. But now I love it. I don’t know if that’s maturity, or it’s just because … well, because the person who gave me the breaks loved it. I can feel him, sometimes. Hear him. Not like memories. Like something still alive” (2018: 325). These forms of connection that are both biological and affective, emotional and embodied, point to a different kind of creative sense of viral potential—one that points to a model of risky cosmopolitanism that envisions a self and polis transformed. Gerry is reunited with his family at the end of the film, cured of the viruses he infected himself with to escape the WHO facility; the heteronormative status quo is maintained despite being temporarily put aside in favor of making risky choices that disrupt precarity’s directionality. Blackfish City suggests something more radical: that it is only in being infected with the virus, a process dependent on embodied intimacies, that one can both expand the operation of empathy beyond fetishistic voyeurism and become physically and psychologically transformed. Blackfish City’s viral cosmopolitanism, then, amends, even revolutionizes, the hierarchical status quo for which cosmopolitanism has long worked to provide ideological cover. The viral cosmopolitanism depicted across these texts, then, highlights the precarities that bind and create cosmopolitan subjects in ways that move past the strictly conscious. Viruses, both biomedical and technological, reveal the connections—and limits of security—that structure contemporary life at its smallest scale. Perhaps more self-consciously than either the food or climate risks considered in other chapters, viral risks also speak more directly to the pleasures of risk-taking. This attention to the libidinal is a useful reminder of the calculations that surround actions that cannot be subsumed by the logic of entrepreneurial improvement and accumulation. While the body remains an object of financial speculation, these texts all suggest the surplus that operates in unpredictable ways; a surplus that might work to highlight a body’s superfluity under biopolitical regimes, but also a place from which to make material alternative solidarities, both temporary and more long-term. Both cosmopolitan connection and possibility become agents of infection, emphasizing the deep ambivalence that can, perhaps must, underscore our understanding of ourselves as global subjects.

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Chapter 3 R I SK A N D S C A L E

In Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, a foundational and astoundingly prescient text in the canon of climate change fiction, the protagonist, Lauren Olamina, founds a religion, Earthseed, whose central principle is that “God is change” (2019: 3). Change, for Lauren, is not only a contingent and unpredictable force, but one that allows for a recognition of human agency: “Any Change may bear seeds of benefit. Seek them out. Any Change may bear seeds of harm. Beware. God is infinitely malleable. God is Change” (2019: 116). Lauren, then, wants to both recognize and harness the potential that inheres in change—a potential that she names the divine. Yet, in his reading of the novel, Mathias Nilges queries the very radical potential of change, asking, “What happens to change and to the progressive politics based on the ideal of change (in other words to the postmodern project) in a time in which change is not a Utopian ideal but the logic of a present that is precisely because of its instability perceived as scary and chaotic” (2009: 1336)? Nilges goes on to note that “the novels are less about the value of embracing change than about the struggle with the necessity of having to do so. Lauren … realizes that the present problem is that embracing change is necessary in order to formulate an individual and collective existence that corresponds to the world surrounding them” (Nilges 2009: 1337). What Nilges highlights is the dual tension at play in Parable of the Sower: the need to be able to recognize or read the change that surrounds its characters more accurately (in the first half of the novel, Lauren constantly encounters others who want to read the world nostalgically) and the ease with which change itself becomes simply another mode of control that disallows intervention into the status quo. As Jeffery Nealon notes of the valorization of postmodern contingency, It’s becoming increasing unhelpful to replay the drama that posits a repressive, normative “stasis of essentialism” that can be outflanked only by some form of more or less liberating, socially constructed “fluid openness.” At this point, we’d have to admit that privatized finance capital has all but obliterated the usefulness of this distinction: to insist on the hybridity and fluidness of X or Y is the mantra of transnational capital—whose normative state is the constant

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Butler, in her narration of these tensions, implicitly and explicitly raises questions about the possibility of Earthseed’s investment in change as founding principle of reality as disrupting a regime of capital that similarly understands change as its founding principle. With her attention to the twinned crises of personal debt and the climate, Butler asks readers to consider whether Lauren’s methodology of reading the world—accurately or otherwise—opens up radical possibility or whether it gets stuck in a feedback loop with the ideologies of late capitalism. This vexed relationship between personal responsibility and global precarity is at the heart of the texts under examination in this chapter. Like Butler’s perceptive questions about debt, climate, and representation, these texts— despite being published twenty to twenty-five years later—ask questions about the links between individual action and structural change. The contemporary context of their creation only further highlights the urgency of these connections; their preoccupation with the same questions demonstrates the stasis within which we generally continue to find ourselves in terms of representing climate crises. Yet one difference in the texts under examination here is their explicit reference to the global reach of debt and climate. Even when focused on specific local realities, the texts I read in this chapter do not refrain from situating the questions and tentative responses they raise in a broader, cosmopolitan frame. In Parable of the Sower, the world outside the Pacific Coast of the North American continent is seemingly gone—or in the throes of disappearance; the only future viable place is, seemingly, the stars themselves. As Lauren tells one of the early devotees of Earthseed, their destiny “is to take root among the stars” (2019: 222). The texts under examination in this chapter have more prosaic locations in mind. While Baciagalupi’s The Windup Girl imagines a post- and mid-crisis dystopic future, the climate change photography examined here and Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior are all tied to realist depictions of “real” places. They mark, perhaps, an ongoing shift in how we represent climate change: as a process already happening, not just as a future telos of current practices. Yet, like Butler’s novels, the cultural producers in this chapter continue to attend— in a variety of registers—to the connection between debt and the precarity it produces and a broader sense of cosmopolitan risk. In the majority of these texts, this is tied to the trope of revelation. Authors narrate the process of becoming aware of the scale of the climate crisis and their position within it; implicitly, there is also an attempt to produce a similar moment of becoming in their viewers and readers. But what is the end point of all this revelation? What does revelation do? And shouldn’t, by the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, we all be well past needing to have climate change revealed to us? If these texts want to reveal the cosmopolitan scope of the climate crisis, the financial risks

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that have helped to produce/prolong it, and the existential precarity it produces, what is the nature of this cosmopolitanism? Is it the same cosmopolitanism of a Kantian Enlightenment humanity where some sort of transcendent humanity links global cosmopolites together? Perhaps unsurprisingly, I want to suggest that what we begin to see in these texts is a tug of war between a Kantian universality and forms of universality underwritten by the legacies of imperialism and the circulation of commodities, particularly oil. As Andrew Simms, Mike Davis, and many others demonstrate, divorcing the contemporary experience of climate change and its effects from long histories of global imperialism is an impossibility. Simms’s notion of “ecological debt,” for instance, highlights that this makes it “possible to imagine a great reversal of centuries of expanding use of finite resources like fossil fuels, and of the growing divergence between rich and poor” (2009: 10). Simms, an economist and fellow at the New Economic Foundation that treats “economics as if people and the planet mattered,” unsurprisingly sees the economy (both actually and metaphorically) as the response to the ecological debt made visible by climate change: addressing climate change “means … finding an answer to how the global economy can both work within natural limits and fairly distribute its benefits” (2009: 10). As he goes on to illustrate, the historical precedents for contemporary life work in often invisible ways: “We have internalised and accepted the ‘natural logic’ of history’s negative redistribution of wealth between continents to our, northern, advantage [which] also show[s]‌how invisible are the real ecological and economic debts that have paid for the unequal world we live in today” (2009: 75). Simms’s attention to history emphasizes the scope of the debt at work here; climate change is not simply the work of the last, say, fifty years of intensified globalization, but has its antecedents in several centuries of colonial extraction and expansion.1 Awareness of these antecedents works to complicate the liberal universalism frequently present in rhetoric surrounding climate, which emphasizes individual autonomy over larger, structural, and systemic effects. Simms uses the notion of ecological debt to suggest the ongoing legacies of colonial histories that explicitly worked to foster and enlarge socioeconomic and ecological distances between countries and continents. Mike Davis illustrates the programmatic way that European colonial powers managed ecological damage, leveraging it to their own benefit and, simultaneously, prolonging the effects for colonized nations and continents. The genealogy of environmental damage that Simms and Davis map destabilizes the limited historicism present in popular debates about and representations of climate change and crises. The presentism of these debates elide, for instance, colonial histories—past and ongoing—of European and settler governments’ violent appropriation of the lands of Indigenous peoples. In other words, we cannot separate the links between contemporary capital expansion as it relates to the environment and ongoing colonial land grabs and exploitation. Romanticized rhetoric about the growing awareness of the “commons” can easily slip into a kind of elision of the actively maintained

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hierarchies that continue to structure, among other things, land use and property rights;2 its overlap with the rhetoric of universal humanity at work in liberal models of cosmopolitanism speaks to the imbrication of cosmopolitanism with how we conceptualize both globality and the environment. Simms’s notion of “ecological debt” and Davis’s tracing of colonial management of famines and ecological disasters helpfully introduce into the conversation about cosmopolitanism centered around environmental issues questions about responsibility that are not simply traced to the contemporary (or near-contemporary) moment and a subsequent individualization. While a cosmopolitan ethics that echoes a ledger-book is not particularly helpful (are ethics truly ethical if they’re only/mostly about paying off a debt?),3 it’s a helpful reminder in a popular debate that sometimes gets stuck on China’s and India’s rising carbon emissions, suggesting (both implicitly and explicitly) that the West has “done their part,” ignoring a whole variety of past and present contexts or that having “done their part” might also mean “significantly contributing to rising carbon levels.” Remembering these histories, then, means remembering that we cannot—or should not—separate our discussions of climate change from the already elaborated discourses surrounding postcolonialism (including gender, sexuality, class, disability, and other intersecting discourses). Simms and Davis offer some language and historical specificity to support this intersectionality, situating the current iteration of environmental precarity in a genealogy of past climate events and their global reverberations and effects. Timothy Mitchell offers another vantage point from which to understand the cosmopolitan ramifications of environmental precarity by placing the “fuel economy” of oil at the center of the current episteme. As he observes, “the leading industrialised countries are also oil states. Without the energy they derive from oil their current forms of political and economic life would not exist. Their citizens have developed ways of eating, travelling, housing themselves and consuming other goods and services that require very large amounts of energy from oil and other fossil fuels” (Mitchell 2013: 6). He goes on to argue that what we think of as the economy only came into being with the “availability of abundant, low-cost energy [which] allowed economists to abandon earlier concerns with the exhaustion of natural resources and represent material life instead as a system of monetary circulation” (2013: 234). This “made possible a form of politics that was dematerialised and de-natured” (2013: 235). Further, thinking about the global connections made possible by and emerging from oil makes visible a different global orientation than is fully captured by preexisting discourses: “in tracing the connections that were made between pipelines and pumping stations, refineries and shipping routes, road systems and automobile cultures, dollar flows and economic knowledge, weapons experts and militarism, one discovers how a peculiar set of relations was engineered between oil, violence, finance, expertise and democracy” (2013: 253). As I will examine at greater length when discussing the oil photos of Edward Burtynsky, thinking about global circuits of oil makes visible and reorients the connections

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that structure everyday life. Mitchell (and Burtynsky) implicitly, then, maps out a cosmopolitanism that takes shared participation in a particular regime of capital as the global link, rather than humanist universalism. Indeed, as he notes, the very boundaries that have long been maintained between humanity, animality, and nature break down in thinking about oil: Debates about human-induced climate change, the depletion of nonrenewable resources, or any other question, create political uncertainty … because of the way they breach [the] conventional distinction between society and nature. They cannot be settled by experts alone, because they involve questions not only about the nature of the world … but also about the nature of the collective. With what forces, human and non-human, do we want to form alliances? To what powers do we want to be subject ourselves? (Mitchell 2013: 239; emphasis added)

As Amitav Ghosh pithily observes, “the humans of the future will surely understand … that only in one, very brief era, lasting less than three centuries, did a significant number of their kind believe that planets and asteroids are inert” (2007: 3). The forms of cosmopolitan solidarity and responsibility that emerge out of Simms’s and Davis’s formulations are ones that expand to encompass the colonizer-colonized dyad; Mitchell offers a further expansion to consider human–nonhuman and nature–society binaries. Implicitly at the heart of both theorizations is an extension of the sites and forms of cosmopolitan practices— and the directionality of both debt and responsibility. Moreover, these shifts and changes move beyond simply attributing forms of Enlightenment humanity to those previously left outside its borders, but in reformulating altogether the points of commonality that establish a meaningful sense of global citizenship. Yet, at the same time, the very circulation of oil that Mitchell puts at the center of modernity has provided the technology to make individual atomization inescapable. Matthew Huber wonders whether “the most problematic relation to oil is the way it powers forms of social life that allow individuals to imagine themselves as severed from society and public life,” as “oil is a powerful force not only because of the material geographies of mobility it makes possible but also because its combustion often accompanies deeply felt visions of freedom and individualism” (2013: xi). Similarly, Graeme Macdonald notes that “the privatisations and privations of oil-based modernity … exemplifies … the privatization of energy guilt, resting the primary burden of ecological response to the problems s/he sees as causing in the individual, in both their ‘choice’ of energy consumption and their ‘green’ ethical behaviour” (2013: 2). Petrocosmopolitanism, then, is a mode of cosmopolitanism that works to actively obscure its own universality. To return, then, to my earlier question about whether revelation about climate connections and their production of modes of cosmopolitanism is still necessary in 2020, scholarship on petrocultures is an active reminder that

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what is being revealed remains an open question. How might what is being revealed actually work to reinforce the ideological systems that underpin the very realities that have produced the current climate crisis? In his definition of “fossil capital,” Andreas Malm observes that every impact of anthropogenic climate change carries the imprint of every human act with a radiative forcing, such that they are infinitesimal representatives of two moving aggregates—the aftermath and the source— intimately coupled yet strangely disconnected from each other. Eyes gazing on abruptly transformed ecosystems are forced to turn back towards human society to understand what has happened. (2016: 4)

The Benjaminian Angel of History, then, is updated for climate catastrophe: “Global warming is a sun mercilessly projecting a new light onto history” (Malm 2016: 4). The consequences of this, for Malm, then are “a matter of searching not for climate in history, but for history in climate” (2016: 6; emphasis in original). While the texts under examination in this chapter don’t proceed straightforwardly from this historicist approach, my readings emphasize the way they work—some more explicitly than others—to consider the histories that shape the experience of climate precarity. In other words, this chapter reads texts that look for the systems in climate precarity; the revelations produced, then, work to link aftermath and source in a method akin to what Malm outlines. Nonetheless, actual or looming environmental disaster and the uneven precarity that subsequently emerge remain the catalysts for these critics in imagining a new cosmopolitanism (though none of these critics use the word cosmopolitanism). The risks that attend and derive from something like climate change offer a material—both in terms of place and commodity regimes— grounding that is often missing from theorizations of cosmopolitanism which tend to center around forms of identity politics and questions of subjectivity. The precarity produced by climate change highlights the very real consequences that emerge from cosmopolitanism; it is not simply a transcendent humanity that connects subjects in some ephemeral way but connections that have consequences for human and nonhuman lives, and landscapes—in the past, currently, and in the future. Not only does this reorient cosmopolitanism to make questions of socio-ecological justice central, but, in its very immanent global extensions, the privilege of ignoring culpability in a global system comes to the forefront. Like the ease with which the consequences of race can be made invisible to privileged white people who benefit from systems of white supremacy, it is, paradoxically, those most typically understood as cosmopolitan who can most easily distance themselves from the lived realities of contemporary global citizenship. Climate change and its ultimate disregard for national borders and spatial arrangements of wealth (though these, of

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course, disproportionately affect the experience of climate change) illustrate the urgency of disrupting this complacent privilege.4 Cultural representations of climate change and related phenomenon provide, then, an important archive for considering how these questions circulate outside the realm of literary criticism and critical theory. Adam Trexler notes, in Anthropocene Fictions, that “climate change and all its things have changed the capacities of recent literature” (2015: 13; emphasis in original). This chapter approaches this change from another angle, or, perhaps, considers the consequences of these changes to a different end: How do cultural texts represent climate change and, most importantly here, what models of global citizenship emerge from these representations? What do these models say about what it means to live now and what we imagine as possible consequences of the contemporary moment? In the first section that follows, I look at recent and ongoing photographic projects by Edward Burtynsky, Sebastião Selgado, and Robert van Waarden, all centered on the effects of climate change. These projects, because of their visuality, reveal much about what and who “enters the frame” when we imagine climate change, with consequences for how we imagine who counts, and who does not, as cosmopolitan. Working with these visual texts amplifies the question of framing that emerges implicitly in the literary texts under examination in the rest of the chapter. In the subsequent section, I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and its similar preoccupation with the lived spaces of climate change, particularly their impact on the rural poor who bear a disproportionately high share of the material consequences, with few of the benefits. If depictions of climate change tend to focus on spaces far from their viewers/readers in both space and time, Flight Behavior refuses to allow such distancing. In the final section, I examine Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, a speculative dystopia that addresses a post-catastrophe world and interrogates the consequences of current models of transnational interconnection. Climate change and its effects are, in this novel, characterized by their immanence—suggesting a different and current sense of urgency than is typically the case. Across these sections, then, I trace the way cultural representations of environmental risk shapes how we imagine what it means to be cosmopolitan.

Framing Climate Change In the author’s note that begins Edward Burtynsky’s Oil (the first book and exhibition in his Anthropocene trilogy), he talks about what he calls his “oil epiphany” where “it occurred to [him] that all the vast man-altered landscapes [he] had pursued for over 20 years had been made possible by the discovery of oil and the progress occasioned by the internal combustion engine” (2009: 9). This epiphany leads him to photograph oil fields, refineries, highways, “motor

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culture” in its myriad variants, and the salvage industry that results from all of this. Of this collection of photographs, he observes “in no way can one encompass the influence and extended landscape of this thing we call oil. These images can be seen as notations by one author—contemplating the world made possible through this massive energy force, and the cumulative effects of the industrial evolution” (2009: 9; emphasis added). There are a series of striking things about this brief preface (it totals four short paragraphs) provided by Burtynsky and what it reveals about the explicit intentions beyond these photos; particularly compelling, however, is its language of revelation and consequence. He states, for instance, that “the car that I drove cross-country began to represent not only freedom, but also something much more conflicted. I began to think about oil itself: as both the source of energy that makes everything possible, and as a source of dread, for its ongoing endangerment of our habitat” (2009: 9). His experience, which he seeks to replicate for viewers in his photographs, is one where a veil is pulled back and oil and its externalities are made suddenly visible (see Figure 3.1). While this sense of ephiphanic revelation is hardly unique or new to environmental writing, what interests me here is how Burtynsky uses this language of revelation and subsequent awareness of risk to make an implicit

Figure 3.1  Edward Burtynsky, “Oxford Tire Pile #5, Westley, California, USA, 1999” Source: Weinston Hammons Gallery, Minneapolis/Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto.

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call to cosmopolitan action. Burtynsky certainly does not make any specific calls to action based on his photographs—perhaps unsurprisingly given that his photos are part of a number of corporate collections that include Encana, the Hunt Oil Company, TransAlta, and other banks and energy companies— nor should he necessarily be expected to. Yet, as the accumulation of photos in the book proceeds, one cannot help but read a growing sense of the urgent need for a global sense of responsibility—especially from those residents in the Global North in whose name oil has primarily benefited and by whom the overwhelmingly majority of oil reserves has been used. Global connections, as represented here, are structured by a global economy of risk, prompted and undergirded by environmental and human destruction. In other words, this is a vision of something like a universal humanity, but one shaped by energy consumption, rather than existential or metaphysical qualities, echoing Timothy Mitchell’s “fuel economy.” This vision parallels Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument that “global warming adds another challenge [for thinking about the nature of the human in the contemporary moment as it] calls us to visions of the human that neither rights talk nor the critique of the subject ever contemplated” (2012: 9). For in thinking about the anthropocene, as Chakrabarty notes, the need arises to view the human simultaneously on contradictory registers: as a geophysical force and as a political agent, as a bearer of rights and as author of actions; subject to both the stochastic forces of nature … and open to the contingency of individual human experience; belonging at once to differently-scaled histories of the planet, of life and species, and of human societies. (2012: 14)

Burtynsky frames his epiphany as a personal one with the aim of producing a similar realization on the part of his viewers, but it is an epiphany to the human as geophysical force, not as political actor.5 Indeed, in the photographs, the human all but disappears. His photos are, for the most part, taken from a distance to demonstrate a sublime sense of vastness and unending expansiveness; as a result, they become strangely depopulated.6 This makes some sense in his photos of Californian oil fields, filled with uninhabited oil derricks; in the photos of oil refineries in New Brunswick and Ontario, however, a deliberate depopulating becomes more visible. We see in these photos human pathways (stairs, catwalks, etc.) but no one on them.7 As a result it lends a peculiarly eerie sense to these photos as they seem to depict something akin to a “last man” scenario.8 Yet, this very depopulation of these photos seems to paradoxically support a discourse of humanity as geophysical force; there are constructions here to remind viewers of human presence, but they also suggest the way humanity in this model becomes far larger than individual people.9 In the second section of the book, “Transportation and Motor Culture,” humans finally begin to appear. To begin with, in the photos of large highway

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interchanges in Houston, Shanghai, and other large cities, humanity is visible as the invisible drivers of the many cars that make use of this infrastructure. Later in the section, in photos of the Talladega Superspeedway and the Sturgis motorcycle rallies, people begin to be more directly visible—though in keeping with Burtynsky’s preference for a sense of scale that evokes the sublime, these are vast seas of people (the Talladega Superspeedway seats eighty thousand while the Sturgis rally attracts upward of four hundred thousand people). Yet humans begin to be visible only through the introduction of what are highly specialized and classed subsets of “motor culture.” Put differently, despite the widespread popularity of both NASCAR and motorcycle culture, these are not the main vantage point from which most global inhabitants interact with car culture. These particular photos, as the end point of this section, might offer an alibi for the typical viewer of Burtynsky’s photos. By linking motor culture with various entertainment and subcultural practices, these photos both suggest how oil permeates all arenas of life and obscures the more quotidian points of interaction with oil and car culture that pervade global life. While this binaristic separation is problematic in what it elides, this elision actually points to the way environmental risk might tend to operate: it is NASCAR or motorcycle enthusiasts who are symptomatic of the overconsumption of oil— not me, the “average” North American driver. This situates the risk economy out of which climate change emerges as exceptional or spectacular, rather than as actual banal everyday reality. It is the third section with its polysemic title, “The End of Oil,” where Burtynsky begins to include human figures that are individualized and humanscale. Like the previous section where it begins depopulated and only includes people in the final photos, this section follows a similar pattern: it begins with abandoned Azerbaijani oil fields, moves to industrial waste in North America, and concludes with ship-breakers in Bangladesh. However, where the NASCAR and motorcycle enthusiasts are depicted in sublime scale, the photos in Bangladesh are the first ones in the entire book to feature something that begin to resemble portraits. Aside from these four photos of three or fewer people, the Bangladesh photos still tend toward groups of people—yet these do not reach the sense the human sublime achieved in the rest of the book. The juxtaposition between the size of the ships being broken down, the size of the men doing the work, and the paucity of the equipment is where the sublime enters the frame in these photos. The risk at play in this work is only made more visible in the final photo of this section where we see three men, barefoot and covered in waste oil in a Chittagong oil recycling plant (though this implies far more infrastructure than is present in these photos).10 While the phrase “end of oil” evokes the rhetoric of peak oil and the exhaustion of global oil reserves, it’s also here more literally the end point of oil. But where nearly everything up to this point in the progression mapped by the photos of oil suggests the absence of human agency, we cannot miss the people for whom the end of oil is material precarity. Worth noting, however, is

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that in the photos in the collection all the ship-breakers shown are adult men; in the video accompanying these photos that forms part of the documentary, Manufactured Landscapes, many of these ship-breakers and oil recyclers are, in fact, children. While the danger present to these men is certainly not negligible, photos of children doing this work has a very different affective impact. So, while Burtynsky frames the project in such a way that it is supposed to evoke a revelation on the viewer’s part about the omnipresence of oil and its related cultures, and the global invisibility of the costs of both extraction and disposal, it still pulls its punches, so to speak, in a number of ways that provide viewers with a way to distance themselves from both their involvement in motor culture and the brutalities of oil disposal. A similar evasive potential is at work in Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis. These photos—published by Taschen in 2013 and on global display since 2013 (notably at the International Center of Photography in New York during the People’s Climate March; Salgado was a speaker at events related to the march)—follow his earlier work on labor and migration in depicting an explicitly global scale, in an attempt to capture the costs of globalization. In Salgado’s foreword to the collection, he links this project to the “violence and brutality such as I had never even imagined before” (2013: 5), which he captured in Workers (1993) and Migrations (2000). This violence, which had led him to lose “all faith in the future of humanity” (2013: 5), is juxtaposed by depictions of landscapes “that have escaped the long—and often destructive—arm of modern man” (2013: 6). Nature, as characterized here, is both untouched and regenerative. As Salgado notes, this is an explicitly romantic vision: I followed a romantic dream to find and share a pristine world that all too often is beyond our eyes and reach. My goal was not to go where man had never before set foot. … I simply wanted to show nature at its best wherever I found it. … Discovering this unspoiled world has been the most rewarding experience of my life. My earlier projects … were voyages through the trials and tribulations of humanity. This one was my homage to the grandeur of nature. (2013: 7)

Unlike Burtynsky, then, who seeks to find those landscapes altered and reworked by industry, suggesting anthropogenic inescapability, and crafting an implicit vision of ethical responsibility as a result, Salgado’s “warning” is to remember and acknowledge “all that we risk losing” (2013: 7).11 In the message from Irina Bokova, director-general of UNESCO, which prefaces the photos, she notes that “Genesis … has the power to open our eyes, to change how we see the world. This is the first step towards changing our behaviour. … I see these images as a call to action … and for us all to recognize the role that each of us must play in safeguarding the world and ways of life that nourish us” (2013: 13). There is a similar language of revelation in both Salgado’s and Bokova’s prefaces that parallels that in Burtynsky’s preface. However, Salgado steps back from

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claiming a directly activist role; he states here that his “approach was not that of a journalist or scientist or anthropologist” (2013: 7) and, when asked at his talk at the events around the People’s Climate March whether he sees himself as an activist, he explicitly rejected this label, positing his role as “mere” observer. Like Burtynsky’s, the photos of Genesis are primarily interested in scale. There are photos of the giant mountains of Antarctica (see Figure 3.2), photos of thousands of Antarctic gulls, expanses of Saharan desert; all aerial photos that work to demonstrate the sublimity of global nature. While the Oil photos have a tendency toward placelessness or a certain kind of interchangeability (the photos of oilfields in California and Azerbaijan, for instance, don’t look all that different and probably don’t look all that different from similar expanses in Saudi Arabia), the Genesis photos assert distinctiveness and specificity. Place, in these photos, in all its material particularity, is their primary meaning. Unlike Burtynsky’s, however, sublime scale does not enter into photos of humans. Salgado’s photos are deliberately interested in showing humans; and, when they do, they are photos of small groups and individuals. However, if the people in Oil are consuming people and laboring people, those in Genesis are people presented for anthropological review. Salgado works to obscure the way these groups have been touched by “modern”/Western consumer society:

Figure 3.2  Sebastiāo Salgado, “Iceberg between the Paulet Island and the South Shetland Islands, Antarctica” Source: Sebastião Salgado.

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My aim was to portray these peoples as close as possible to their ancestral way of life. Some might wear secondhand clothes distributed by evangelical groups, but I wanted to show the ceremonial attire and tribal customs of which they are most proud and which in a few decades may survive only in photographs. Sooner or later, the modern world will touch them—or they will go looking for it. I wanted to capture a vanishing world, a part of humanity that is on the verge of disappearing, yet in many ways still lives in harmony with nature. (2013: 8; emphasis added)

He goes on to note that “the subjects of our research—landscapes, animals and peoples—often overlapped” (2013: 8). This suggests, then, for all its rhetoric of interconnection, Genesis continues to view global humanity in rather astonishingly anachronistic, though sadly too familiar, ways: there is the modern Global North and the premodern Global South. While there are certainly echoes of this at work in Oil, Salgado’s decision to eliminate the way modern consumer culture “touches” most parts of the globe—human and otherwise—speaks to the Edenic pastoralism pointed to by the title. Indeed, in the comment about the overlapping subjects of his photos, he makes a troubling parallel between global tribal peoples and animals; there is a brief suggestion of agency—“they will go looking for” the modern world—but these peoples are primarily the objects of an ephemeral notion of the “modern world,” colonial charity that provides them with “secondhand clothes,” and the anthropological gaze invited by the photos themselves. As the frequent references to “discovery” in Salgado’s note highlight, these photos align themselves quite closely with colonial rhetorics of discovery—and, implicitly, conquest. The “timelessness” of this rhetoric is only emphasized by his use of black-and-white photography, in contrast to Burtynsky’s vibrant color.12 The call to action in response to global climate change, then, as suggested by these photos, is about return—return to a premodern moment of pre-lapsarian innocence. In an interview with Simon Hattenstone, while in the midst of the project, he observes that so many times I’ve photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet—to see the innocence. And then we can understand what we must preserve. (2004)

Central to both Burtynsky’s and Salgado’s projects, then, are explicit calls for action with ethical and political consequences—though hazily defined in both cases—and the implicit mapping out of a vision of the human that is principally global (whether this is a romantic idea of universal humanity or something akin to the Anthropocene is a slippery issue in both cases).13 This

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very vision of global humanity is central to the urgency they both articulate around climate change and environmental risk; for them, then, cosmopolitan aims and practices are the grounds upon which to mobilize a global response to a global problem. These cosmopolitan aims and practices emerge from differing impulses, though: for Burtynsky, it is a sense of responsibility that the Global North has because of the global inequalities they benefit from; for Salgado, there’s an equivalent sense of responsibility in response to privilege, but it is wrapped up in a colonial-evolutionary sense of prehistoricism and modernity.14 Significant in both, however, is the sense of separation at work—and the mode of cosmopolitan responsibility that echoes a version of Golden Rule morality that, harkens back to the height of empire and its vision of “muscular Christianity.” One has a responsibility to those most at risk in global systems of environmental destruction because one is, naturally and neutrally, strong, not because one has any hand in the creation of those risks themselves. Salgado’s very language of Edenic innocence and genesis points to his evocation, intentional or not, of Judeo-Christian notions of sin and redemption. Unlike Burtynsky’s and Salgado’s photos, Robert van Waarden’s digital project, “Along the Pipeline,” shifts from a depopulated or deliberately anachronistic landscape to one that is emphatically peopled. “Along the Pipeline” is “an ambitious project to photograph those impacted by the proposed Energy East pipeline.” The Energy East pipeline proposed by the TransCanada Corporation would be, approximately, 4,600 kilometers of pipeline connecting Western Canadian crude oil reserves to Eastern Canadian refineries. Where Oil and Genesis depict landscapes affected by oil culture, or, conversely, “untouched” wilderness, “Along the Pipeline” consists of photos of people who live along the proposed pipeline, alongside landscape photos and other multimedia material. This project strikingly photographs a wide variety of subjects: they include oil industry workers, farmers, artists, Indigenous people, and activists. And while, for the most part, his subjects are skeptical or hostile about the pipeline, he does also feature subjects who are pro-pipeline (see, e.g., the portrait of Mike Gerbrandt, a Saskatchewan farmer). Each subject has both their photo taken and offers a (brief) take on the pipeline; this is linked both to a map and a landscape photo. Similar to Burtynsky, van Waarden sees the outcome of this project as one that highlights interconnection: Through this work I hope to demonstrate the strength of individuals and communities, what they value and how this project will have far reaching implications. By leveraging the power of visual storytelling we can bring people from all over Canada to the front lines of this issue. … People who see this exhibit may recognize themselves and their communities in the faces of others and realize how we are all connected. (“The Project”)

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We move here out of the language of epiphany and salvation, and into something approaching that of social justice and solidarity. While one set of rhetorics is not objectively better than the other, or more politically “pure,” what seems useful with van Waarden’s project is that it shifts away from the separation implicit in Burtynsky’s and Salgado’s project—even when they emphasize interconnection. Van Waarden’s project, clearly, does not have the same explicitly global implications that Burtynsky’s and Salgado’s do and, thus, does not have the same intimations of cosmopolitanism. Yet, in its very drawing of connections along environmental lines that are in conversation with global energy demands (the crude oil refined in Eastern Canadian refineries would be, at least in part, exported), it is difficult to see this as a strictly national or regional issue. What van Waarden illustrates then, in contrast to the cosmopolitan universality at work in Oil and Genesis, is, what I’ve termed elsewhere (Johansen 2014), a “territorialized cosmopolitanism”—one particularly inflected by rurality. The bulk of van Waarden’s subjects are rural inhabitants—unsurprising given that the pipeline most directly impacts rural spaces—but are not exclusively so. The specifics of rural life in its myriad variants, thus, come into conversation with metropolitan residents whose connection to the pipeline is more mediated. This moves away from the rural/metropolitan divide that structures both Oil and Genesis, resisting a vision of rural landscapes as either pastoral or xenophobic escapes from contemporary petrocultures. Instead, it suggests the way these various spaces are interconnected and interdependent. Van Waarden’s multivalent approach to photographing the effects of and response to climate change is only amplified by the variety of his projects on climate activism, and landscape photography. These projects all work together to suggest a territorialized cosmopolitan approach to understanding the subject’s relationship to global others and their own enmeshment in global climate change. If both Burtynsky and Salgado provide a number of alibis for viewers to ignore their own emplacement in the photos, this elision is less immediately available in van Waarden’s archive. Moreover, it returns the rhetoric of risk back to the Western nation-state. The immediate experience of precarity in Oil, for instance, is primarily geographically distant to its viewers; Burtynsky interpellates his viewers into this risk, but the costs are separate from them. The costs in “Along the Pipeline,” however, are far more proximate. Indeed, as the graphic showing the proposed route of the pipeline on the “About” page states: “Our risk, Their reward.” These are risks that viewers are included in, in an immediate way, not in the more universalist sense at work in both Oil and Genesis. This, thus, introduces into the representation a different way of understanding the implications of the photos. What these photographic projects ask us to consider, then, are the way representations of climate change—and the risks associated with it—speak to particular models of forming cosmopolitan publics and practices. Rather than

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a compartmentalizing vision of a transcendent and universal humanity, these projects (and the many others like them) all firmly situate notions of global humanity within the framework of environmental risk and its global causes and consequences. These projects effect, then, how we might conceptualize global responses to global climate change and its attendant risks; as Walter Benn Michaels notes, “if what you want is a change in policy, you’re not likely to get it from art … but if what you want is a vision of the structures that produce both the policies we’ve got and the desire for alternatives to them, art is almost the only place you can find it” (2015: xiii). The differences between these projects also signal the varying ways in which climate change and its consequences might be represented, querying and destabilizing the tendency toward unilateral views of both from either side of the political spectrum. Put differently, these photos work to reveal—intentionally or not—the ideologies that suffuse representations of environmental risk and global humanity’s relationship to it.

Climate Change and Proximity If climate change photography typically represents its effects as geographically distant from its viewers, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior suggests the way that spaces typically ignored in cosmopolitan discourse might alert us to the way risk is already much closer to Global North readers than they might expect. Flight Behavior does not allow for temporal and spatial distancing, envisioning a model of cosmopolitan practice emerging out of locality rather than globality.15 As Patrick Murphy observes, “recent large-scale studies of climate change, the politics around it, and the need to move to a different economic model for the world here at the end of growth all address an increasingly inescapable conclusion: the problem is not one of means but one of recognition, acceptance, and will to act” (2014: 149). Kingsolver is invested in recognition of globally shared environmental precarity by those who have both been the largest perpetrators of environmental damage and most able to distance themselves from its effects, posing this moment of recognition, even revelation, as central to cosmopolitan practice and illustrating a proximate sense of disaster—both spatially and chronologically. Flight Behavior follows, then, from Rob Nixon’s call to consider how to “rethink the standard formulation of neoliberalism as internalizing profits and externalizing risks not just in spatial but in temporal terms as well, so that we recognize the full force with which the externalized risks are outsourced to the unborn” (2013: 35). Yet where Nixon usefully considers the implications of this “slow violence” over distance, Flight Behavior asks its readers to recognize how the impacts of slow violence are not just elsewhere in time and space, but are actually already much “closer to home” than readers may have realized. Nixon imagines a set of implicitly cosmopolitan practices that emerge from an awareness of global distance, reiterating familiar vectors

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of influence; Kingsolver envisions a notion of cosmopolitanism that reverses these directionalities, reimagining what cosmopolitan responsibility might look like (and how it might be recognized/called into being). Kingsolver’s novel, and others like it, provides an important addition to and complication of (a simplified version of) Nixon’s notion of slow violence, refusing the separation that all too easily follows in representations of climate change and its impacts. This simplified vision of the slow violence of climate change can be seen most readily in the growing visual representations of climate refugees, most notably Michael P. Nash’s 2010 documentary, Climate Refugees, and the Argos Collectif ’s collection of photos, also published in 2010 as Climate Refugees. Both the documentary and the photographs work to make visible the impact of climate change on globally underdeveloped places. The underlying premise of both is that their audience is geographically and socially separate from the most vulnerable victims of climate change, and that this is an audience with cosmopolitan aspirations (that they want to view themselves as responsible global citizens). While both projects work to highlight the ways Global North consumption patterns have produced devastating effects in places already structurally dispossessed, they also simultaneously work to discursively locate precarity elsewhere and to remove agency from migrants and refugees. The rhetoric of necessity and inevitability that structures these representations of climate refugees maintains a binaristic opposition between elite cosmopolitans and subaltern migrants, illustrating Jane Elliott’s suggestion of the elision of agency that surrounds vulnerable subjects. As Elliott notes, discussing Hurricane Katrina, another event that we can, in part, understand through the lens of climate change, “neoliberal governance is obviously not the neutral framework for free choice it purports to be, but the unacceptability of the choices it offers does not render them illusory or without import—quite the opposite: the choices … are so significant and so painful precisely because they are so unjust” (2013: 87). The representations of climate refugees, exemplified by the two Climate Refugees, in their attempts to make visible the cruelty and vulnerability imposed on, primarily, the Global South by the Global North, inadvertently work to reiterate colonial claims of “third world subjects” (a phrase I use deliberately here) as in need of saving by Euro-American nation-states—while ignoring simultaneously the role the so-called saviors played in creating the crisis in the first place and the way the effects of climate change are not simply the purview of others, elsewhere.16 The cosmopolitan demands of climate change, under this savior model, not only reinstates already existing assemblages of power, but continues to suggest that cosmopolitan practices exist above immanent and everyday lives and realities. Flight Behavior resists this separation in a number of ways, viewing both action and revelation as emerging out of local lives, leading cosmopolitan subjects to see parallels between the local effects of climate change and those at a distance, thus suggesting their participation (in a number of ways) in both their own immediate environment and in a more

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expansive sense of the world. For instance, while Flight Behavior echoes the language of recognition and revelation that runs through much of the discourse surrounding the photos described here and in the earlier section of this chapter, this is revelation that emerges out of empirical experience rather than reportage of places far distant to the self. Like the title for Salgado’s collection of photos, there is a decidedly biblical connotation evoked in Flight Behavior’s revelation.17 Indeed, Kingsolver particularly evokes the New Testament story of Pentecost, told in Acts: And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language. (Acts 2:1-6)

The story of Pentecost can be read as a story about something akin to cosmopolitan confusion, like the more frequently alluded-to story of the Tower of Babel, as both are stories about living with difference—with the outcome of Pentecost being that everyone is baptized as Christians, a universalizing gesture in the face of revelation and incomprehensibility. Kingsolver evokes Pentecost throughout the book, but especially in the first chapter—and, through her use of Pentecostal images, she raises questions about the role of knowledge, responsibility, and the cosmopolitan connections and interdependencies made visible by climate change. The first four sentences of the novel make explicit the language of revelation and conversion that permeates the novel: A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture. Or so it seemed for now, to a woman with flame-colored hair who marched uphill to meet her demise. Innocence was no part of this. She knew her own recklessness and marveled, really, at how one hard little flint of thrill could outweigh the pillowing, suffocating aftermath of a long disgrace. (2012: 1)

Dellarobia, the novel’s protagonist, is on her way up the family’s mountain to an adulterous liaison with a younger man, suggesting her compromised moral position. There is a deliberateness, however, to Dellarobia’s actions: adultery here (which is not actually consummated, as she is stopped by the butterflies and the revelation they inspire) is not an accidental expression of excessive emotion, but an active choice on her part. She is not, then, unaware of the

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fallout of her actions, yet chooses to act anyway in a way that privileges her own desires over her other responsibilities (a choice that Kingsolver rightly notes is not as morally straightforward as it might appear). Right from the beginning of the novel, then, Dellarobia operates at the intersection of personal agency and an awareness of its repercussions for others. The revelation of the butterflies, however, begins to rebalance the relationship between these two vectors guiding her behavior. The revelation begins, suitably enough, with echoes of the biblical story of Moses and the burning bush: “A small shift between cloud and sun altered the daylight, and the whole landscape intensified, brightening before her eyes. The forest blazed with its own internal flame. … No words came to her that seemed sane. Trees turned to fire, a burning bush” (2012: 13–14). The moment of revelation continues: She was on her own here, staring at glowing trees. Fascination curled itself around her fright. … She was pressed by the quiet elation of escape and knowing better and seeing straight through to the back of herself, in solitude. … This was not just another fake thing in her life’s cheap chain of events, leading up to this day of sneaking around in someone’s thrown-away boots. Here that ended. Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became a brightness rising. … A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean something. … It was a lake of fire, something far more fierce and wondrous than either of those elements alone. The impossible. (2012: 15–16)

In between these moments of sublime awe, Dellarobia begins to think differently about what she had set out to do: “Look what she had nearly done. She paled at the size her foolishness had attained. … She could save herself. Herself and her children. … It was not too late to undo this mess” (2012: 15–16). Once she descends the mountain, the flame of revelation remains, “with her mind aflame and her heels unsteady from what she’d seen, she tried to look at the vinyl-sided ranch house in some born-again way. Whatever had gained purchase on her vision up there felt violent” (2012: 16). While Dellarobia’s thoughts and fears here are directed at her family life and she is not yet aware of what has caused the monarch butterflies to end up in the Appalachians, rather than in Mexico, these moments of revelation and, ultimately more significantly, the process of conversion she undergoes (which, again, echoes the story of Pentecost, but also that of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus) begins to model the transformative view of scientific and environmental realities that she develops as the novel progresses. She later comments to Ovid (her scientific mentor whose name points to another Classical model of metamorphosis offered by the novel), “ ‘It’s not that we’re all just lazy-minded. Maybe you think so.’ She struggled to articulate her defense. On first sight, she’d taken these butterflies for fire and magic. Monarchs were

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nowhere in her mind. Probably he wouldn’t believe that. ‘People can only see things they already recognize,’ she said. ‘They’ll see it if they know it’ ” (2012: 282). More immediately after the moment of revelation, Dellarobia observes, in comparing herself with her mother-in-law, that “Hester wasn’t the only one living in fantasyland with righteousness on her side; people just did that, this family and maybe all others. They built their tidy houses of self-importance and special blessing and went inside and slammed the door, unaware the mountain behind them was aflame” (2012: 22–3), yet she “felt herself flung from complacency as if from a car crash, walking away from that vale of fire feeling powerful and bereft” (2012: 23). Maintaining the status quo becomes impossible in the face of revelation, echoing Jacques Rancière’s claim for the political role of the aesthetic (for Dellarobia’s response to the butterflies is, at this point, primarily an aesthetic one): “Political activity reconfigures the distribution of the perceptible. It introduces new objects and subjects onto the common stage. It makes visible what was invisible, it makes audible as speaking beings those who were previously heard only as noisy animals” (2011: 4). Yet, at the same time, Dellarobia does not have the information or skills to do anything with this revelation. Dellarobia, whose own college aspirations disappeared in the face of an unexpected teenage pregnancy and subsequent hasty marriage, explains to Ovid that “kids in Feathertown wouldn’t know college-bound from a hole in the ground. They don’t need it for life around here. College is kind of irrelevant” (2012: 224). While she may have hoped for further education, this marks Dellarobia as exceptional in this locale rather than the norm—a revelation that Ovid responds to with shock “as if she’d mentioned they boiled local children alive” (2012: 224). While the paucity of her own education doesn’t preclude her ability to work with Ovid and his researchers as an assistant, it does highlight the way class-based assumptions around education can act to inhibit action or engagement. Indeed, as Cub, Dellarobia’s husband, makes clear, class-based resentments work to inhibit the ability for revelation and conversion to occur in the first place: as he states, in response to Dellarobia’s articulation of climate change as the cause of the shift in monarch butterfly migration, “Al Gore can come toast his buns on this. … Weather is the Lord’s business” (2012: 260–1). Cub’s implicit sense of his wife’s infatuation with Ovid, his resentment of his infantilization at the hands of his parents, and a more generalized sense of economic disempowerment all act to make it seemingly impossible for him to accept scientific realities; the climatological weirdness that he observes prevents him from recognizing either his role in the state of affairs, broadly understood, or his potential for action. As Sylvia Mayer notes, for Cub and many of the others in the novel, “environmentalism … is linked to social and economic privilege, and climate science is regarded as simply a tool to consolidate such privilege” (2016: 218). As the novel suggests, these class distinctions are mapped onto and replicated by the discursive structures of knowledge. Dellarobia’s toddler Cordie’s growing

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recognition of object permanence illustrates the difficulty in overcoming these epistemologies: Cordie loved disappearing. Which was funny, because not that long ago, Preston could throw that blanket over a toy she was crawling after and Cordie would sit up and howl with despair at its sudden disappearance. She didn’t know to look under the blanket, and Preston couldn’t resist repeating the experiment, amazed at his sister’s conviction that unseen things did not exist. Some time between then and now, Cordie had conquered the biggest truth in the world. (2012: 112)

Dellarobia recognizes this as the “biggest truth in the world”—and thus, in some sense therefore, the most important. But what the novel insists upon is that this truth is not something that is learned once and then conquered. Instead, new limits of invisibility continue to be found and must be uncovered. Dellarobia observes early on, about the disconnect between Ovid and his students and the townspeople, that “there were two worlds here, behaving as if their own was all that mattered. With such reluctance to converse, one with the other. Practically without a common language” (2012: 152). Similarly, in reflecting on Cordie playing with a toy rotary telephone that does not look like what she would ever know as a phone, Dellarobia notes that “Hester wouldn’t get this, of course. In her eyes it was a phone, and that was that. Dellarobia could barely get it herself. She’d seen something so plainly in this toy that was fully invisible to her child, two realities existing side by side. It floored her to be one of the people seeing the world as it used to be. While the kids shoved on” (2012: 134). Later on, Dellarobia states that “words were just words, describing things a person could see. Even if most did not. Maybe they had to know a thing first, to see it” (2012: 250). These passages (of which these are just three instances of other, similar statements throughout) work together to demonstrate how the novel argues for an environmental knowledge and practice that recognizes local knowledges, scientific research, and the complicated way in which these discourses interpenetrate one another. This policed separation between discourses, typically reflecting the way “all knowledge [is] measured, first and last, by one’s allegiance to the teacher” (2012: 261), prevents praxis in any meaningful way—or leads to actions that act to reinforce already existing hierarchies. It is, in other words, insufficient to simply make visible the effects of climate change, then; a meaningful response requires attention to intersectionality. While we see the failure to think and act intersectionally in Cub’s class-based resentments, Kingsolver characterizes him as, ultimately, harmless, because of his limited social capital—a limit that only becomes more pronounced once he leaves his home and moves into the world. Dellarobia’s encounter with Leighton Akins, a visiting environmental activist, highlights the way social capital without accompanying self-reflexivity

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makes visibility just another form of invisibility. Dellarobia contrasts, from the beginning, Akins with the younger activists because he lacks “their wrecked clothes and good cheer” (2012: 311), suggesting an intentional distancing, reinforced in both appearance and affect, between himself and the residents of the area. This is only further underlined when Akins begins to explain himself and his project to her: “I come to places like this, instead of Portland or San Francisco. You people here need to get on board, the same as everyone else. If not more so” (2012: 315). This binary between him (and others like him) and “you people” demonstrates how, despite his ability to see the damage wrought by climate change, he can only understand this damage in a way that seeks to absolve him from culpability. The suggestion that Dellarobia, her family, and other rural residents are the primary cause of climate change is so laughable as to be meaningless—except for the ways in which it reflects all-too-familiar suggestions that characterize the rural as the repository of all negative and repressive social values, in contrast to the supposed enlightened progressiveness of the urban. Moreover, Akins’s claims of “you people” as the primary cause of climate change reflects a more broadly neoliberal, individualist sense of environmental action that is seen in the “pledge” that he travels around with, “a list of things you promise to do to lower your carbon footprint” (2012: 326), a phrase he patronizingly explains to Dellarobia. As he proceeds through his pledge, which includes suggestions such as “bring your own Tupperware to a restaurant for leftovers,” “try to reduce the intake of red meat in your diet,” and “fly less” (2012: 327, 329), and Dellarobia repeatedly responds in such a way that reveals that he is asking her to reduce things that are essentially, if not actually, nonexistent in her life, Akins becomes increasingly uncomfortable, as he is forced to face the particular set of assumptions built into his pledge. Yet, as he leaves, Dellarobia notes that “Leighton Akins would not find the bank [to make more copies of the pledge]. He and his low-emission vehicle would just head out of here. She and Dimmit Slaughter [an antagonistic neighbour] would claim their place among his tales of adversity” (2012: 329). Leaving aside the mounting evidence that personal consumption choices are insufficient, given the scale of already existing carbon pollution, the choices that Akins poses as universal18 are hardly that, even within the Global North, to say nothing of moving outside of Euro-North America. In between Dellarobia’s two encounters with Akins, Ovid observes that “an animal is the sum of its behaviors. … Its community dynamics. Not just the physical body. … Interactions with other monarchs, the migration, everything. The population functions as a whole being. You could look at it that way” (2012: 317). This characterization of the monarch as the sum of its and its community’s behavior is hardly, thus, unique to butterflies, but points to something Akins cannot see and which Dellarobia and others forget in their attempts to isolate discourses and causes. What Flight Behavior points to then is the necessity of thinking at a variety of simultaneous scales about climate change and the

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slow violence it marks. Put differently, the slow violence of climate change is not just happening elsewhere and in the future; it happens close to home and now—as well as at a more sublime distance. During one of their conversations, Ovid explains the scale of catastrophe represented by the shift in the monarchs’ migration patterns—a reality that prompts a viscerally emotional reaction from Dellarobia: She stilled her mind, trying to embrace this sadness Dr. Byron had asked her to understand. “One of God’s creatures of this world, meeting its End of Days,” she said after a quiet minute. Not words of science, she knew that, but it was a truth she could feel. The forest of flame that had lifted her despair, the migratory pulse that had rocked in the arms of a continent for all time: these fell like stones in her heart. … She had only begun to know it. Now began the steps of grief. It would pass through this world like that baby in its pelt of red fur, while most people paid no attention. … “I didn’t know it was that bad. I want to help out here, I’m glad to.” (2012: 229)

Dellarobia responds using the language of biblical revelation that suffuses the novel, that of personal tragedy (her stillborn baby), and of more generalized grief; she translates, then, the “words of science” into “a truth she could feel.” And she ends with a statement of action: “I want to help out here.” This discursive translation and its eventual translation into a desire to act (a desire that, at this point, Dellarobia doesn’t really have the skills to turn into actual behaviors) culminate at the end of the novel with her separation from Cub and enrolment in community college classes. While this replicates a familiar liberal narrative of education as the vehicle of escape from working-class drudgery (a narrative certainly at work here), it also suggests a complex response to the recognition of climate change’s impact on her life and the ways she might act to mitigate its effects (for this novel is profoundly skeptical of the possibility of actually halting the effects of climate change). Flight Behavior demands of its readers that they think differently about climate change as “out there,” and as, instead, something that is already here—with a concurrently changed sense of how we must respond to it. This not only recognizes the already existing forms of cosmopolitanism at work in rural places and, thus, reading rural places differently, but reorients the directionality associated with cosmopolitan revelation. Cosmopolitanism is not something one acquires by going “out there” or bringing elsewhere home, but by recognizing the way “here” is already “there” and that “there” is already “here.”

Imagining the Afterlife of Climate Change If Flight Behavior is set in advance of or the midst of environmental catastrophe, illustrating the way that effects typically imagined as belonging vaguely,

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globally elsewhere, are increasingly much closer to the North American readers of the novel than they had thought, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl is set firmly in a post-collapse, post-catastrophe world where the global axis of power has firmly tilted away from Europe and North America.19 Indeed, US culture operates as a kind of classicism, akin to the rhetorical operation of Ancient Greece or Egypt: “Yates had books of his own. Dusty tomes he’d stolen from libraries and business schools across North America, the neglected knowledge of the past—a careful pillaging of Alexandria that had gone entirely unnoticed because everyone knew global trade was dead” (2009: 70–1). While India is a waning power in the near past of the novel’s chronology, Thailand has become the center of the world, principally because it had closed its borders early and, most importantly, maintained a seed bank as collateral against the omnivorous destruction of corporate agriculture: “The seedbank has kept us independent of your kind. … You’re saying that you yoked the world to your patented grains and seeds, happily enslaved us all—and now you finally realize that you are dragging us all to hell” (2009: 167). Similar to the claims made by Timothy Taylor and Ruth Ozeki in Chapter 1 addressing food risk, Bacigalupi appears to suggest that the local is the site of biodiversity, in contrast to global monoculture, and, thus, localizing is the pathway to preventing or correcting the global climate crisis. By localizing, these texts argue, we can abbreviate, potentially even eliminate, the slow violence created by colonizing systems of capital and expansion that off-load the consequences of risk to global elsewheres.20 However, despite the virtues of Thai protectionism in this novel and its preservation of a viable society, Bacigalupi reminds readers that economic protectionism can too easily go hand in hand with forms of xenophobic protectionism and, particularly in this novel, hierarchical and exploitative labor conditions—something that is central to the novel from the very beginning pages: “The workers cost twice as much as they should. Another problem of dealing with the Kingdom. Thai workers for Thai jobs. Yellow card refugees from Malaya are starving in the street, and he can’t hire them. By rights, Hock Seng should be out in the job lines starving with all the other survivors of the Incident” (2009: 18). Later, Hock Seng observes that the neighborhoods populated by refugee labor are most susceptible to flooding from beyond the city wall: “If the seawall gave way, the entire slum would drown in nearly cool water” (2009: 77). The refugees’ economic precarity here is echoed in and compounded by their physical precarity. In other words, while Taylor and Ozeki (just two examples of this rhetoric in food writing) suggest that localizing works to mitigate these precarities, Bacigalupi highlights the way that this very rhetoric reinforces the precarity of marginalized subjects;21 moreover, he illustrates the seeming inexorability of this xenophobia in the face of patriotic localization of the sort practiced by the Thai and believed by Jaidee and Kanya. In the very final pages of the novel, when General Akkarat has authorized the destruction of the seed bank in order to receive paramilitary support from the agricultural corporations, Kanya, in charge of supervising this destruction, sabotages it in order to protect Thai sovereignty. Yet, as she

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does this, she spots Hock Seng, who is in the seed bank, and refers to him as a “yellow card,” the pejorative term for refugee in the novel. The sovereign vision of the local, here encompassing the nation, that encourages forms of biodiversity cannot escape from its investment in racial distinction—which overlays the labor divisions. This is only further compounded when gender intersects race and labor social positions—though it is also these intersections that provide the potential for some variety of social response to catastrophe. The narrative tension operative between Kanya and Emiko, the titular windup girl, demonstrates how an awareness of the complicated ways various social positions and form both reinforce one another and provide a particular orientation to the world, particularly in light of the novel’s two philosophical positions toward the world: Expansion and Contraction. Kanya, understanding these various subject positions as separable and maintainable, espouses Contraction as the only viable option in a world destroyed by climate change and the “calorie corporation” who exploit this devastation for profit. Emiko, on the other hand, whose experience as a coerced sex worker is reflexively coterminous with her labor and racial position,22 espouses something closer to an Expansion position as the novel closes with her as part of a group of disgraced calorie corporation scientists and other windups. While this group is not without its own complicated politics, it offers one of the very few examples in this novel of a collection of people working toward a shared goal; indeed, the only other immediate example, beside the Thai army, is a collection of corporate representatives who want to work together to open Thailand up to corporate trade. This is a helpful reminder that collectives are not straightforwardly politically admirable or even neutral. As the opposing viewpoints Kanya and Emiko offer at the end of the novel remind us, to say nothing of the similar opposition between proponents of Contraction and Expansion throughout the rest of the novel, various attitudes toward global citizenship contain myriad inflections of their own social embeddedness. We see this throughout Flight Behavior with Ovid’s initial desire that climate science is discourse removed from repercussions: it observes and reports, it does not declare or propose. He imagines, therefore, a zone of global behavior—climate—that transcends the politics of everyday life. Dellarobia’s circumstances interrupt his pretensions to transcendence but Kingsolver’s novel remains heavily localized in its ability to imagine outcomes. While Dellarobia finds moments of communal connection both in Ovid’s lab and with Hester and the other women who provide alternative models of knowledge to Ovid’s scientific detachment and Bear’s investment in clear-cut logging, her actions at the end of the novel—separating from Cub and enrolling in college—are all, at least in the short term, individual and deliberately so. Her married life has been overdetermined by her role as mother and daughter-in-law, subsuming the self underneath the complicated web of social expectations that shape heteronormative marriages. Her decision, therefore, to abandon the normative

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collectivity in the form of the family in favor of personal development is totally explicable and also remains invested in liberal modes of development: formal education as the one path to social, and subsequently economic, mobility. Kingsolver, thus, cannot ultimately envision a path outside of or away from the liberal poles of self and family. Kanya and Emiko, however, begin to point to something a little different. Kanya’s advancement through the ranks of the Thai military follows a vision not totally dissimilar from Dellarobia’s (liberal) belief that autonomous work is her pathway to advancement. However, her complicated mentor relationship with the dogmatic Jaidee, her own double agency, and her final treasonous moment when she engineers the destruction of the seed bank, all undercut a model of self-advancement and personal success at all cost. Kanya’s understanding of the world—however limited and ultimately xenophobic it might be—is ultimately shaped by a communal ethos that understands herself as only part of a larger social whole. Moreover, it is an ethos that the novel portrays as driven by sincere aspirations toward saving the Thai nation from both the predations of the calorie corporations and the ravages of climate collapse. This is different from Anderson’s sense of self-promotion, for instance, and Jaidee’s dogmatic investment in the rules; Kanya’s sense of her place in a social whole is more flexible and contingent. She models, then, a response to the risks of contemporary life—and life in this novel is overdetermined by its own precarity, with only a difference in scale, rather than kind, for Bangkok’s inhabitants—that envisions the individual as necessarily linked to other individuals and, more broadly, a polis with changing borders (no matter how solid and stable the walls of the city might initially appear). Her sense of who constitutes another member of her polis is foreshortened by the structural racism that Bangkok is built upon and dependent on the limits of a patriotic nationalism. Yet, this is distinct from both the Trade and Environment Ministries and the calorie corporations who only understand the collective as a vehicle for personal wealth and power. The collective, thus, exists in these scenarios as a funnel toward its oligarchic center. Kanya, by contrast, envisions a much more dispersed sense of power and, perhaps more compellingly, a sense of the responsibilities the collective bears beyond the accumulation of wealth. Moreover, Kanya is, of all the employees of the Trade and Environment Ministries and the calorie corporations, the only one left standing at the end of the novel—suggesting that her social protectionism is more viable than the economic self-protection of those other groups. Nonetheless, her actions at the end of the novel leave Bangkok flooded—something that, as Hock Seng observed in the quotation above, would disproportionately impact the city’s most precarious residents. The character who closes the novel, Emiko, is one such resident of the city as she doesn’t even hold the status of human. And while Kanya’s actions and statements at the end of the novel reveal her inability to move past a parochial xenophobia toward the city’s refugee population, she views the windups in a

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similar way, noting of another windup that she encounters that “it apes the motions of humanity, but it is only a dangerous experiment that has been allowed to proceed too far” (2009: 328). But it is from this very position of the nonhuman that Emiko begins to imagine a community dependent upon modes of kinship dissociated both from corporate control and normative kinship relations (both familial and national). Her actions throughout the novel are, in fact, catalyzed by Anderson’s drunken, postcoital mention of windup enclaves in the mountains: “There are whole villages up there, living off the jungles. It’s poor country, genehacked half to death, out beyond Chiang Rai and across the Mekong, but the windups there don’t have any patrons and they don’t have any owners. The war’s still running, but if you hate your niche so much, it’s an alternative to Raleigh [the brothel owner to whom she is indentured]” (2009: 52–3). From the beginning, then, Emiko’s action is shaped by this vision of an overhaul of the systems of labor that fundamentally limit her life. Like in Strawberry Fields, The Windup Girl understands labor solidarity—and its potential to upend the hierarchies of contemporary capital—as central to managing precarities, even transforming these precarities into something else altogether. Kanya’s insistence on national solidarity as the pathway to safety in the face of precarity and its subsequent limitations are contrasted, then, with Emiko’s belief in post-human, labor solidarity. Where Dellarobia ends the novel with a more expansive, less domestically centered notion of her labor options, Emiko goes even further to imagine a future where labor is no longer alienated under the structures of capital. Dellarobia, then, while working or aspiring to a less personally precarious future, still remains tied to a system dependent on precarity for its very operation. The Windup Girl attempts to imagine something more radical, then. In The Shock Doctrine (2007), Naomi Klein illustrates the way neoliberal politicians have used the moment of catastrophe as an opportunity to institute radical austerity measures and economic realignment along orthodox neoliberal values; Bacigalupi asks, then, whether the opposite might be possible. Could the moment of catastrophe, when the precarity of everyday life is at its most heightened, provide an opportunity for a radical overhaul, but to form a different status quo than that of late capitalism? Indeed, the novel demonstrates in a number of different ways the opportunities that catastrophe offers for reimagining the world. More or less every central character in the novel, plus many of those for whom we don’t have access to their point of view, is interested in transforming the world—usually in their favor in the most mercenary way. What we might say of Flight Behavior is that it retains an investment in and hope for renovation and reform of already existing modes of behavior and thought; The Windup Girl is substantively less optimistic about the possibility of reform of a thoroughly corrupted system. Instead, like the “environmentalism from below” espoused by Rob Nixon in Slow Violence, The Windup Girl focuses on the transformative work done by those who have previously been the most marginalized. However, rather than a trickle-up effect, where those in power

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are changed by this work, the novel ends with most of those previously in power dead or, at the very best, thoroughly sidelined from social life (General Akkarat, for instance, one of the few remaining alive becomes a hermit monk). This is hardly the slow, incremental change of Flight Behavior. In fact, a simple way to distinguish the scale of the endings of each novel is that each ends with a flood: the family farm in Flight Behavior and Bangkok in its entirety in The Windup Girl. While the Old Testament–style justice of Kanya’s flood is probably not aspirational for a risky cosmopolitanism, it does provide a mode of considering the relationship between the cosmopolitan and non-cosmopolitan subject. In this case, it upends altogether the typical alignment of those categories: if businessmen like Anderson typically seem cosmopolitan with their global mobility and commodity markers of sophistication (akin to Ovid’s cosmopolitanism in comparison to Dellarobia and her family), they are here shown to be unable to embrace the millennial thinking of Kanya’s and Emiko’s risky cosmopolitanism. Implicitly, this then highlights the scale of risk that either group is actually prepared to embrace: Anderson and others are prepared to risk something if it is near guaranteed to work in their favor and to lead to the further accumulation and/or consolidation of wealth. Kanya and Emiko are prepared to undertake risky behavior that has a very high chance of leading to their own destruction because of the impossibility of imagining any real social mobility under the metastasized capital of the novel. An acknowledgment of personal precarity, then, acts as a necessary condition of possibility for action in The Windup Girl; so long as we can imagine our own precarity as limited and mitigatable, we are prepared to ignore that of global others in service of the hegemonic maintenance of the status quo. The Windup Girl, then, is one of the texts under examination in this book most prepared to follow the consequences of catastrophe to their most radical and, indeed, catastrophic ends (Blackfish City would be the other). This, perhaps, reflects the scale of risk and consequence at play in this novel: a world post–climate catastrophe is one where incremental change is meaningless. For example, were Emiko to, say, enroll in some educational institution, this would be, effectively, without purpose.23 Similarly, we see, through her relationship with Anderson, that the white man savior through romantic love story line is a nonstarter in The Windup Girl. Gibson arguably plays a version of the white savior role, promising Emiko that he can find a way for her to act as the progenitor of more windups: The windup movement is not a required trait. There is no reason it couldn’t be removed. … Limitations can be stripped away. The safeties are there because of lessons learned, but they are not required; some of them even make it more difficult to create you. Nothing about you is inevitable. … Someday, perhaps, all people will be New People and you will look back on us as we now look back at the poor Neanderthals, … You cannot be changed, but your

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children—in genetic terms, if not physical ones—they can be made fertile, a part of the natural world. (2009: 385–6)

Gibson, with his echoes of Kurtz in the jungle at his eugenicist height, is a disturbing figure for Emiko to venture with out into the world at the end of the novel, accompanied by Kip, another windup. However, Gibson, old and infirm, is positioned as simply a stepping stone for Emiko (and, presumably, Kip): necessary for his scientific abilities, but not someone with whom Emiko forms an affective bond (in the way she does, however limited, with Anderson). The novel suggests, then, that the risky cosmopolitan subject might find some utilitarian, cyborgian use in the structures of a pre-collapse world. Emiko’s affective sense of herself as part of a collective is with fellow windups who have been exploited and brutalized; Gibson is simply a means to an end—both to find the other windups and for creating new ways of producing more windups. She imagines, then, a world emerging from the wreckage of collapse. Her experience of risk and precarity provides an opportunity for imagining the world differently, not to fetishize the experience of risk itself but to suggest that the germ for this new world is already in place. Both Flight Behavior and The Windup Girl, while still dealing with the trope of revelation, suggest that the revelation at play isn’t about the scope of climate change, exactly. Instead, the revelation is a recognition of one’s own precarity in a global system and, subsequently, the catalyzing operation of this awareness. Where Burtynsky’s and Salgado’s projects are still locked into the revelation of climate change alone, with a limited recognition of the consequences of this, these novels begin to imagine how the “shock” of revelation might offer a site from which to imagine new worlds—a project very much in the vein of Octavia Butler. This isn’t, however, the increasingly unviable belief in individual action as the solution to systematic environmental crisis and imminent collapse; instead, it is a recognition of new solidarities which might be imagined around forms of cosmopolitan connections that recognize shared climate precarity, rather than liberal humanism.

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Chapter 4 R I SK , A C T IO N , A N D S YM PAT H Y

The previous chapters have focused on the way contemporary literature works to diagnose the cosmopolitan causes and consequences of risk, raising questions about how to situate their principally Western and middle-class readers (and, generally, characters) in a global risk economy in a way that productively and collectively engages with precarity, rather than privatizing and individualizing security. But can literature move beyond the diagnostic impulse to begin, however tentatively, imagining how those readers and characters might act within the cosmopolitan risk economy that they are imbricated with everyday? One way, of course, that literature in general, and the novel in particular, has often been enlisted in such a project is through the empathetic education it is believed to provide: literature, so the argument goes, teaches its audience how to feel with fictional others, offering, therefore, a model for feeling with real-world others. Yet as Rachel Greenwald Smith argues, this expansion of empathy— seemingly posed as a corrective to the atomizing tendencies of capital (indeed, it is Adam Smith himself who first links the need for sympathy with others as a way to mitigate the effects of laissez faire capitalism)—is increasingly part of the very demands of neoliberal capital: “the individual’s economic autonomy is not seen as threatened by affective ties [but that] these ties are invested with an economic imperative[;]‌attachments to others [are] themselves constitutive of the individual’s full realization” (2015: 40, 41). Similarly, Suzanne Keen (2007) reminds her readers that the actual effects of novelistic empathy are generally unpredictable and unreliable. Nonetheless, in her discussion of art, care, and the role of the novel in Never Let Me Go, Anne Whitehead observes that, while “art cannot save us in any straightforwardly utilitarian way,” “the literary reorients us from expectations of profit or gain toward questions of ethics” (2011: 80). She concludes by noting that “we should care, but perhaps not too possessively or too exclusively” (2011: 81). At the same time, as Shameem Black notes, “sentimental connections have the capacity to make the unmanageable feel intimate, to make the global feel small, and to make the minute gesture feel ethically significant [and thus] accomplish in practice what more robust philosophies of expanded concern have often been unable to provide” (2009: 286). Whitehead and Black usefully resist a notion of narrative

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as salvation (a notion perhaps long debunked by literary critics but which still maintains a popular stranglehold: see, for instance, every single freshman entrance essay written by a prospective English major) but point to the smallscale uses of empathy (and its limits). The tension between the inclination toward empathy that narrative produces and a simultaneous recognition of empathetic stagnancy, even the moral limitations of empathy, cannot help but resonate throughout the diagnostic impulse at play in the texts under examination in this book: they aim to make visible existing or create new sites from which to feel with global others. This chapter, then, shifts to examine two novels—Catherine Bush’s The Rules of Engagement and John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener—that start from this tension and work to consider how one acts/can act in the face of these tensions. While neither novel offers politically ideal options (an impossible expectation, anyhow), they both offer glimpses of how to conceptualize a cosmopolitan risk that does not limit itself to diagnostic empathy. Both novels focus on the actions that risk requires of the responsibly cosmopolitan citizen; the diagnostic role of recognizing one’s position in a global risk economy is dispensed with pretty quickly in both and, indeed, taken as somewhat self-evident. The Rules of Engagement follows Arcadia Hearne, a Canadian researcher of global conflict, living in London. Her arrival in London is spurred by a series of tempestuous love affairs as a college student, culminating in Evan and Neil, her two lovers, fighting a duel over her in the Toronto ravines. Now, decades afterward, she must grapple with the way this has led her to withdraw from all forms of both risk and responsibility. The Constant Gardener is similarly interested in the overlap between personal trauma and global responsibility. Here, Justin Quayle, a career diplomat for the British Foreign Service, tries to uncover the causes of his wife Tessa’s murder. Tessa, a lawyer, has been trying to uncover the links between pharmaceutical giant, KVH, the humanitarian industry, and the Kenyan and British governments. The Rules of Engagement ends with Arcadia smuggling Canadian passports into Kenyan refugee camps, spurred by her involvement with Somali and Iran asylum seekers, while The Constant Gardener ends with the implied murder of Justin in the same spot as his wife, as he gets too close to the truth of her murder. Both novels make use of romantic love as an empathetic catalyst but end up suggesting the way this can act as an alibi for information readily and clearly available to them previously; indeed, that their impetus to take action requires emotional catalysts is shown to be a limit of both Arcadia’s and Justin’s thinking. Instead, both novels demonstrate that risky practices, not feelings or subject positions, are at the heart of a cosmopolitanism invested in a more socially just world. This chapter begins by interrogating both novels’ use of the expansion or revelation of information and romantic love as catalyzing forces, and the way this is connected to the narrative conventions that allow—or disallow— empathy. The subsequent sections examine the various ways both Bush and Le Carré highlight their characters’ situation within global economies of risk

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that have been made obscure by their desire to preserve personal security. The final section takes up the specific forms of risky cosmopolitan practices that each novel envisions for its characters and their attendant awareness of their responsibility as part of a global community of subjects made precarious by the intersections of colonizing capital. The Rules of Engagement and The Constant Gardener, I argue, offer steps for moving, however tentatively, past cosmopolitan feelings to make practices central to a risky cosmopolitanism.

Expanding Sympathy, Limiting Action Common to and persistent in both The Constant Gardener and The Rules of Engagement are assertions, from the main characters, that they did not know the details or depth of the violence surrounding them or, if they did know, that they were unsure of the most effective way to act. Justin and Arcadia each exist in a space characterized by knowing and not knowing, acting and not acting. Further, their prevarications are highlighted through comparison with others who act, however injudiciously. While Justin’s and Arcadia’s desire for safety and protection—from physical and mental/emotional threats—seems, on one hand, eminently reasonable, especially according to neoliberal common sense, the comparisons set up in the text, on the other hand, reveal this desire as not only impossible, but reliant upon privileges neither wish to fully acknowledge. Le Carré and Bush query their protagonists’ inability or unwillingness to act on two fronts: as academics (though neither work within the traditional academy, both are occupied by research-driven employment in a way that is self-consciously academic) and, more problematically, in their involvement in heteronormative romance narratives. From these two vantage points—academia and romantic love—Justin and Arcadia undergo a process of self-transformation seemingly designed to expand their sympathetic connections with others; indeed, it is the imaginative fertility of one (romantic love) that enables them to abandon the sterility of the other (academia). Both texts usefully illustrate the way both risky theories and practices are limited by highly selective sympathies. The tension, then, between seeing and not seeing—and the actions made subsequent to these optics—impacts cosmopolitan ontologies; only when Justin and Arcadia know what they have always resisted knowing—and subsequently act—can they locate themselves as engaged cosmopolitical subjects. The first chapters of The Constant Gardener, told from the perspective of Sandy Woodrow, set up a clear contrast between those who research and those who act. This contrast maps itself through the contrast between those who see the world as they want to (though in a romanticized, idealized fashion), and those who know it as it is (here, cynical and hard-bitten). This distinction between action and passivity overlaps with notions of class and social hierarchies throughout the novel.1 These distinctions, as made by Sandy, are, on some level, ironized by his monstrous self-satisfaction, and self-promotion.

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His underestimation of both Tessa and Justin reveals him as remarkably shortsighted and an ultimately unreliable narrator. Nonetheless, as readers, we don’t fully know this in these first chapters. And while Woodrow’s assessment of Justin and, to some extent, Ghita is shown to be inaccurate, his descriptions of Coleridge, the High Commissioner, and Tim Donohue, the spy, retain a good deal of validity throughout. These descriptions of Coleridge and Donohue emphasize their relative disinclination to act on information. Coleridge, for instance, is “a hollowed, hyperintelligent man, an eternal student of something [yet] had somehow remained stranded on the brink of manhood” (Le Carré 2001: 25). Donohue, similarly, “looked even sicker than usual … sunken, colorless cheeks. Nests of crumbling skin below the drooping yellowed eyes. The straggling mustache clawed downward in comic despair” (2001: 8–9). Both men are characterized as hollowed-out, occupying the periphery of manhood, either through the appearance of youth or extreme age. Yet, on hearing of Tessa’s murder, Donohue responds with “probing stares” (2001: 17), while Coleridge is in tears (2001: 25), with Woodrow suspecting that Donohue has learned of Tessa’s death before him, through the spy network of information (2001: 17). Both Coleridge and Donohue are understood as gatherers of information, yet only one of them is able to transform this knowledge into action. Coleridge, in his reliance on colonial-era notions of English civility and good governance, attempts to address Tessa’s death through gentility and the appropriate (though unofficial) bureaucratic channels. Despite all of Coleridge’s “looking into things,” he effects no change. Indeed, at the end of the novel, he disappears “into the catacombs of official Whitehall [of which] little was said, but much implied” (2001: 538). The Constant Gardener, thus, is not a novel that demonstrates the rewards of knowledge-gathering. Even Tim Donohue, who collects information in the service of the British intelligence service and, implicitly, props up corporate and corrupt regimes, is a spectral figure who acts as a haunting reminder of the uses to which knowledge might be put. Tessa herself makes use of her legal research skills to assemble the portfolio damning KVH and the effects of Dypraxa. Similarly, Justin reassembles her research after her death. But, notably, the research is either ineffective in its intended manner (Tessa’s portfolio leads to her murder, not the diplomatic intervention she advocates), or, at some level, beside the point. There is the constant sense throughout that Justin’s research leads him to discover things he already knows and, more significantly, results in his murder. For neither Tessa nor Justin is research the goal; knowledge is there to confirm what they already know (however this might be determined). Indeed, strikingly throughout The Constant Gardener is the near-constant sense that what Tessa, Arnold, Justin, and others discover is that it is already common knowledge. Tessa, in particular, occasionally appears to think that what she learns is strikingly new, only to have someone like Sandy, a company man to the bone, suggest that he, more or less, already knows her information. Her actions—her interest in the Kibera

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slum, having her baby in a Nairobi hospital, her final visit to Lokichoggio— truly surprise Sandy and others. Her actions are what make her unintelligible to the diplomatic community in Nairobi, not the information that she uncovers. A tension thus exists in the novel between the gathering of information, and the use to which that information is put. Justin must know, consciously, what Tessa knew in order to act. Without the specifics of her information, he cannot disrupt the complacency of the corporate-neocolonial complex. Further, this information is shown to be risky: those who know—and acknowledge the ethical issues surrounding it—end up demoted, at best, and murdered, at worst. Yet the gathering of information is very much secondary to specific actions being taken. Given the horrors of Dypraxa, and all the pharmaceuticals it stands in for, action seems key. Yet the actions to be taken are relatively unconsidered by Justin and, implicitly, by Tessa. Once they both figure out the source of Dypraxa in Kenya—Lorbeer—they find him and he then sets in motion their deaths. While Justin’s actions are inexorably determined by Tessa’s actions, the novel offers little sense of why the near-solitary journey is presumed to be most effective. Actions here do not require the same level of thought that their research would indicate; indeed, both Justin and Tessa seem to follow a predictably linear route from low-level bureaucrat to those higher up (they act, perhaps inevitably, like characters in a middlebrow thriller). Once Justin sets out to discover who is responsible for Tessa’s and Arnold’s murders, his actions can no longer proceed in the rhizomatic fashion characteristic of the research he does, but must advance from cause to effect in a, more or less, straight line. The Rules of Engagement takes the opposite approach: Arcadia’s decision to act arrives slowly and only after significant consideration. Arcadia’s careful deliberation of potential action is, in fact, contrasted with those who act, seemingly without consideration (those, in other words, who might seem to resemble Tessa and Justin). The novel repeatedly draws our attention to the fact that Arcadia is neither a war correspondent nor a scholar who partakes in fieldwork. This distinction between correspondent/active scholar and the work Arcadia does is repeatedly framed in terms of risk, safety, and gender: female war correspondents are “permitted to be fascinated by war while trailing the allure of those who thrive in dangerous situations. They’re women who race through sniper fire gathering stories about human suffering, who manage to win the confidence of hot-blooded, sex-starved young men brandishing AK-47s” (2000: 15–16). Arcadia here portrays—however self-servingly—risk as the work of glamorous ingénues who use, even exploit, their sexuality in service of a scoop. Indeed, the war correspondents—male and female—who populate Rules of Engagement do not seem far removed from a romanticized vision of the Second World War–era war correspondents. And while war correspondents are framed as active participants in the work of making visible invisible conflicts, the intimation is that they undertake risk for their own quasientrepreneurial glory. Arcadia’s fears about her own investment in ensuring Basra’s safety resonates with the text’s attitude toward war correspondents and

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others like them: “I wondered if this was simply selfishness masking itself as altruism, a kind of mania in which I ultimately had my own interests at heart” (2000: 187). The conflation of risk and selfishness here points to the necessity to not presume about the end point of risk behavior; that acting riskily is not necessarily a cosmopolitan act; “Bush’s novel posits that histories of engagement, whether between individuals or nation-states, need to be more completely, and complexly, acknowledged” (Authers 2009: 793). Yet while the war correspondents of the novel are presented as solipsistically risky, Arcadia’s refusal to take risks is hardly valorized. The description of the office she works out of reveals the ironically isolated nature of the work she does—despite its global connections: These rooms are our shell, the carapace that hides the telecommunication lines and fiber-optic cable and complex binary codes that store our information and connect us to each other, to colleagues, and to conflicts around the globe. We cross borders with ease this way, even though the computers are chained to bolts in the floor and the red eye of an alarm system blinks high on one wall. (2000: 15)

The juxtaposition between the mobility of information and the immobility of infrastructure (anchored to the floor and protected against theft) is paradoxical; risk is studied but studiously avoided. Further, as Arcadia later reveals, the study of risk can be a way of simply deferring responsibility: Given that you can’t act everywhere, do everything, just as you can’t intervene in all conflicts, you have to determine your zones of responsibility. That’s what we grapple with in intervention studies. You have to choose where you’re going to take your risks, set limits. As you travel from zones of safety into zones of danger. That’s what makes risk meaningful. (2000: 190)

Is responsibility about taking the most studied, most prepared course of action? Or is it in the acting itself? Bush, therefore, raises questions about what cosmopolitan risks entail and under what circumstances they might be taken. Notably, however, even in Arcadia’s list of the reasons to avoid taking risks prematurely, the question of responsibility is central—suggesting that risks must be taken, especially by those who can. Yet while both Justin and Arcadia eventually act, taking up a risky cosmopolitanism, both novels back away from the ethical decisions being made in favor of framing their decisions in a narrative of heteronormative romance. Thus, Justin’s and Arcadia’s actions are interpretable under the rubric of a cosmopolitan ethics, but this is ultimately undercut by the suggestion that they act, not as a way of affirming a new ethics of global interconnection and behavior, but to coalesce heterosexual partnerships. While both romantic pairings signal minor social transgressions—the age difference between Justin

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and Tessa, the ethnic difference between Arcadia and Amir—these primarily serve to highlight the true sympathy that exists in each pairing. Further this romantic framing raises questions about catalyzing engaged cosmopolitan worldviews: Are they simply the response to interpersonal dynamics? Or, do they emerge out of a conscious decision to understand oneself as part of a larger category of belonging, with attendant responsibilities? Most immediately problematic about the romance narrative of empathetic evolution is that it posits a model for global citizenship dependent upon encountering someone who already possesses something like an engaged cosmopolitanism in a direct fashion, transforming this into a bildungsroman-esque narrative. This manner of direct connection, while perhaps particularly effective in certain scenarios, suggests a model of infection that demands a one-to-one connection. Moreover, a vision of individual choice driven by interpersonal affiliations echoes neoliberal visions of postracism/postfeminism, and so on where the individual’s social and personal connections are the greatest— even sole—influence, denying any larger, collective ethics and responsibility. Personal responsibility ultimately, then, stands in for global responsibility: the individual becomes the be-all and end-all of social change. Cosmopolitanism, then, becomes post-cosmopolitan and thus an alibi, even euphemism, for neoliberal globalization.2 This, ultimately, isolating and atomistic vision of cosmopolitanism is at odds with both texts’ investment in taking risks in order to signal global responsibility. This paradox is particularly apparent in The Constant Gardener. As mentioned above, Justin’s quest to gather knowledge against/about the effects of Dypraxa and KVH is primarily a quest to recover the information already collected by Tessa and Arnold. He shifts from his passive blindness as a member of the British diplomatic corps to an active seeker of truth (a notion that is notably unreflexive in the novel) and taker of risks. Yet this can be read as a melancholic gesture to resist the loss of Tessa. Justin must—almost compulsively—retrace Tessa’s steps and actions; he reanimates her through repetition. Indeed, while his actions are framed, to some degree, as an attempt to find and bring to justice her murderers, he ultimately loses this specific interest (in part, this is in response to the varied levels of guilt held by many people: Tessa is murdered by many, not just those who physically kill her), becoming a martyr at the site of her death. Justin’s need to repeat ultimately occludes any deaths that are not Tessa’s. His melancholic need to make Tessa live is increasingly posited as a reflection of an epic love story.3 This situates Justin’s actions within a neoliberal frame of romance as self-realization. Moreover, this move on the novel’s part to recontain Justin’s actions within a familiar narrative of romantic love downplays not only the cosmopolitan development he undergoes, but it, in some sense, ironically gives credence to the narrative surrounding Justin developed by the British Foreign Office: that, in his grief, he loses his grip on reality. His actions are those of a grief-stricken widower, not those of a man who belatedly realizes his own complicity in global oppressions and violence.

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More significantly, this way of reading of the novel does further discursive violence to the dead Kenyans who populate the novel—particularly Wanza and Arnold (who is not Kenyan, but Congolese-Belgian). These deaths become incidental—no matter either the violence with which they are committed, or their role in a larger pattern of globally unmourned, unnoticed African deaths. Indeed, the brutality of Arnold’s death, when revealed to Justin, is grieved through Ghita—suggesting that it is outside of, in some sense, Justin’s interests. Moreover, the brutality of his death is connected explicitly and repeatedly to his homosexuality, suggesting that his death emerges out of Kenyan homophobia, rather than corporate criminality, as is the understanding of Tessa’s murder. While the novel generally resists all-too-familiar depictions of Africans as less civilized than Europeans and North Americans,4 depicting the predatory capitalism of ThreeBees and “Moi’s Boys” as both the result of lingering colonial inequalities, and the “natural” effects of unregulated neoliberal economic globalization, Arnold’s death, and the justification of it, strikes a jarring note. Yet in the shift to romance, these deaths become nearly invisible as the narrative can only focus on Justin’s melancholic need to return to the lost object of love. If romantic love acts as a catalyst for Justin’s actions but ultimately elides his realization of his enmeshment in globally oppressive regimes, it is a similarly catalytic force in The Rules of Engagement. Yet Arcadia’s romantic past and present act to ground her sense of responsibility; her romances reveal her refusal of responsibility in the face of personal violence in the past, which she extrapolates to consider her avoidance of her necessary connection to ongoing global violence. Indeed, Arcadia’s involvement—romantic and otherwise— nearly disappears from the text once she decides to act. Amir’s own risktaking—actions that both act to repay the debt he feels to those who helped him escape a theocratic Iran, and reflect a sense of global interdependence that decenters his own (relative) privilege—acts as inspiration to Arcadia, challenging her own uneasy complacency. Romantic love is here unsettling—a fact emphasized by Arcadia’s youthful romances with Evan and Neil, both of which have profound effects on her risk aversion. Yet where Justin’s melancholic grief takes the form of following Tessa’s movement—intellectually and physically—suggesting a temporal loop of sorts, Arcadia’s grief is transformed into risk-taking, allowing her to break with her own static past. This, of course, suggests a linear narrative of progressive development, arguing for cosmopolitanism as evolved behavior/perspective. In spite of this, Bush resists a notion of heteronormative romantic love as narrative end point and, more importantly, model for global connection. Significantly, Arcadia’s affairs with Amir, in particular, but also Evan and Neil, are not the only relationships that prompt her to act. Arcadia’s relationships with her sister and Basra (and, though to a lesser extent, her parents) are equally transformational. Bush, therefore, suggests that a broad variety of interpersonal connections, some more extensive than others (Arcadia’s connection with Basra, for instance, is a relatively superficial one), prompts new ways of seeing the world and one’s

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place in it. The matrix of relationships that Arcadia develops over the course of the novel provokes a sense of herself within a community, which becomes increasingly global. The isolation that both neoliberal capital and Justin’s melancholic grief produces is minimized by Arcadia’s commitments to Amir, Basra, Lux, and the memory of Neil. While Arcadia can ultimately only act as an individual, her actions are much more explicitly community driven: she transports an illegal passport to Basra’s sister in a Kenyan refugee camp. This is categorically different from Justin’s individualized martyrdom. While martyrdom can produce its own affective response, here, because it occurs at the close of the novel, it is hard not to read this as primarily an act of selfnegation. The actions that transpire at the close of The Constant Gardener— Ham’s press conference—are ones that close down rather than open up future actions.

Nature, Space, and Risk Beyond the interpersonal or romantic, which suggest at least some degree of self-consciousness on the part of the characters (one makes particular choices of romantic partners), and its individualized and individualizing focus, both novels go further, suggesting the way narratives of space—both natural and constructed—operate to make visible and viable forms of risk and action. Both The Constant Gardener and The Rules of Engagement illustrate how narratives of space naturalize and localize broader narratives of interconnection and responsibility that are shaped by race, gender, class, and geopolitical location. Like romantic love, there is a tendency to see space as outside the machinations of global systems such as capitalism or colonialism, perhaps particularly when envisioning contemporary places. By attending to the links between proximate space and distant ones, these novels offer the opportunity to reconceptualize the everyday operation of cosmopolitan risk. Though appearing only briefly in person in the novel, Basra Alale, the Somalian refugee to whom Arcadia delivers forged travel documents, occupies a significant role throughout the novel as a twinned figure to Arcadia. One of the most obvious ways in which Bush twins these two characters is through their names. Both Basra and Arcadia are names that allude to Edenic spaces; Basra is one of the suggested geographical locations of the biblical Garden of Eden, and Arcadia is the pastoral wilderness home of Pan in Greek mythology, immortalized in Virgil’s Eclogues and Sidney’s Arcadia. Basra and Arcadia evoke, then, premodern sites of innocence and simplicity; both are implicitly paradisal, though not in the sense of any particular afterlife—these are heavenly places, but not heaven. The pastoral suggests “a withdrawal to a place apart that is close to the elemental rhythms of nature, where [one] gains a new perspective on the complexities, frustrations, and conflicts of the social world” (Abrams 2009: 241). As Glen Love suggests, “the pastoral can be a serious and complex

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criticism of life, involved not merely with country scenes and natural life but with a significant commentary on the explicit or implicit contrast between such settings and the lives of an urban and sophisticated audience” (2003: 65). While Rules of Engagement is not a deeply pastoral novel, Bush deploys these allusions to an Edenic pastoral in much the way that Love suggests more typically pastoral works do; namely, these character names evoke the pastoral only to suggest the risk that pervades so much of modern life. This distinction between the pastoral and the dangerous pervades the novel. One of the first descriptions of Arcadia’s London apartment makes this distinction clear: There was comfort in this room, my white cocoon. I’d built a haven within these four walls. There was safety in the flicker of flame against the pale green ceramic tiles that line the fireplace. … In the maps that cover the walls— maps dotted with pins and pencil lines to demarcate the world’s restlessly new and shifting borders. Even in the titles lining the bookshelves, titles like Slaughterhouse and How to Make War and The Origins of War. (2000: 13)

This juxtaposition between “cocoon” and “haven,” and “slaughterhouse” and “war,” suggests the simultaneity of safety and an inescapable danger. A similar comparison occurs further on when Arcadia works in the British War Museum and notes that, outside, “bright lawns blazed beneath a glittery noontime sun— still green on the surface, although if you stepped onto the grass, the ground beneath was hard as tack. … All that pastoral beauty. Sheep would not have looked out of place” (2000: 18). This juxtaposition between hard and soft, cocoon and slaughterhouse, only becomes more explicit when Arcadia meets Basra. On meeting her, Arcadia remembers stories she has heard from war correspondents about the brutal violence done to civilians in Basra (the Iraqi city the character is explicitly named for) during and in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. The implied violence of Arcadia’s scholarly books and the hardness of the ground are shown here to be mere intimations of the more profound violence that the refugee experiences. This second juxtaposition between Basra and Arcadia suggests that a reductive equivalency is drawn between the two, “occlud[ing] the significant differences between these narratives” (Authers 796). We might also read this suggestion of violences in London (however minor or banal) as a reminder of the constant, significant violences that occur elsewhere—often caused (directly or indirectly) by the global systems that touch down in the cities of the Global North like London. These reminders highlight “the hot-spots to which [Arcadia] and London are connected but from which, she believes, they are protected” (Ball 2004: 82). While Arcadia is unsure of Basra’s exact immigration status, her friend’s story of Basra (the city) is about the violence done to Iraqi refugees and this story is flanked by Arcadia’s memories of other, similarly violent immigration stories. While Basra is Somali, rather than Iraqi, her history is connected to similar violence—violence that Arcadia

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(and the readers of this novel, implicitly) has tried to forget. This forgetting is tied to, as Sherene Razack argues, the “mythologies [that] help the nation to forget its bloody past and present” (2004: 9), though here moving past national communities to encompass a more broadly global forgetting. These parallel names indicate one of the ways these two characters are tied together by the novel; a tie that suggests the violence that makes the pastoral an impossibility in contemporary times. Both Arcadia and Basra have experienced violence of different sorts and magnitudes making it impossible for either to imagine the Edenic pastoral that their names evoke. While the catalyzing violence that leads to Basra’s and Arcadia’s immigration is not of the same scale, tellingly, both understand their migration and the necessity of it as stemming from violence. And in both cases, it is neither an abstract violence nor is it something wholly unconnected to their own actions. Both women are framed as agents who, just the same, cannot escape old violences, whether tribal or romantic. Basra “was a university student in Mogadishu, she sang with this group—they were all students … but she was the only girl, and I think she wrote the songs—about the trouble with clans” (2000: 25). Basra is framed here not solely as a helpless victim but as a political agent in a space where political activism, particularly by women, is disallowed. She is framed then as an active, resisting subject rather than the passive object of oppression. This vision of agency points back to the novel’s fundamental concern with the tensions between danger, safety, risk, and responsibility. Violence is repeatedly shown to be endemic to contemporary society—mirroring Hardt and Negri’s claims in Multitude of a contemporary state of perpetual war (2004: 3–95)—yet neither Basra nor Arcadia are presented as wholly victims of this violence. On encountering Basra again, in Toronto, Arcadia notes that “what had struck me, on first meeting, as simple willowiness now seemed, in retrospect, to have been a kind of bony strain, which was missing. She did not look relaxed, exactly, but some taut core of fear had migrated” (2000: 273). This vision of a relaxed Basra evokes popular multicultural platitudes about Toronto, and Canada more broadly, as a place free of the racial and ethnic violence of the rest of the world. Yet this fantasy is troubled by Arcadia’s earlier encounter with a Somali man who knows Basra who warns Arcadia that “you will cause trouble for her. Here. If you do this” (2000: 206), as well as her realization that “clan loyalties were perhaps as strong here as over there. Perhaps Basra’s songs protesting the stranglehold of clan allegiances were known here. Perhaps I should not, in fact, be asking after her” (2000: 189). Violence is never far from the surface—even in the seemingly cosmo-multicultural haven of Toronto. This suggestion of violence in even the most ostensibly safe places echoes through the duel between Evan and Neil that causes Arcadia to flee Canada for London. The duel takes place in the ravines of Toronto—a site that evokes the pastoral nature of both Arcadia’s and Basra’s names yet also introduces a note of wildness to the proceedings, as though what unfolds between Evan and Neil is the result of atavistic passions: further suggesting the inescapability of

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the violence that pervades The Rules of Engagement. Moreover, the unavoidably anachronistic nature of a duel also blurs the distinction between modern/ non-modern, civilized/barbaric that readers might be inclined to use as a way to reduce or dismiss the violence that Basra and Amir experience as the behavior of “uncivilized” or non-modern places. Nature in both the Global North and South, which is all so often depicted as a kind of Romantic refuge from the vicissitudes of modern life, is shown throughout to be just as violent as anywhere else. This might seem, then, to suggest that violence is “natural,” and thus above meaningful notions of culpability: if violence is a natural state, humanity cannot help but be violent. Yet this gets at the forms of risk central to the novel; risk, like violence, cannot be ignored, except with a dehumanizing sense of one’s relation to the rest of the world. In other words, if one discursively off-loads violence onto other spaces, other subjects, this is to deny one’s own part in a global humanity. Indeed, while Rules of Engagement might suggest the inescapability of violence, it does not follow that it advocates an anarchic and violent free-for-all. Instead, this inescapability demands careful and responsible engagement and a rethinking of existing forms of global safety. As Bush suggests throughout, the sense of safety that Arcadia constructs is one centered on a willful denial of reality. Similarly, the names that Arcadia’s father chooses for his daughters (Arcadia and Lux) suggest that he, like Arcadia herself, attempts to create the pastoral in the face of the world’s many dangers. This is, in some ways, a comprehensible gesture, particularly when her father, a nuclear scientist, is all too aware of the potential dangers present in the world, yet it is a gesture that, in addition to erasing risk, negates their presence in a dangerous world. This, then, is an attempt at a kind of separatism—perhaps understandable, but not particularly cosmopolitan or ethical. Moreover, this ability to elide risk and violence is clearly more readily available to already privileged global subjects. The desire for and attempt to create the pastoral becomes, in Rules of Engagement, one that demands a denial of the world. Elements of the pastoral work in a similar way in The Constant Gardener. Le Carré does not establish the same kind of ongoing comparison between modern life and a traditional vision of the pastoral in the manner that Bush does; however, Justin’s gardening, which evokes the pastoral tradition, suggests a similar vision of separatism and a willful renunciation of the world. Significantly, Tessa makes use of Justin’s gardening to protect him from conversations between herself, Ghita, and Arnold, that they decide are better for him not to overhear: Ghita the last of the innocents, head to head over green tea with the very pregnant Tessa, solving the world’s problems in the garden in Nairobi while Justin the absurdly happy skeptic and father-to-be in a straw hat, clips, weeds and prunes his way through the flower beds, tying and watering and playing the middle-aged English bloody fool. “Watch your feet, please, Justin,” they would call to him anxiously. (2001: 275)

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While the text suggests that Tessa and Ghita specifically warn Justin against the predations of safari ants, the implication remains that the warning encompasses a larger, human threat. The language of this passage emphasizes Justin’s fussiness as he seeks to maintain his garden. Justin’s entrenched support for the status quo is at the heart of his general obliviousness to the realities of his role in Kenya. Indeed, he suspects that his official role is why Tessa kept the details of her investigation from him: In the last months, Tessa and Arnold kept Ghita at arm’s length, I assume for her own good. As for myself, it was my perception that they actually mistrusted me. They believed that if I was caught in a conflict of interest, I would owe my first allegiance to the Crown. (2001: 179)

Despite his belief that “never in a thousand years” (2001: 179) would he reject Tessa in favor of national sovereignty, his gardening remains connected to the image of Justin as uninvolved, even emasculated. Indeed, the reader’s first introduction to Justin, through Sandy Woodrow, connects him both with his plants, and the corresponding implication of effeminacy: “On the windowsill at Justin’s left stood a line of potted plants that he was nurturing” (2001: 19). Sandy notices these plants in Justin’s office; meanwhile Justin studies the graphs he has posted on the walls of his office. These graphs, “titled RELATIVE INFRASTRUCTURES 2005–2010 and purported, so far as [Sandy] could make out from where he stood, to predict the future prosperity of African nations” (2001: 19), and their predictive calculations (the novel is published in 2001, so these are calculations that look significantly into the future of the novel’s time), are discursively linked by Sandy with Justin’s nurturing of “jasmine and balsam” (2001: 19). Per Sandy’s descriptions, the predictive and calculative research Justin does is no different in terms of efficacy than his interest in ornamental gardening; it makes things look better but has no larger purpose than the aesthetic. Recurring through these images of Justin as gardener is his inability—either in terms of gender or age—to act as a proper husband to Tessa; given the analogies between Tessa’s activism and motherhood throughout the text, this would suggest that Justin also cannot be a true father, and is similarly unequal to the task of participating in her research. He is “the middle-aged English bloody fool.” Justin is not only aware of this, but seeks to perpetuate it to some degree: And if Arnold dropped by, which at weekends he frequently did, the conversation would take a more specific turn. Their three heads would draw together, their expressions tighten, and if Justin out of mischief watered too close for their comfort, they would make ostentatious small talk till he had removed himself to a more remote flower bed. (2001: 276)

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This would suggest that, like Arcadia and her father, though in a more lighthearted fashion, Justin cultivates his own separation from global realities. By making himself ridiculous through an exaggerated portrayal of himself as the out-of-touch, middle-aged Englishman, Justin guarantees his exclusion from Tessa’s and Arnold’s engagement. Also, noteworthy in this passage and the one quoted earlier is the juxtaposition between Justin as “middle-aged English bloody fool” and a man acting “out of mischief,” suggesting a kind of childishness. Both positions seem to place Justin outside of an engaged sense of responsibility (paralleling the representations of Coleridge and Donohue discussed earlier). While the suggestion that the middle-aged are beyond the political pale seems harsh, the novel would appear to argue that middle age is most readily commensurate with forms of complacency: whether this is Justin’s good-natured obliviousness, or Sandy’s lascivious self-regard. This is only heightened by the text’s continual reminders of how much younger Tessa is than Justin: a fact that seems to reinforce her idealism and Justin’s cautious pragmatism. This would bolster the belief that idealism and engagement is for the young and impractical, making it a “phase” one necessarily outgrows. Yet, this is undercut by Justin’s simultaneous depiction as a child. Rather than only seeing his caution as a logical response to greater worldly experience (in comparison to Tessa’s relative youthful inexperience), this would suggest that caution also reflects a juvenile notion of one’s place in the world. Children are not typically associated with caution; however, the comparison here is not directly about Justin’s caution, but about his attitude toward the sincere engagement demonstrated by Arnold, Ghita, and Tessa. He is preoccupied with childish mischief, while they are concerned with the violences enacted by pharmaceutical companies and effectively endorsed by the national and diplomatic elites. We might compare Justin’s behavior here with Guido, the young boy on Elba who helps Justin with Tessa’s computer. While Guido is, for the most part, understood as “wise beyond his years,” his adoption of a quasi-American, slang-filled dialect when speaking about computers is shown to be extremely off-putting to Justin. While Guido appears to be less self-aware about his mischievousness, his behavior, like Justin’s, results in a wary distance between them; it reminds Justin that Guido is a child and, therefore, removed from the contingencies of his own reality—a reaction that echoes that Tessa’s and Arnold’s response to Justin. Engagement, then, not complacency, becomes the hallmark of adult maturity. Indeed, a similar separation between immature complacency and mature engagement can be seen in the repeated phrase used to describe Sandy: “soldier’s son,” framing him with a childlike relationship to adult responsibilities. Sandy’s and Justin’s retreat into official responsibilities and traditions, then, does not signal an adult acceptance of reality, but, instead, a child-like retreat into fantasy. Caution, like the pastoral, is a retreat from reality, not necessarily an appropriate response to global realities. By implication, Sandy’s and Sir Bernard Pellegrin’s desire that Tessa act like a proper, foreign-service wife reveals their

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own fantastical understanding of both gender roles and of the world in which they live. And as the novel repeatedly reveals, these fantasies are not just delusional but dangerous as Sandy, Pellegrin, and others go to great lengths— often violently—to perpetuate them. While Pellegrin arguably is interested in something larger than safety, Sandy’s desire to cautiously maintain the status quo demonstrates the way in which personal safety might (often) come at the expense of that of others—particularly others who are seemingly invisible to the self. The pastoral as it operates, then, in both The Rules of Engagement and The Constant Gardener acts as a vehicle for refusing one’s necessary incorporation in the world. In neither novel is the pastoral presented as utopic refuge whereby a new world might be imagined and instantiated. Nor, on the other hand, does the pastoral act as a critique of everyday reality by way of contrast. Instead, the critique that emerges is through the suggestion that attempts to imagine the world as pastoral or to create pockets of the pastoral is to, in fact, reiterate already existing forms of political quietism. The world, in other words, is too quick to be pastoralized, denying the uneven access available to it except through romanticized (and trivialized) depictions of poverty (paralleling, for instance, the preponderance of shepherds in classical pastoral romances). Yet, at the same time, alongside notions of the pastoral are notions of cultivation and stewardship (particularly evident in The Constant Gardener). The pastoral is, on one hand, an idyllic or utopic retreat into nature and, on the other, requires an attention to natural rhythms, realities, and interconnections. This second aspect of the pastoral suggests that the pastoral is, in some ways, always already deferred; it can never be fully achieved as it is always in a state of cyclical growth: the adult is not a teleological end point, but one point in a larger sequence. Moreover, responsible stewardship demands the recognition of interconnection: neither the plant nor the individual lives in isolation from its environment. This requires, then, a different approach to the world; safety for the self is impossible if the rest of the ecosystem is at risk. One example of this is when, after the stillbirth of her own child, Tessa breastfeeds the child of Wanza, the dying woman in the same maternity ward. Tessa’s desire to have her child in a Nairobi hospital, rather than returning to England, reflects an attempt to understand herself as part of, not separate from, the place where she lives. Despite the parallel, this suggests far greater engagement with place than, for instance, the aristocrats who play at being shepherds in classical pastoral narratives: Tessa doesn’t want to play at being a shepherd, but desires to become one herself. Rather than maintaining and developing a diplomatic remove from Nairobi, Tessa tries to make herself more, rather than less, a part of it. Place, as Tessa lives it, is embodied and rooted, not something to be either ignored, or transformed into a version of England; Tessa re-territorializes herself in Nairobi, in contrast to the determined deterritorialization, even counterfeit territorialization, of the diplomatic corps.

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In addition to the traditional extraterritoriality of diplomatic missions, the upper-level members of the diplomatic corps reside in a vision of transplanted England: The Woodrows lived in a suburban house of quarried stone and leaded mockTudor windows, one of a colony set in English gardens in the exclusive hilltop suburb of Muthaiga, a stone’s throw from the Muthaiga Club and the British High Commissioner’s residence and the ample residences of ambassadors from country’s you may never have heard of till you ride the closely guarded avenues and spot their nameplates planted among warnings in kiSwahili of dangerous dogs. (2001: 32)

Both the architecture and the landscaping of these houses mimic a heritage vision of European life, with Kenya only intruding in the warnings made to burglars and other presumed criminals. Gardening here is notably not about maintaining or responding to a Kenyan ecosphere; instead, gardens are English—not just in layout but in the plant species grown in them. These gardens, like the houses they surround, are clearly depicted as a colonizing gesture by Le Carré, no matter how postcolonial the nation might appear to be. Moreover, the implicit allusion here to the Civil Station of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India emphasizes how little has changed in the nearly eighty years that separate the two texts—despite the surface differences. Significantly, the architecture and landscaping are inextricably tied here to risk—or, more accurately, an attempt to avoid it. Risk works in two ways here: firstly, as the kiSwahili warning about the “dangerous dogs,” suggesting to potential intruders that the risk of entrance to these homes should be considered high and, secondly, as the intrusion of the African into the selfcontained body of embassies. The description above continues, making explicit the constant presence of risk: In the wake of the bomb attack on Nairobi’s U.S. Embassy, the Foreign Office had supplied all staff of Woodrow’s rank and upward with crash-proof iron front gates and these were conscientiously manned day and night by shifts of exuberant Baluhya and their many friends and relatives. Round the garden’s perimeter, the same inspired minds had provided an electrified fence crowned with coils of razor wire and intruder lights that blared all night. In Muthaiga there is a pecking order about protection, as there is about many other things. (2001: 32)

As with the nameplated warnings, native Africans are only present in this neighborhood as (literal) gatekeepers, acting as a makeshift security force. Yet, while Bantus are employed to maintain, by whatever means necessary, the boundaries of the area, they are themselves kept outside. Apart from the domestic labor force, the homes are designed to repel African intruders; in

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their landscaping, this expands from human intrusion to include botanical interlopers. The irony of this, of course, is so transparent as to be almost laughable. And while, as Le Carré notes, there is a legitimate threat that leads to the intensified security, this is notably a threat, despite initial appearances, that does not emerge out of a geopolitical vacuum but is a direct response to American (and Western, more generally) presence in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East. Le Carré thus subtly suggests that the interests the Foreign Office goes to such lengths to protect in their homes—and in their business enterprises as we see in their treatment of ThreeBees and KVH—are part of a system (which Le Carré terms “diplomatic gentry” (2001: 32)) that might be understood as partially responsible for its own insecurity. In other words, the same extraterritorial interests that appear to protect the diplomatic corps also undermine, in part, its safety. This interconnection is echoed later in the novel in the discussion of the triangular economy of humanitarianism and genocide in Sudan (2001: 506–7)—though this economy is not only more invisible but is far more destructive. Risk and violence, then, are intimately connected to questions of place; to speak of risk is to speak of a particular arrangement of space, one that naturalizes the hierarchical distribution of wealth, power, and sovereignty. Place is not neutral anywhere—and, perhaps, especially in Africa where Western colonial interests remain almost unabated, though under new names and flags. The desire for pastoral gardens, then, particularly highlights the deliberate and cultivated naïveté of the inhabitants of the houses about their role in geopolitical systems of control. These spaces are not idyllic so much as they are nostalgic for a time when European power was even less unambiguous. The gardens that Justin cares for, for both himself and others, are manifestations of ongoing English desires for colonial control and mastery. These houses, in addition to their gardens, exemplify an attempt to manage Africa, turning it into a “little” Britain. This echoes long-standing colonial arrangements of space whereby colonizers attempt to manage their control of their colonies through renaming them and by installing European-style infrastructure (using colonized labor, like the Bantu security force in the diplomatic neighborhood). Thus, Le Carré not only gestures to the contemporary risks and violences made invisible by these homes, but suggests that they speak to historically resonant hierarchies and power inequalities. The risks of the novel then, endemic to late modernity according to Ulrich Beck, cannot be separated from historically earlier risks. Whereas the tendency in popular and critical thinking about the risks of modern life tend to posit that they represent a definite and definitive break with earlier forms of risk, Le Carré demonstrates that risk is not so straightforward. The systems of power that both produce and ostensibly mitigate risk in modern life are shockingly, yet unsurprisingly, similar to what preceded them. This parallels the suggestion in The Rules of Engagement of the atavistic nature of Evan’s and Neil’s duel. Yet, that suggests something inherent to human nature

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about violence; Le Carré, instead, links the violence of modern life, particularly in Africa, to specific colonial histories. Violence and risk are not “natural,” but instead constructed within particular contexts of global interaction. This further emphasizes the impossibility of imagining oneself outside of risk, particularly for those like Justin or Sandy who explicitly occupy positions of global influence, as it emerges out of such broad historical and spatial expansion. If the arrangements of space in The Rules of Engagement work, then, through twinning to suggest the inescapability of violence, space in The Constant Gardener demonstrates how the colonial/neocolonial appropriation of space is part of a larger system that inevitably produces risk and precarity. In neither text, then, can place be understood as neutral; instead, it is intimately connected to the more ephemeral arrangement of social spaces and connections. Place, however, is neither simply a metaphor in these texts, nor is it only a background to the “real” action of the novels. Rather, place is a constitutive element in forming attitudes about global risk and connection. This is particularly evident in The Constant Gardener where Justin’s botanical knowledge and practices provide a model for a form of global connection (even though they also simultaneously signal his separation from global realities). As the novel’s title suggests, Justin is a “constant gardener,” indicating that the cultivation and attention skills necessary to produce a good and viable garden are similarly applicable to thinking about global citizenship. In other words, Justin must learn, over the course of the novel, to translate his gardening skills into a global praxis. Similarly, Arcadia must learn to navigate the separation between the pastoral and the violent that she both witnesses and constructs. Moreover, this goes beyond this tension in her own immediate life, but requires thinking and responding to how this separation operates on a larger, global scale. In both instances, relationships with place are central in reimagining forms of global interaction. While neither novel has a particularly ecocritical approach to global risk and violence, both, nonetheless, require that we take notice of and respond to the material realities of place. Risk, even for those who lead relatively secure lives, cannot be consigned solely to the epistemological as thinking through risk requires a rethinking of the ontological reality of everyday life, no matter one’s ostensible security.

Documentation What, then, might cosmopolitan risk look like, in practice? If the texts under examination in the previous chapters work principally to diagnose various sites of global risk and the previous sections of this chapter consider the more general narratives used to obscure risk and/or minimize responsibility, The Constant Gardener and The Rules of Engagement also both begin to imagine what risky cosmopolitan practices might look like. One of the ways they do this is to imagine the way global privileged subjects might make use of the

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practices of the globally marginalized, both to highlight the real limits placed on some at the expense of others and to make use of their privilege to benefit others. One such instance of this is their examination of the operation and dispersion of the right to cross borders and the documentation required for this. The image of the refugee traveling on falsified documentation, gaining access to the nation-state illegally and clandestinely, is the central fear of those who wish to restrict immigration. The idea that someone—however deserving of refugee status—“games” the system this way, that they fail to act appropriately, is taken as evidence of their unsuitability for the nation. This leads to calls for stricter, tighter borders, with an emphasis on an enforcement mentality. Over and above a consideration of the exigencies that typically lead people to travel on false documents, these debates are predicated upon notions of risk and safety and, more importantly, how these categories are globally dispersed. Significantly, those who travel “illegally” might be seen as the shadow side of those who travel “legally”: those typically considered cosmopolitan. This discourse, thus, further displaces precarity onto those already endangered; indeed, debates around national security often frame the need for tighter border security as a way of minimizing the nation-state’s risk, privileging the continuing, un-risked safety of those already (more or less) safe. While, on the one hand, this is a logical response by the nation-state, the sovereign has the responsibility to protect its citizens, it is one dependent upon a decidedly un-globalized vision of the nation-state. In other words, it requires ignoring the way that safety in one place is dependent upon, even creates, danger elsewhere. Central to the action in both The Constant Gardener and The Rules of Engagement are Justin’s and Arcadia’s travel on or with falsified documents. Their travel, which parallels that of refugees in this way, points to how the risk of undocumented travel is lessened by racial and economic privilege but also marks a way in which both use their privilege as a way of connecting their own actions to those of global others. If discourses of national security reinforce or concretize geospatial distinctions of risk and safety, Justin and Arcadia suggest the mutability of these distinctions—demonstrating their interconnections and relationality. The echo of undocumented immigration in their travel is telling as it highlights the many modalities of travel and immigration that do not follow juridical guidelines. Popular discourse surrounding so-called illegal immigration associates it, almost exclusively, with terrorism and extremism (see, for instance, the statements by former Canadian minster of immigration, Jason Kenney, that “No One Is Illegal” groups are “not simply another noisy activist group [but] hard-line anti-Canadian extremists”5). Undocumented immigration becomes a strict, binary opposition between “good” refugees who follow the rules and “bad” refugees (read: terrorists) who do not. Rather than seeing the issue as a complex one, demanding contextualization, it becomes a starkly moral issue where representatives of a nation-state’s sovereign bodies determine arbiters of moral character.

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The Constant Gardener and The Rules of Engagement trouble the stark moral judgments that typically surround undocumented migration. As both demonstrate, the false documents that their main characters travel on or transport are a currency of their own. Further, that both characters are white and from emphatically economically privileged backgrounds highlights the relative ease with which each still manages to cross borders.6 For Justin, traveling on false documents becomes a necessary act of subterfuge—though one that is shown to be frequently unsuccessful—in his quest to find those responsible for Tessa’s murder. Indeed, he is advised that traveling on his own documents will make it impossible for him to complete this task. Acting extralegally becomes the only way to respond to those who act illegally: in this case, ThreeBees and KVH. Traveling illegally, then, signals here, not delinquency, but taking up one’s global responsibility; it is about holding global actors to ethical (to say nothing of legal) action, not taking advantage of unsuspecting nation-states. ThreeBees and KVH, in contrast, are depicted as those who exploit various nation-states, particularly those in the Global South. Rather than the typical assumption that it is illegal immigrants who act as some sort of resource drain on the nationstate, it is corporate executives, scientists, and security personnel—who all cross borders frequently and legally—who are shown to take advantage of national inhabitants. Yet, Le Carré neither valorizes nor normalizes traveling on false documents. Instead, Justin’s experiences emphasize the precarity endemic to this manner of movement. Indeed, despite Justin’s immense wealth, his ability to cross borders using the documents he has is continually shown to be neither secure nor stable. In fact, his alias is repeatedly “seen through,” particularly by the agents of ThreeBees and KVH who attack him in a Bielefeld hotel room, and follow him to Saskatchewan. False documents, which might be assumed to provide him with a degree of anonymity, psuedonymity at least, are shown to be easily discovered by anyone looking to find him. Traveling on false documents is demonstrably risky for someone with Justin’s wealth, connections, and, presumably, highgrade fakes; one cannot help but imagine, then, how difficult it must be for someone without his many and varied privileges. Moreover, Justin’s travel is impelled by a desire for justice, rather than to protect either himself or his family. In other words, Justin’s travel is, at some level, optional as he more or less knows, before he begins his trek, who is responsible for Tessa’s death and why, and the subsequent impossibility of obtaining justice in any substantive way. The risk he takes on here, symbolized by his travel documents, echoes substantially riskier movement, but remains fundamentally incommensurate. Yet through this very echo, Le Carré compels readers to reconsider the popular narrative that surrounds illegal immigration by suggesting the different contexts from which it might emerge. The trope of the amateur detective/spy traveling on false documents borders on the cliché at this point—another reason why illegal immigration is seen as dangerous as anyone who enters a nation-state through pretense

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may well be a secret agent/terrorist and, thus, a threat to national security. Le Carré, then, works well within the limits of the genre (the spy thriller) for which he is best known; nonetheless, The Constant Gardener is an awkward fit for the contemporary spy thriller as Justin is not really a spy, and the field of engagement is Big Pharma and the humanitarian industry, rather than the Cold War or a post-9/11 landscape of terrorism and the “Clash of Civilizations.” Again, as noted above, unlike the stereotypical spy (professional or otherwise), Justin’s subterfuge is seen through almost instantly by those with the power to impede his actions and cause him violence. Thus, even the quasi-authorized illegal border crosser—the spy—does not operate with the assumed fluidity. Again, it is ThreeBees and KVH who are shown to be truly insidious and impervious to the legal boundaries of national borders. Further, even if the agents of these two corporations are generally seen to travel legally, they engage in cyber attacks on any computer related to Justin or Tessa—suggesting the permeability of borders for them, and them alone. As before, Le Carré calls into question assumptions about the nature of terrorism and its source. Rather than focusing anxiety around the individual illegal immigrant, Le Carré suggests that the larger threat comes from corporations who use the appearance of legality to operate unethically in the global sphere. The “terrorists” at work in The Constant Gardener are large pharmaceutical corporations and the nations that enable their operations, not Justin, Tessa, or Arnold. In contrast to Le Carré’s connection between illegal travel and corporate global expansion (and malfeasance), Bush’s depiction of movement on false documents is considerably smaller in scale: the emphasis here is on individual mobility, rather than the larger juxtaposition present in The Constant Gardener. Indeed, while Bush continues Le Carré’s emphasis on the connection between individual movement and global power hierarchies, she moves away from the specific contrast between authorized and unauthorized movement. Instead, The Rules of Engagement disrupts the racialized boundary evidenced in popular conceptions of the undocumented immigrant, suggesting both the multiple instigators of unauthorized movement, and highlighting the ways that borders are simultaneously fluid and rigid, depending on one’s subject position. In other words, Bush posits the multivalent meanings of borders and the authorized/ unauthorized movement divide. Like Le Carré, this disrupts easy and simplistic divisions between the “legal” and “illegal” migrant, while underscoring the very real effects of this discursive separation; the parallel does not, here, seek to eradicate difference but, almost paradoxically, to highlight it. Unlike Justin who travels on false documents in order to evade, however briefly, those responsible for Tessa’s murder, fulfilling genre requirements for the amateur spy, Arcadia travels throughout under her own name. However, after she flees to London, following the presumed death of Neil, Arcadia remains in England illegally, until she marries an Englishman, regularizing her status. Arcadia’s irregularity, thus, is not an exigent scenario, or, at least, originates in such a scenario but shifts quickly into the status quo. For Arcadia, her escape

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into London is an effort to eliminate risk from her life—despite the legally risky situation in which she finds herself. She is shown to be able to maneuver within the legal constraints of her situation with relative ease, suggesting not just the privilege (and invisibility) of whiteness but the breadth of an economy predicated on precarity. Arcadia’s early encounter with borders are paralleled with and exaggerated through an implicit comparison with her sister Lux’s experiences smuggling recording equipment to musicians in developing nations. Where Arcadia understands herself as deliberately avoiding risk, Lux initially frames her travel as free from risk (a distinction between avoidance, meaning risk is present, and absence, risk does not exist): “It’s not that suspicious. I mean, what’s odd about me traveling with a palmcorder? I’ve never been stopped” (24). Yet when she is stopped by Mozambiquan border guards, she begins to doubt her ability to manage risk: “I was completely freaked out. Always before, I’d known there was a chance something could happen but it didn’t. I was lucky, but what I felt was that I was good at this, I had some kind of knack. I was inviolable. Inviolate? And then I lost that, I lost it completely” (2000: 231; emphasis in original). For Lux, these encounters with the realities of border crossing faced by most of the world’s residents are a kind of game—her ability to “win” is based on her “luck,” “knack,” and freedom from suspicion (all things that code her global position as a middle-class white woman, traveling as a music journalist). While Arcadia does not understand her own crossing of borders as a game, consequences still exist as a vague and shadowy presence for her. The violence that Lux comes to face-to-face with draws attention to the privileged spaces from which she and Arcadia travel from and within. Amir’s narrative of his escape from Iran is a useful counterpoint, as it highlights that so much of the tension around illegal immigration and refugee travel occurs in the space between departure and arrival. Amir’s narrative surrounding escape is sympathetic but, at the same time, his arrival at the border without legally appropriate documentation is suspicious. Somewhere, over the course of his movement, the public perception of him changes from someone with the right to escape to someone who should not have the right to entrance. For all the zero-sum morality that circulates around discussions of immigration, it is telling that these rights of escape and entrance are treated as unevenly malleable and ambiguous. Further, this polysemic response to immigration highlights that attitudes toward immigration are not so stable as the rhetoric might suggest, and that this mutability has little to do with the migrating subject themself. It also reveals the ways that risk is an unstable category and one from which privileged subjects are more easily shielded. Amir and Basra remind readers that the risks taken by Arcadia (and Justin) are risks taken voluntarily and, therefore, the dangers are somewhat mitigated by this fact. Risky mobility, then, must be remembered as uneven. Justin and Arcadia cannot become Amir and Basra, both refugees who have traveled on illegally obtained documents, without drastically oversimplifying and over-universalizing their experiences.

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Yet, Justin and Arcadia usefully remind readers of the multivalent realities encapsulated in the phrase “illegal immigration,” suggesting that notions of legality and illegality are not easily delineated in a world defined by global risk and the way these categories can be inverted as a tactic of critique and personal responsibilization.

Beyond Safety and Risky Cosmopolitanism As this suggests, while both novels foreground the necessity of a risky responsibility, they simultaneously suggest that the ability to take this kind of responsibility is not the same for everyone. Indeed, what both posit is the way that responsibility to oneself and others is a fluid thing; sometimes the self must take priority over others and vice versa. For, while Arcadia’s self-preserving choices are posed as simultaneously selfish and necessary, Basra’s and Amir’s decisions to escape politically tenuous situations without their families are viewed much less ambivalently and more positively. Such ambivalence suggests a nuanced view of global risks. Rather than arguing that responsibility means either always prioritizing others or self-protection (both straw-man positions), Bush allows for the complicated relationship between the self and others in a global risk society. In the narratives surrounding both Basra and Amir, Bush connects the individual risks they take repeatedly to the risks created by neoliberal modernity: “as a rule, the choice to become or remain a ‘foreigner’ is not freely made but is the consequence of poverty and hardship, of flight from persecution or an attempted escape from starvation” (Beck 2004: 134). Yet as Beck suggests, “what we now see [in late modernity] are unlimited risks and uncertainties that are much harder to identify (like transnational terrorism, climatic disasters, contested water resources, migration flows, AIDS, genetically modified foods, BSE, and computer viruses able to cripple civil and military communications) (2004: 146–7). The early risks Amir takes are not entirely of his own making (this parallels Basra’s situation discussed earlier). He, as a student in Iran, applies for a visa to study in England—an application that seemed to signal “that he wanted to flee into the embrace of the West, when really, what I wanted was merely to travel, to be cosmopolitan, which is not the same as wanting to be Westernized, even though people so often act as if it is” (Bush 2000: 113; emphasis in original). His response suggests a kind of youthful naïveté about what constitutes risk. After being denied both a student and exit visa, Amir is incarcerated for six months. On his release, he escapes Iran: Amir was the one who followed the leads, the whispered voices, met burly men in coffeehouses who talked into their coffee and threatened terrible retribution on all his family if he gave any of their secrets away. He managed to scrabble together enough money for a midpriced escape, which was

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substantial, but the cheapest sort apparently meant days of walking and was so dangerous you might as well give up anyway. For the price he paid he was told he’d get an escape that involved only a few hours on foot. (2000: 114)

Amir, while helped by others, must here place responsibility for the self over that of others (family, friends, etc.); responsibility for others is deferred. And, as his participation in the acquiring and alteration of passports for refugees suggests, this is a responsibility the novel shows him taking up. The risks Amir takes in leaving Iran are substantial but are, for the most part, not entirely chosen freely: he leaves, not because he has a strong desire to leave but because the political situation is too precarious, making it untenable for him to remain. Again, as he states, he does not desire to become Westernized but, instead, to become cosmopolitan. Amir’s choice to become a “foreigner,” then, is not really a choice at all but the consequence of political persecution. While his situation is specific—Iran under the mullahs—it does not emerge in a global vacuum. Nonetheless, Rules of Engagement ultimately emphasizes the importance of taking cosmopolitan risks—risks that acknowledge or emerge out of global interconnection. This gets beyond the acceptance of difference that characterizes much of the discourse surrounding cosmopolitanism. If, as Bruce Robbins suggests, “the term cosmopolitanism is ordinarily taken to [refer to] aesthetic spectatorship rather than political engagement” (1999: 17; emphasis in original) then emphasizing cosmopolitan risk-taking might be one way to reframe cosmopolitanism in terms of political engagement.7 Yet, Rules of Engagement—and, perhaps, cosmopolitan novels more broadly—suggests the impossibility of separating the aesthetic from the political—particularly the affective impact of the aesthetic. And this impact implies (as Lauren Berlant suggests) “a social relation between spectators and sufferers, with the emphasis on the spectator’s experience of feeling compassion and its subsequent relation to material practice” (2004: 1). As Michael Hardt argues, affects “illuminate … both our power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it, along with the relationship between these two powers” (2007: ix). Arcadia’s interactions with Basra—and her remembered interactions with Evan and Neil, the two young men who fight a duel over her—are deeply personal and affective. Yet this affective response is what prompts her more active political engagement. While she tries to contain her experiences with Evan and Neil in the past, and keep her connection with Basra as strictly academic, Arcadia is unable to act. Once she appropriately mourns Evan and Neil and acknowledges her affective response to Basra’s situation, then she is able to take the risks required of a responsible cosmopolitical subject. Indeed, part of the question of responsibility in Rules of Engagement is resisting the enticements of global voyeurship—something that too much emphasis on careful deliberations and research can become. Bush depicts the rhetoric of cautious platitudes that reveals the common-sensical aspect of it, challenging the neutrality of safety: Arcadia asserts that “sometimes I’d like to

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believe … that being informed, that knowledge is an end in itself, that one is justified simply in knowing what’s going on in the world. … When we’re all these global voyeurs, really, watching endless television clips of atrocities— how are we to make sure we don’t all collapse into utter passivity” (2000: 110)? The connection Bush establishes between information and voyeurism raises questions about the potential limits to liberal programs of cosmopolitanization that emphasize the exposure to different cultures as key to cosmopolitan subjecthood: Is exposure/experience enough, particularly for already privileged Western subjects like Arcadia? The novel, therefore, raises important questions about what cosmopolitanism can—and should—look like. While Arcadia is the protagonist of the novel, she also points to some of the willful blindness of elite cosmopolitan subjects (many of whom make up the audience of a novel like Rules of Engagement). However, rather than reject cosmopolitanism as an inherently corrupted category, the novel points to ways of bringing critical theoretical models into practice—arguing for the importance of thinking through a risky cosmopolitics. The Constant Gardener is similarly interested in thinking about the responsibilities inherent to a cosmopolitanism that takes seriously the risky realities of modern global life. As Justin articulates it, Tessa’s sense of the necessary affective response to the pain and suffering of others points to the novel’s sense of ethics: Tessa distinguished absolutely between pain observed and pain shared. Pain observed is journalistic pain. Diplomatic pain. It’s television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. Those who watch suffering and do nothing about it, in her book, were little better than those who inflicted it. They were the bad Samaritans. (2001: 159)

Implicit here is that the ability to “switch off ” pain is concentrated in the experiences of a privileged few. Arcadia’s ability, for instance, to isolate herself in her carapace-like home and office is akin to this notion of pain observed. It resists the affective immediacy of pain shared, in favor of a coldly quasiscientific sense of remove. Tessa’s vision of pain shared as an ethical imperative in a violent, risk-filled world points to the novel’s larger ethical vision. Le Carré suggests the necessity of embracing pain, rather than avoiding it— paralleling Derrida’s notion that forgiveness only occurs when it forgives the unforgivable: if one can readily and easily separate oneself from pain, like switching off a television set, then one has not engaged with pain. Rather than a gesture of empathy and ethical engagement, it is an act of voyeurism. A responsible cosmopolitanism, then, which is necessarily implicated in a global risk society, is one that attempts to share the pain and risks of others. It is, nonetheless, important to emphasize the always already incomplete nature of this attempt. To fully share the pain of others—particularly those marginalized in relation to the ones who are privileged—is a fantasy. As Sara Ahmed notes,

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“the reader in accepting the imperative to feel sad about the other’s pain is aligned with the other. But the alignment works by differentiating between the reader and the others: their feelings remain the object of ‘my feelings,’ while my feelings only ever approximate the form of theirs” (2004: 21). Pain shared, despite what one might think, remains one’s own pain, however imaginative and interpellative. Yet, “an ethics of responding to pain involves being open to being affected by that which one cannot know or feel” (Ahmed 2004: 30). The political possibilities of pain shared exist in this moment of recognized incommensurability and the limits, even failures, of the imagination. Ahmed’s politics of pain is particularly useful as it resists, even rejects, the suggestion that because experiences are necessarily unequal, they are therefore unintelligible—a suggestion that can lead to forms of political separatism and irresponsibility: “the emphasis on context and on the relativity of standpoints springs from an impulse to acknowledge the difference of others; but when it is absolutized in thought and practices it flips over into an incommensurability of perspectives which results in pre-established ignorance” (Beck 2006: 49). If one cannot respond to the pain of others because it is different from one’s own circumstances, then one can only feel responsible for the self and one’s immediate environment in the narrowest possible sense. What Ahmed and, implicitly, Le Carré and Bush offer is a sense of a provisional politics centered on the affective response to others but extending beyond it. The provisionality emerges from the way in which these relationships and responses remain enmeshed in oppressive and hierarchical global systems, suggesting the necessity of attending to the inequalities that structure the ability to respond. Yet, this does not invalidate actions taken, again, however provisionally. As Paul Gilroy notes, discussing Rachel Corrie, “anybody inclined to dismiss these protests and acts of solidarity as trivial should consider the fact that, in this case, the occupying power certainly does not regard them in this light” (2005: 82). The danger lies in making this provisionality invisible as such. In other words, when responses that work around larger systemic issues are taken as ideal and uncompromised this undermines—to some degree, though not totally—the actions taken as they might be seen to reinforce already existing systems. Seeing global actions as a zero-sum game is dangerous as it tends to support the status quo; searches for purity—epistemologically or ontologically—are necessarily doomed to fail. Le Carré and Bush, despite their larger critiques, are hardly examples of purity of impulse and follow-through. Neither are fully reflexive on the question of their protagonists’ privilege; one irony of The Constant Gardener is the frequent repetitions of Justin’s and Tessa’s immense wealth (they are potentially the wealthiest characters in a novel full of wealthy individuals) and, at the same time, the depiction of both as, more or less, normative global subjects. Nonetheless, both novels remain interested in trying to figure out a politics that attempts to overcome these privileges, making these privileges useful to draw attention to their very existence. The Gilroy reference to Rachel Corrie

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is instructive as a parallel to the politics of risk that both Le Carré and Bush outline. Despite both novels being written and published before Corrie’s death, there is a striking similarity in narrative. Corrie and other members of groups like the International Solidarity Movement and Christian Peacemaker Teams use their positions as relatively privileged global subjects to draw attention to invisible or misrepresented forms of global violence. Privilege, then, becomes a tool deployed by Corrie and others to highlight their own position in a globally unequal and hierarchical society. These are acts that may not destroy global relationship of center and periphery but, importantly, they reveal the constructed nature of these distinctions. As elucidated in The Constant Gardener and The Rules of Engagement, Tessa, Justin, and Arcadia act in such a way in order to respond responsibly to the risks that surround them; they develop “a cosmopolitan outlook in which [they] view themselves simultaneously as part of a threatened world and as part of their local situations and histories [which necessarily includes the privilege into which they were born]” (Beck 2006: 48). Responsibility, and the attempt to articulate it in an engaged and ethical way, suffuses Le Carré’s and Bush’s discussion of risk, sympathy, and privilege. Responsibility, as articulated in these two novels, is an active response to global risk society—risks from which the characters can make themselves immune, though only at the cost of and heightened risk for global others. Individual safety, then, is shown to be at odds, at least potentially, with global responsibility. Further, rather than try to transform the globally marginalized into a simulacrum of global elites, through, for example, the rhetoric of consumption, Justin, Tessa, and Arcadia find ways to act that echo the (more treacherous) journeys of globally marginalized subjects. This selftransformation, rather than a transformative pedagogical practice for the oppressed, is significant because, instead of positing Justin, Tessa, or Arcadia as saviors or part of a political vanguard, present to indoctrinate the global proletariat, they are the ones in need of education and transformation, they are the ones who become simulacrums. The work of transformation is thus placed on those most able to access the resources necessary. Yet responsibility is not, here, about the transfer of material assets alone, even at all, in the vein of philanthropic humanitarianism; this is not responsibility in the form of a check written and then forgotten. However insufficient or incomplete we might view Justin’s, Tessa’s, or Arcadia’s actions, they are significantly about them changing their actions—not about others being forced to accommodate their politics of responsibility. This is a cosmopolitan modality then that attempts to mitigate the colonizing impulse of universalism. In the place of this universalism, the risky cosmopolitanism of The Constant Gardener and The Rules of Engagement highlights the different standpoints from which the cosmopolite inevitably speaks and acts. Cosmopolitanism is contingent in these novels, and never fully sufficient for the violences that suffuse global reality. Instead, cosmopolitanism marks an attempt in good faith to address these realities from within its preexisting limits.

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Afterword R I SK Y C O SM O P O L I TA N I SM I N A P A N D E M IC

I submitted the preceding portion of this book to Bloomsbury on March 5, 2020. Within a week, the university where I work had announced that the rest of the semester would be conducted online and, two weeks later, on March 19, 2020, the governor of Texas, where I live, had issued a “shelter-in-place” mandate. Now, seven months later, as I draft this, over three hundred thousand Americans and more than a million people worldwide have died because of Covid-19. As a “third surge” crests in the United States and a “second wave” makes its presence known elsewhere, our ability to reflect on the radical consequences of a pandemic of this scale are hampered by the fact that we are very much still in the midst of its unfolding. These consequences far surpass the epidemiological as mass unemployment and evictions, and massive challenges to supply chains, unfold globally, suggesting the scale of a currently inconceivable disruption. As Covid makes clear, however, we were all already in a state of precarity whether we have been aware of it or not because the time of worldwide precarity is now, not some nebulous future moment. This is, of course, not news for the bulk of the world’s population as capitalist-colonialist modes of extraction have long seen most of the world as a site of unending accumulation by dispossession, hastening and exacerbating all manner of precarity. If anything, the experience of Covid is a much-belated acknowledgment of this precarity by many of the residents of the Global North (though certainly not all, as many have long already experienced it here too). What Covid alerts those of us in the Global North to is the urgency of thinking of ourselves as risky cosmopolitan subjects. Yet, as Andreas Malm observes about Covid and its consequences, “no horseman of the apocalypse rides alone; plagues do not appear in the singular” (2020: 3). For, at the same time that Covid wreaks havoc, nations throughout the world have been grappling with the insidious and inescapable violence of policing—particularly the violent deaths of Black people at the hands of the police and the state. While this violence predates Covid by centuries, the stark realities of racial inequalities and anti-Black state violence were only further highlighted by the disproportionate impact the virus has had on Black populations in the United States and elsewhere. As many have noted, the all-too-familiar refrain

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of “I can’t breathe” as police murder Black men in the United States resonates in new ways in the midst of a pandemic that causes respiratory distress. Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and the ENDSARS movement in Nigeria are just two nodes of a global network of resistance to the violence enacted daily in the ostensible defense of order and state security. Similarly, Canadian settler state aggression directed at Wet’suwet’en land defenders and Mi’kmaq lobster fisherman (among other sovereign Indigenous nations) has highlighted the varied modes of state policing, all characterized by mass modes of physical repression and implicit support of extrajudicial white-supremacist violence. All these modes of state violence show us that the safety of some is deemed more important than the safety of all, highlighting the uneven applications of risk and precarity. While Covid and racist state violence unfolded globally at varying speeds, the recent past has also been characterized by regional bursts of climate emergencies, such as the massive wildfires that were near unstoppable for months in late 2019 to early 2020 in Australia and over the summer on the west coast of North America. Similar fires have been raging through Siberia as the region has been averaging temperatures over 9 degrees higher than the twentieth-century norm (Demuth 2020). These are but two examples of the climate catastrophes that have characterized 2020—and the decades preceding this moment. Malm wonders “why … the states of the global North act on corona but not on climate” (2020: 12), suggesting that one reason might be that “global heating gave extended opportunities for obstruction to the perpetrators in conjunction with a poor-first timeline of victimhood. Covid-19 negated both. So suddenly did it strike that no capitalist interests had the time to build up apparatuses for resisting the suspension of business-as-usual. … Covid-19 came as an instantaneous and total saturation of everything” (2020: 24; emphasis in original). Malm wrote this in April 2020 and was, as a result, overly optimistic in his account of pandemic management in the Global North: as we know now, in the fall of 2020, the US president knew of the pandemic well in advance and chose to downplay its seriousness in favor of racist posturing about the “China” virus. While infectious disease specialists have been warning about the potential for a global pandemic for years, Malm’s claim that Covid-19’s timeline didn’t allow for, at least initially, a widespread mobilization of a probusiness lobby on the scale of that arrayed against real action on climate change points to a difference in the early rhetoric around Covid-19 in contrast to the entrenched pro-business resistance to climate science. In the United States, this rhetoric was short-lived, with Texas Lieutenant-Governor Dan Patrick saying on Fox News on March 23, only four days after Texas issued a “shelter-in-place” mandate, that the elderly would willingly sacrifice themselves to the virus in order to ensure economic stability (Sonmez 2020). These are only the most spectacular—in the sense of the scale of attention that they generate—forms of precarity that have shaped what it means to live in 2020. The near-inescapable experience of precarity is, of course, nothing new

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for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities and, especially, for those who exist at the various intersections of these communities. What is, perhaps, different about the shift brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic is a matter of scale. While memes abound on social media claiming that there is some unique malevolence to 2020, the bulk of the crises that have characterized the last year all long predate this exact moment: indeed, early on in the pandemic, the rhetoric of “banding together in the face of adversity” was deeply inflected by the Second World War–era rhetoric, including the rise in and return of “victory gardens” (Garrity 2020). Despite, then, a desire to understand the current pandemic as a break from all that’s come before it, the language used to describe and account for it consistently acts as a reminder that few things are ever truly new under capitalism. As billionaires increased their wealth by 27.5 percent (according to a report by Swiss bank UBS after the third financial quarter of 2020), growing their accumulated wealth to over $10 trillion dollars, it is clear that a pandemic is spectacular for generating and hoarding capital (Neate 2020).1 Given the intensification of precarity that Covid responses (or nonresponses) have generated, the consequences of which are still very much in their early stages, it feels impossible to attempt even the slightest prognostications for how things will operate when this book is actually published.2 Things might get much worse—or, as seems increasingly likely, they will return to something resembling pre-pandemic life for the upper middle classes of the Global North while the rest of the world is left to their own struggles, characterized as the consequences of their own bad choices. This is, of course, a narrative we have all heard so many times before as to seem banally clichéd. What, then, do we do with precarity? Anna Tsing asks, “What if … precarity is the condition of our time—or, to put it another way, what if our time is ripe for sensing precarity? What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the center of the systematicity we seek” (2015: 20)? She goes on to note that “the modern human conceit is not the only plan for making worlds: we are surrounded by many world-making projects, humans and not human” (2015: 21). If, as she persuasively claims, “we are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological [we might add “epidemiological” to this alliterative list] ruination, [then] neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival” (2015: 19). Tsing’s emphasis on the trivial and the mundane as modes for imagining the world otherwise is one that resonates with many of the texts under examination throughout this book. For Tsing (and these cultural texts), by attending to the modes of precarity—and resistance—that refuse the spectacularizing representation of a global pandemic, that focus on the small, local experiences of precarity and risk, we can begin to see the contours of precarity anew and, perhaps most importantly, start to envision these as moments of opportunity for reimagining global interconnection. Tsing’s notion of the potential for “collaborative survival”—and “contamination as collaboration” (2015: 27)—is paralleled in Arundhati Roy’s

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article that went viral in the early days of the pandemic: “The Pandemic Is a Portal.” Roy’s article (2020) ends by stating that historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Like Tsing, Roy invites her readers (in the Financial Times, no less) to understand crisis as a moment “ripe for sensing precarity” (Tsing 2015: 20) but also one ripe for imagining new worlds—implicitly, those that refuse the logic of liberalism and its hyper-individualism. Indeed, both Tsing and Roy (and the bulk of the works under examination in this book) suggest the need to abandon the Hobbesian notion of self-preservation as natural law in favor of “patterns of unintentional coordination [that] develop in assemblages” (Tsing 2015: 23). Yet, as Dean Spade observes, if we seek to imagine transformation, if we want to alleviate harm, redistribute wealth and life chances, and build participatory and accountable resistance formations, our strategies need to be careful not to oversimplify how power operates. Thinking about power only as top/down, oppressor/oppressed, dominator/dominated can cause us to miss opportunities for intervention and to pick targets for change that are not the most strategic. (2015: 6)

This is an understanding of transformation that places “collaborative survival” at the center, even if, at particular moments, that survival is focused on that of a single person. We can see, for instance, this mode of collaborative survival focused on a single person or a particular emergency in the explosion of GoFundMe campaigns and the circulation of Venmo and other mobile payment service information over social media as the pandemic has unfolded. These calls for individual aid highlight the way Covid compounds the preexisting and intersecting pandemics of austerity, transphobia, and white supremacy.3 Mutual aid, as Spade notes elsewhere, “is a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions” (2020b: 136). While Spade’s work, drawing on both abolitionist and trans of color criticism, points to an anthropocentric vision of collaboration,4 it shares, with Tsing’s and Roy’s work, a critical interruption of the ideological centrality of individualism in the discourses of safety and “self-preservation”— and in the language of institutional reform. Nevertheless, individualism has proven remarkably persistent in the Global North’s response to the pandemic as much of the discussion about the

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pandemic across the partisan spectrum in the Global North has been focused on individual feelings of safety. Amanda Mull notes, in relation to the early fall White House outbreaks of the virus, “that Trumpworld’s infection fiasco is an especially bizarre case study of one of the pandemic’s defining features: how different feeling safe and being safe actually are” (2020: emphasis in original): for a group of people for whom self-preservation has long been an obvious goal, their willingness to put themselves in optional danger, given all the resources at their disposal, can’t be completely explained by Trump’s lack of empathy or his advisers’ policy goals. It suggests that on top of everything else … presumably, Trump and his coterie felt safe, despite the mortal danger nipping at their heels for all to see.

Even those, therefore, with the most access to information about a crisis persist in understanding safety as a state of mind, rather than a set of practices that are only meaningful when collaborative. The distinction Mull makes between “feeling” and “being” safe is fundamentally one between the individual and the group, between psychology and action. This distinction between individual autonomy and group affiliation fundamentally structures so much of how we understand risk, crisis, and responsibility. David Harvey sums up the ideological conflict straightforwardly, saying that “the widespread acceptance of the benefits to be had from individualism and freedoms that a free market supposedly confers, and the acceptance of personal responsibility for one’s own well-being together constitute a serious ideological barrier to the creation of oppositional solidarities” (2018: xiii). Yet, as the realities of Covid have made clear, the consequences of risk cannot be disentangled from fairly narrow modes of individual experience. Put differently, no matter how large-scale the risk, it is inevitably mutated by idiosyncratic variables that only highlight how important a coherent collective response to precarity must be. This tension between the necessity for a largescale response to modes of precarity that could have unfolded differently and the acknowledgment of individual experiences of isolation, infection, and labor suffuses much of the cultural production so far around the pandemic. For instance, Italian photographer Paolo Ventura’s suite of paintings, entitled “Quarantine Diary,” is described, on the website for the Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis, as “an in-depth exploration of the artist’s personal experience [that] speaks to the global experience of the quarantine and creates a collective permanent diary.” Similarly, in the introduction to her collection of quarantine essays, Intimations, Zadie Smith observes that they are “some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked … in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are above all personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity” (2020: xi). For both Ventura and Smith, then, the quotidian realities of the pandemic are best tracked by the banal and trivial details of a newly quarantined and atomized existence.

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Aside from the straightforward and obvious privilege both articulate in a quarantine defined by moments of reflection, rather than, say, the vulnerability of impending eviction or risky employment—the reality for vast numbers of people globally—Ventura’s and Smith’s work highlights the difficulty of reflection on risk as it unfurls. While we can already see some of the varieties of the new world that Roy anticipates through the other side of the pandemic portal (most of which are even grimmer than what predated the pandemic), it remains difficult to fully articulate the inevitable sublimity of risk on this scale as it happens. This echoes Rob Nixon’s (2013) notion of the sublimity of slow ecological violence discussed in Chapter 3 and his claim that this produces or requires new modes of representation; however, what distinguishes Covid from the ongoing climate crisis is, in fact, its speed. The changes wrought by Covid have, so far, spanned less than a year. Ventura and Smith illustrate the heightened role of the seemingly trivial in the midst of developing precarity and highlight that what has perhaps made Covid different from how other modes of precarity have been experienced is not just its explosion in the Global North (as Malm suggests), but the isolation that has been the hallmark of the early moments of the pandemic. Another early pandemic publication—Lolli Editions’ Tools for Extinction, a collection of stories and poems compiled (and, in some cases, written) in the early moments of the European lockdown—similarly draws attention to the house-bound quality of the first stages of the pandemic, while acknowledging the unevenness of this spatial mode: “Essential workers are risking their lives everyday to keep society’s foundation in place. For those of us who are working from home … the ongoing mass isolation poses an invitation to stop and think. … With heightened awareness of mortality and earthliness, we turn to nature, to fruit and other forms of nourishment” (Hansen 2020: 8–9). While the nearly global lockdown portion of the pandemic produced an explosion in eco-fascist memes and think-pieces about how the elimination of human presence lead to the “healing” of the earth, Hansen suggests the overlapping valences of the Covid crisis and that of impending climate catastrophe. This offers, I would suggest, another implicit reminder of the expansive cosmopolitanism that necessarily shapes global life: cosmopolitan subjects (that is to say, everyone) are both human and nonhuman. A cosmopolitanism that takes seriously risk and precarity as preconditions of contemporary life—as this book argues we must—is one that also must take seriously the way the Global North externalizes precarity not just to the residents of the Global South and marginalized residents of the Global North but also to the nonhuman residents of the entire globe. While this book has focused on the narratives of those most responsible for this externalization, there is much work to still be done to consider how the nonhuman factors into conceptualizations of a risky cosmopolitanism. Another collection of stories from later in the pandemic (published initially in The New York Times Magazine in July) is The Decameron Project, twentynine stories that attempt to update Boccaccio’s plague stories for contemporary

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plague conditions. In her introduction to the collection, Rivka Galchen observes that Boccaccio’s stories worked as examples of “Memento vivere— remember that you must live,” in contrast to “Memento mori—remember that you must die—[which are] a worthy and necessary message for ordinary times when you might forget” (2020: xvii). Many of the stories in The Decameron Project, like Smith and Ventura, focus on banal and quotidian experiences of life under quarantine and the shadow of Covid. However, perhaps because the bulk of these stories are written later in this experience than Smith, Ventura, or the writers in Tools for Extinction, there is a greater awareness of the morbidity at play. The collection opens and closes with stories from Victor LaValle and Edwidge Danticat, both of which foreground the lonely isolation of Covid deaths—both at home and in the hospital. LaValle’s narrator is haunted by the voice of a neighbor who has died alone in her home. Early in the story, the narrator observes that the neighbor, Pilar, “has lost her playful ways. She said: ‘The screens give the illusion that we’re all still connected. But it’s not true. The ones who could leave, left. The rest of us? We were abandoned. … Why pretend?’ ” (2020: 8). In the closing story, Danticat’s narrator’s new husband is on a ventilator in the hospital and she can only contact him over the phone, where she tells him stories about their plans to visit her namesake cave in Haiti for their honeymoon. As LaValle’s and Danticat’s stories lay bare, the ability to frame lockdown as a moment to return to Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations as a guide for reflection, as Smith does in the foreword to Intimations (2020: xi), not only reflects a self-evident privilege but, more importantly, highlights the durational shift in the experience between early March and July. Karen Russell’s contribution to the collection focuses on Valerie, a bus driver and thus “essential worker,” who has a near collision with an ambulance that shunts her, her passengers, and the EMTs out of time. They are, eventually, able to work together to find a way to return themselves to the normal operation of time. Yet, as Valerie observes at the end of the story, she “could sense them segregating again. … Some would forget as soon as they crossed the river, while others would be permanently haunted. And yet they’d shared a nightmare. A miraculous escape. … Already, she was beginning to doubt it” (2020: 157). As Russell’s story illustrates, the atomization of contemporary life doesn’t necessarily give much reason to be optimistic about the likelihood of those of us in the Global North abandoning individualism in favor of collective action. In Mona Awad’s story, for instance, the narrator has her memories of Covid removed in a cosmetic procedure to erase the traces of “a difficult year,” which were visible on her face (2020: 14). In its echo of Boccaccio’s characters who have retreated from Florence, the stories of The Decameron Project highlight, in numerous different ways, the way crisis-time, pandemic-time, shifts from its earlier mundanity into something more unsettling, and potentially ominous, as time both returns to normal and stops altogether. As developed more expansively in Ling Ma’s Severance (2018) and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), pre-pandemic novels that

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both speak all too well to our current moment, this tension between “normal” and “frozen” time captures the stasis endemic to late capitalism, where one is trapped in work routines (while this atomization is on a continuum, it is not absent from any mode of labor) that seem inescapable. Thus, while Covid has certainly exaggerated and intensified feelings of isolation and precarity, these texts all demonstrate—explicitly and implicitly—the parallels between the pre-pandemic world and now. Indeed, they illustrate that an assumed break is principally a fantasy available only to those most privileged Global North residents. As Julián Fuks’s story in The Decameron Project observes, a whole population was discovering, in one interminable moment, that it was possible to experience in life the extemporaneous nature of death. That it was not necessary to experience pain and unhappiness to find oneself outside of time, that the imminence of pain and of happiness was enough—it was enough that this imminence become broad and impersonal for the whole temporal order to collapse. (2020: 234–5)

For Fuks, then, what is transformative about this moment in time is its very unavoidable imminence. While the consequences of Covid have been more manageable for some than others, the virus has been inescapable across the spectrum of humanity—as has its consequences: there is no viable “outside” to the virus currently. The inescapability of the virus and its varied consequences, as these various Covid cultural texts illustrate, emphasizes the need for thinking collectively both at the level of the everyday and structurally—something that is true when we think about risk and precarity in a variety of situations. The authors of The Care Manifesto posit that as we live through the ascendancy of far-right populism and the uncertainty of a post-pandemic world, the idea of care has been so diminished that it tends to mean care exclusively for and about “people like us.”… “Really not caring” is presented by the right as a form of “realism”; strong evidence of what we call the banality of carelessness. It also shows how crucial the question of dependency, and interdependency, is for our societies and our lives, at every single level, and the multiple destructions caused when these interdependencies are denied. (2020: 18)

In this vacuum of care in a world that seems to exist at a standstill while, simultaneously, moving ever forward to extract endlessly and violently the labor of the “essential worker” and other forms of, to use Neferti X. M. Tadiar’s phrase, “remaindered life” (2015), risky cosmopolitanism seems simultaneously more difficult to imagine and also more crucial. Only through imagining or looking to—and, most importantly, allowing them to structure our modes of thought and action—existing alternatives to the individualizing program of liberal capitalism can we begin to “act in the middle of heartbreak and loss.”5

NOTES Introduction 1 Indeed, it is very easy to imagine a version of the interactions on the Portland train that worked to reinforce notions of white savior-ism, rather than the more radical risky cosmopolitan subject. 2 As, Neferti X. M. Tadiar reminds us, this spatiality is central to the operation of global speculative finance: In order for national developing states and economic elites to become viable players in the financialized global market, they must have at their disposal a population that can be made redundant to any particular lines of industry as dictated by the sudden vicissitudes of capital flows and that will ultimately shoulder the costs of fallout of any and all speculative maneuvers. (2013: 26; emphasis in original) Tadiar’s crucial point parallels Rosa Luxemburg’s revision of Marxist notions of primitive accumulation to recognize it as an ongoing, violent process, rather than a completed historical stage. Jodi Kim notes that this is a spatializing and financializing process key to the operation of “settler modernity” where, “we might think of primitive accumulation as the concept that helps make visible the violent process (as opposed to historical stage) of not only imperial capitalism but also settler colonialism, franchise colonialism, racial chattel slavery, and gendered racial labor exploitation, or the very ground that continues to make possible capital accumulation” (2018: 47). See also Byrd et al. (2018) and Vora (2015). 3 See, for instance, Ulrich Beck’s (1992) emphasis on nuclear risk. 4 Grace Blakeley defines financialization “as a mode of accumulation distinct from modes such as industry or commerce. Rather than using their capital to produce or trade goods or services, financiers create and trade financial assets—even if those assets are ultimately based on production that takes place elsewhere in the global economy. … The main financial activities are … lending, investment and speculation” (2020: 3). She goes on to note, importantly, that “production is not the point of the capitalist enterprise—profit is. And the financialisation of nonfinancial corporations has been an excellent way to maximise profit” (2020: 6). 5 References to “globalization” similarly spike in the mid-1980s. 6 For more on the centrality of crisis to the operation of neoliberal financialization, see Lapavitsas (2013) and Mirowski (2013). 7 If risk for these scholars names an ultimately transactional and calculative scenario, this suggests, at least on some level, that risk economies operate out of deliberate decision-making: the risky actor takes a risk, based on their evaluation of available data, hoping for success, but shouldering failure if things don’t work out. While this scenario is one that would emphasize intersecting forms of

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privilege, Jane Elliott’s notion of “suffering agency” (2013), and its development in microeconomic thought, illustrates that one might still expect to take risks, hoping for the best outcome, even when the available choices are all awful. While risk has accumulated an array of moralizing connotations, it remains, principally, an adjective that describes a practice or scenario: one takes risks, one is not risk. Even if we consider the phrase “at risk” as a descriptor of a subject, we’re still describing a scenario rather than the subject themself. Precarity, while also having an adjectival use, is more existential in its operation. While a situation is precarious, one might also be made precarious or be a member of the precariat. A related distinction is that risk is predominantly individual, whereas precarity tends to indicate a collectivity, however nebulous. Moreover, a precarious situation is often made so by forces outside of the subject (war, weather, capitalism, etc.), resisting vectors of individual responsibility. We might recognize this distinction in the rhetoric around immigrants (who risk leaving their homelands, and are thus responsible for the consequences) and refugees (who are forced into movement because of the precarity of their previous situation). As this example illustrates, the line separating risk from precarity often has much to do with ideological perspective about who counts as human and, more specifically within that subset, who is presumed to have the evaluative skills to make rational decisions. 8 Butler’s conceptualization of the centrality of war and its contingencies to the idea of the human also points to the need to make wartime violence central to our conceptions of cosmopolitanism. 9 Indeed, as Byrd et al. note, austerity operates as a civilizing discourse that can’t be separated from colonial histories: When we perceive financialization as always already predisposed and configured by settler colonialism and empire, today’s austerity becomes legible as a new civilizing discourse, another iteration of propriation, a civilizationism redux for neoliberal times. (2018: 9) 10 In her reading of Martin, Neferti X. M. Tadiar observes that as financial reason overtakes a system-based moral and political economy, the figure of the investor elbows out the consumer-citizen as the new normative focus of government policy. Leverage takes precedence over ownership and fixed benefits, and risk becomes somatized as a way of being, made into a subjectivity shaped by the specific logic of finance, less an entrepreneur than an arbitrageur. (2013: 21) 11 For more on the moral imperative of personal responsibility and safety, see Dean (2009) and Rose (1996). 12 Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva, in their important discussion of “the racial logic of global capitalism,” also offer the important reminder that these questions of debt—both historically and contemporarily—can’t be dissociated from the operation of raciality and its role in constructing the “proper” economic subject: Raciality, as it places the “others of Europe” before the horizon of death, disappears with the very possibility of a relationship that would make a debt/ credit situation comprehensible and hence the debt as something that could

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be eventually paid precisely because of how it makes the colonial (African and Indigenous) other and their descendants as lacking the moral attributes (self-determination, self-transparency, and self-productivity) characteristic of persons and places (the ones they originate from) that truly embody the traits that distinguish the proper economic subject. (2012: 386) Similarly, as Jodi Byrd et al. note, “financialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism” (2018: 1). They go on to crucially observe that “debt and financialization continue to constellate the subordinated social relations that are constitutive of late liberalism and how ‘race’ itself is deployed to obscure the lasting ethical and material indebtedness settlers and arrivants have to Indigenous dispossession” (2018: 2). 13 As Lazzarato notes, “debt creation, that is the creation and development of the power relation between creditors and debtors, has been conceived and programmed as the strategic heart of neoliberal politics” (2011: 25). Jodi Kim observes that debt indexes not only the state and sum of money owed but also a broader social relation structured by violent disciplinary protocols compelling the indebted to conduct themselves in a manner that will maximize the likelihood of repayment. In this sense, to be indebted is not simply to owe money. It is to inhabit a subjectivity that robs one of the possibility of having multiple futures, multiple ways of conducting oneself and being in the world. This, then, is the relationship between debt and time: debt neutralizes time so that it conforms to the homogeneous time of repayment. (2018: 54–5) Kim also locates this social relation in a more explicitly racialized and colonial context than Lazzarato; she observes that “debt … is itself both a relation and an instrument of violence converted by the strange math of settler modernity and racial capitalism into a promissory note that binds for some but not for others” (2018: 55). 14 Karl Polanyi, in his 1944 book, The Great Transformation, critiques economic faith in the “self-regulating market,” anticipating the proto-neoliberalism concomitantly being theorized by Friedrich Hayak and the Mont-Pèlerin Society in the early 1940s. One of Polanyi’s central critiques of this blind faith in the market is its failure to account for human tendencies to act in ways that don’t map onto economic self-interest (that their desire for security and stability, for example, might outweigh their desire for profit). 15 As Chakravartty and Ferreira da Silva note, in relation to the subprime mortgage crisis, the failure of the risk-taking subject was framed not just as someone who had rolled the dice and lost but as someone who was legally and morally culpable: “references to law and morality, expectedly, prevail in condemnations of those served with ‘subprime’ loans, who are construed as intellectually (illiterate) and morally (greedy) unfit if measured against any existing descriptors of the modern economic subject: the (liberal) rational self-interested, the (historicalmaterialist) productive-creative laborer, and the (neoliberal) obligation-bound debtor/creditor” (2012: 362).

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16 Paul Amar notes, for instance, that “late twentieth-century market-state logics, in their neoliberal form, are struggling to survive the early twenty-first-century era of financial crisis and geopolitical realignment. … But security-state logics are doing fine” (2013: 14; emphasis in original). Amar goes on to suggest that “humanized security politics challenges individualistic and market-oriented neoliberal frameworks with moralistic, technocratic rescue doctrines” (2013: 27). In Amar’s case studies of Egypt and Brazil, the rise of security-state logics has been tied to “humanitarian pacification apparatuses” (2013: 22) where the ideal subject has become “rescued prostitutes, secured traffickers, and culturally redeemed communities,” rather than the “creative entrepreneur prospering in a flexible economy” (2013: 27). One’s situation within a risk economy, then, has become increasingly central to the permutations of neoliberal logics in the twenty-first century. 17 Indeed, implicitly as well as explicitly in much scholarship on contemporary literature and culture is a seeming urgency to justify why study a period that isn’t really a period yet (or not a stable one, as Theodore Martin outlines). While this concern emerges out of specific institutional pressures, it is also something that, anecdotally at least, reflects the experience of departmental and pedagogical life: for example, inevitable when teaching classes to undergraduates on contemporary literature is the moment where we discuss the way that studying contemporary literature is not the same thing as appreciating it, meaning that we’re not just gathered in a class to talk about the fun books that we like—an expectation that does not operate in quite the same way for classes organized around more traditionally and clearly defined historical periods. That myself and others, then, want to make (sometimes overly totalizing) claims about contemporary literature’s usefulness in the world is perhaps not a surprise. 18 Neferti X. M. Tadiar’s notion of “remaindered life” is a helpful conceptualization of “practices of living” among socially and globally disenfranchised peoples that are “life-sustaining forms and practices of personhood and sociality that, despite being pushed into permanent outmodedness and illegibility by the discursive and practical mandates of imperial reproduction, persist in creative, transformed ways” (2015: 151). These “remaindered forms of life point to subaltern human pathways of transmission and influence through which life-making affective properties and sensibilities are invisibly passed across distinct communities” (2015: 156). Tadiar’s notion of “remaindered life” demonstrates other modes of existence outside or beyond the logic of financialized risk that suffuses contemporary neoliberal life. Thus, while the texts under examination in this book don’t demonstrate “remaindered life,” they are, nonetheless, implicitly in conversation with these practices.

Chapter 1 1 For more on the necessarily regional focus of any “national” cuisine, see Appadurai (1988). 2 See, for instance, Cook and Crang (2006).

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3 Navneet Alang’s (2020) article on Alison Roman’s and the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen’s video stars addresses the culturally appropriative and homogenizing use of global pantry items and recipes and highlights another angle on food travel: when one “travels” without leaving one’s kitchen. 4 Bourdain, as stand-in for his principally white and middle-class viewers and readers, makes risk into an aesthetic object (the “perfect meal”), while insulating them, and himself, from any actual precarity. Bourdain jokingly refers to himself as a whore, saying that “when I signed on the dotted line, any pretense of virginity or reluctance—of integrity (I don’t even remember what that is)—vanished” (2006: 13; emphasis in original). What he means here, though, is that all the encounters the show documents have been, to some degree, scripted: “When [the producers] want you to enter the restaurant again, shake hands with the owner, tell him how delighted you are to be eating fish head at his establishment— even though you just did that five minutes ago, when you meant it—you do it” (2006: 13). While he notes that this didn’t entirely soften the experience, one can’t help but think that this isn’t totally true. Risk is mediated here in a number of ways that don’t totally eliminate it, but certainly shape it and further move away from the somewhat hollow claims travel programs of all sorts make about authenticity. 5 Parker-Bowles is the son of Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, from her first marriage, making the future king of England his stepfather. 6 This parallels similar rhetoric around rurality in the lead up to and aftermath of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 American presidential election. 7 Indeed, at the end of the novel, when Jeremy opens The Food Caboose, his speakeasy-inspired restaurant, Olli provides the initial investment to get him started. Olli’s funds—which Jeremy refused for the first restaurant—become idealized in contrast to those of Dante’s, which are predatory and dictatorial. While both Olli and Dante are tied to Jeremy’s familial past, it is Olli and his family who have meaningful kinship bonds with Jeremy, suggesting that capitalism isn’t a problem if it has the accoutrements of family. 8 See, for instance, the “Seasons of Local Splendour” event that all the characters attend where local producers become the site of an ideological tug of war for Jeremy’s soul (2001: 254–65). 9 For more on the links between food and foreign policy, see Chapple-Sokol (2013), Cullather (2007), Rockower (2012), and Wilson (2013). 10 Something similar is at work in Zadie Smith’s “Lazy River” (2019), which is focused on African migrants who labor in the Spanish produce industry alongside British tourists in Almería, Spain. 11 The violent and exploitative realities of labor in meat-processing plants and agriculture, more broadly, has been again highlighted during the ongoing Covid19 pandemic where workers have been particularly susceptible to the virus because of close working conditions, no paid sick leave and, perhaps most importantly, the reliance of these industries on undocumented labor whose work and residency status are made especially precarious during a pandemic and under xenophobic, anti-immigrant governments.

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Chapter 2 1 This chapter was written before the Covid-19 pandemic and, thus, doesn’t address it directly, though much of the discussion in this chapter about the metaphorical operation of viruses resonates with Covid. I discuss the ongoing pandemic in the afterword to this book. 2 See, among many others, Esposito (2008), Foucault (2008), and Rose (2007). 3 For more detailed background to this metaphoric link, in general, see Sontag (1988) and, in the British context, see Marsh (2011). 4 As Simon During notes, this slippage between bodies and economics is central to the operation of Thatcherism: “It’s not so much that the closet helps spread Aids but that homophobia and the Thatcherite appeal to the old narrow traditions of dissenting morality is so galling because neo-liberalism has another ethos too: a welcoming of risk, enterprise, independence of inherited values and hedonism which particularly solicits a certain urban gay participation, and certainly secures Nick’s participation. For all his dismay at Thatcherism’s vulgarity and nonBurkeanism, Nick is not not a Thatcherite after all” (2013: 10; emphasis in original). 5 Because the novel is told from Nick’s point of view, it is, of course, impossible to read how genuine Wani’s attitude toward his health is—after all, Wani is shown throughout the novel to say/feel one thing and often do quite the opposite. This is, most obviously, the case with his sexuality, which Nick presumes to be unacknowledged by Wani’s family. However, at the end of the novel, readers learn that, perhaps, Wani is not as closeted as Nick believes him to be as they have been funding a woman to appear publicly as his fiancée. Wani fails to be as selfconscious or direct as Nick wants him to be, but he is not straightforwardly as hypocritical as Nick assumes. 6 For a discussion of Thatcher’s presence in the novel, see Duff (2010). 7 As Sarah Brophy notes, “The Tory establishment … can only locate him and his sexuality as a monstrous affront to upper-class white propriety … pathologis[ing] Nick and his lovers [and] charging him with treachery” (2011: 184–5). 8 While The Line of Beauty is set pre–9/11, it was published in 2004 (and thus before the 7/7 attacks in London); it is unlikely, though, that Hollinghurst would be insensible to these parallels, particularly given the novel’s attention to the socially sanctioned racism directed at the Ouradis—which turns on their Lebanese origins. 9 As Kagan observes, “Despite their blue chip, aristocratic appearance, Nick’s investment in the Feddens turns out to have been an insecure venture” (2014: 804). 10 Nick, asking whether or not Wani’s official girlfriend, Martine, will receive a similar bequest, learns that Wani and his mother have been paying Martine all along, revealing another mode of managing risk. 11 Though Nick thinks of bequeathing property as somewhat banal and anachronistic, real estate is one of the central tent poles of the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sectors that are at the heart of contemporary financialization. Wani’s bequeath actually demonstrates his recognition of property as financial asset, in comparison to Nick’s romanticized belief in homes as sites of affective belonging. As Grace Blakeley notes, “Their profits rely on the extraction of economic rents—simple transfers of outputs from non-owners

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to owners—rather than productive economic activity that creates new value” (2020: 4). For a more detailed discussion of the rise of the “real estate state,” see Stein (2019). This echoes, in some ways, Bruce Robbins’s notion (2012) of the “sweatshop sublime.” On the orientalism of Atwood’s depiction of Oryx, see, among others, Jane Elliott (2009) and Fiona Tolan (2007). While I would certainly agree that there is an orientalizing tendency in the novel, I would also argue that Atwood is attentive to the violent unevenness of global hierarchies and interconnections— including the rhetorical violence of orientalist categorization—as she constantly draws attention to the way our readerly access to Oryx is through Jimmy/ Snowman, a narrator who can’t consistently be relied on to see the whole story. For more on the privatization of police forces and its relation to neoliberal freedom in the novel, see Vials (2015). Though this is, of course, already the experience of life in the Global North for racialized and other minoritized communities. This is obviously an assumption of freedom from precarity in contemporary suburban life that presumes middle-class whiteness, as the murder of Trayvon Martin, among others, highlights. See Isin (2004) for his theorization of the “neurotic citizen.” For further discussion of this figure, see the Introduction to this book. While the novel version of World War Z is also attentive to the global scope of the virus, its cosmopolitan implications are more explicitly under examination in the film, hence my focus on it here. Indeed, the catalyzing political issue in this book relates to the apartments that the city’s oligarchs own and purposefully keep empty, despite the city’s massive unhomed or underhoused population. The apartments are, in fact, valuable in part because they create scarcity, and thus raise the overall housing cost and real-estate profit in general. See Madden and Marcuse (2016) and Stein (2019) for further exploration of the real-estate state and its cultivation of housing scarcity. The nanobonders and their destruction seem to particularly evoke settler colonial genocidal practices directed toward Indigenous people. Qaanaaq itself, named by its first residents to reference its proximity to Greenland, repeats colonial naming practices where European colonizers used Indigenous place-names while violently eliminating actual Indigenous peoples and cultures. There is, therefore, a decolonizing impulse at play in Ora’s recognition of the breaks’ revolutionary potential.

Chapter 3 1 On these antecedents, see V. I. Lenin’s (1996) and Rosa Luxemburg’s (2003) work on imperialism as the inevitable end point of capitalism. For a foundational discussion of this in terms of Africa, see Walter Rodney (2018). 2 The Canadian government’s violent invasion of sovereign Wet’suwet’en territory in order to enforce the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline is only one current example of these ongoing colonial land grabs.

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3 Paying off debt is more in the register of responsibility and duty, rather than ethics. To pay off your credit card debt or mortgage isn’t really an ethical choice, but a requirement (it wasn’t “your” money to begin with). For more on debt and its implications, see Biss (2015) and Coates (2017). 4 As Sarah Jaquette Ray (2021) recently noted, climate anxiety and its attendant fears about climate refugees is principally a white phenomenon. She asks, “As climate refugees are framed as a climate security threat, will the climate-anxious recognize their role in displacing people from around the globe? Will they be able to see their own fates tied to the fates of the dispossessed? Or will they hoard resources, limit the rights of the most affected and seek to save only their own, deluded that this xenophobic strategy will save them? How can we make sure that climate anxiety is harnessed for climate justice?” These questions parallel those asked by this chapter, though mine are focused through the lens of cosmopolitanism. 5 In his discussion of representations of the Anthropocene, Alberto Toscano highlights the way this discourse transforms the liberal into the geological: “The ascription of geological agency to humanity treats by analogy with an individual act … a widely and extremely uneven distributed … multitude of actions, whose potentially catastrophic consequences are here used to unify the species as a subject of nature, precisely when the subject of history has long become an object of tired mockery” (2016: 117). Like Chakrabarty, Toscano suggests that, in “narratives of the Anthropocene, the geological agency of mankind seems … to overwhelm and obliterate the actions of human beings, especially by confecting a discourse of responsibility and guilt that is improbably intended to interpellate all equally” (2016: 110). 6 Much has been said already about Burtynsky’s use of scale and its relation to aesthetics, labor, and the intersection of both with each other and other elements of global climate change. See, e.g., Ahlberg (2017) on the new visibilities afforded by Burtynsky’s use of scale; Ehsani (2018) on the disappeared workers in representations of the oil industry; MacRae (2018) on post-collapse representations; Peeples (2011) on the toxic sublime; Ray (2016) on how Burtynsky’s scale exposes viewers to an uncomfortable pleasure; Solnit (2003) on Burtynsky’s evasion of political engagement; Trischler (2017) on Burtynsky’s use of scale to refocus older traditions of the sublime. 7 On the trope of depopulation in representations of the Anthropocene, see Toscano (2016). 8 Indeed, I. J. MacRae describes these photos as part of a genre of work that is “after the ‘end,’ ” that works from “the knowledge that ecological collapse is ongoing and accelerating” (2018: 144). 9 Walter Benn Michaels might suggest that it is this very depopulation of Burtynsky’s photos that lend them their ability to offer a critique as they “imagin[e]‌a form that refuses the politics of personal involvement, they make … objective social conditions visible” (2015: 172). Similarly, he argues that “to feel the beauty of the problem is precisely not to feel the pathos of the suffering produced by the problem; it’s instead to feel the structure that makes the problem” (2015: 39). Benn Michaels is not unconvincing. However, the exhibitions that accompany Burtynsky’s photos make explicit an ongoing investment in “the politics of personal involvement,” as does Burtynsky’s narrative of personal revelation. Burtynsky’s photos (like Sebastiaõ Salgado’s) are both invested in making “objective social

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conditions visible” and unable to imagine the structure with any specificity, in part because neither approach can avoid photographing people altogether and, thus, end up perpetuating an investment in the “pathos of the suffering produced by the problem.” Tellingly, in the documentaries that accompany the various exhibitions, there is substantially more focus on the people doing the extractive labor Burtynsky photographs. Indeed, in the Anthropocene exhibition, the only people present are in video vignettes (taken from the Anthropocene documentary) that viewers can access at specific points, via smartphone app. Apart from Italian craftspeople working with marble, all the people present in the videos are from the Global South. The videos of logging in British Columbia, for instance, show chainsaws in motion, but not the operator. If, as Benn Michaels might suggest, this is to highlight structure, rather than pathos, then the exhibit seems to make the claim that structures operate through ghostly actors. Labor, to the extent that it is visible in these exhibits, is principally the work of highly trained craftspeople. Wolfgang Struck, in his discussion of Genesis, suggests, in contrast to work like Burtynsky’s that focuses on a post-collapse, depopulated world, Salgado “searches for a world where a globalized modern civilization has not yet arrived, a pristine world right after the moment of its creation—in other words: a world without us, a world before us, a world before (and besides) the Anthropocene” (2014: 219). Saskia Sassen argues, however, that Salgado’s use of black-and-white photography is what allows for theorizing; unlike color photograph “that leaves little room for distance and thereby theory,” “black and white photography of actual settings creates distance and thereby unsettles meaning” (2011: 438). Salgado has apparently taken reforestation and conservation in Brazil as his central project in the aftermath of Genesis, replanting his family’s 1505-acre farm and creating an NGO, Instituto Terra, that does tree replanting and provides educational outreach to children (Rudel 2011: 433). Thomas K. Rudel, in his very sympathetic discussion of Genesis, suggests that critiques of Salgado’s use of developmental and colonial aesthetics are “excessively scholastic,” ignoring that “Salgado speaks to a different, less disciplinary audience.” As a result, Rudel claims, “the words in his explanations matter less than the images in his portfolio. The immediacy of the experiences depicted in the photographs stirs even those of us who are familiar with the problems he catalogs” (2011: 434). Alexandra Nikoleris, J. Stripple, and P. Tenngart use Kingsolver’s novel to highlight the usefulness of literature in the broader transmission of scientific scenarios: “Literary scenarios can also show how people may be differently affected by climate change and its (lack of) solutions. Through identification with the protagonists in literary fiction, climate change moves from being distant and abstract to close and personal. Literary scenarios may thus affect engagement with climate change as an issue through those subjective encounters and create space for personal reflections” (2017: 317). See, as well, Whitely, A. Chiang, and E. Einsiedel (2016), who make a similar argument. This is perhaps an optimistic belief in the power of literature; however, it does illustrate how the notion of distancing, both metaphorical and material, informs discussions of the novel. As Greg Garrard notes, “literary fiction is poorly suited to the task of climate activism; the inverse ratio of writerly excellence and deliberate political design is

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Notes too well-established. What it can do, diagnostically, is stage some of the processes by which climatic risk becomes knowable, over and above the quantification attempted by the IPCC” (2016: 302). Robert Graves’s and Didier Madoc-Jones’s Postcards from the Future is one example of visual work that aims to represent the effects of climate change in Europe, though it is speculative (depicting a future London and Brighton). Robert van Waarden’s photojournalism work, discussed above, is an example of this work done in nonspeculative fashion. Garrard suggests that this “moralistic language of ‘rapture’ and ‘demise’ helps establish the church-dominated mental and physical landscape of the storyworld, even from the ironic, tangential angle of the independent woman who cannot help thinking with such words” (2016: 303). These suggestions are hardly idiosyncratic creations of Kingsolver; they are all suggestions that pervade popular publications and websites. See Hageman (2012) for more on Bacigalupi’s representations of ecological catastrophe. For a discussion of the tension between the national and the global in the novel as it relates to biogenetic seed production and its utopic possibilities, see King (2016). On the question of scale and representation, particularly in reference to gene modification, see Selisker (2015). We might understand this as a compound position for Emiko as she is both visibly Japanese and a windup (and, thus, not biologically human). Her position as a windup operates in a mode akin to race and also substantially different. Race is also, therefore, even more intertwined with Emiko’s labor position than is typically the case. We might compare this to a similar narrative in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) where the post-human subject, Sonmi-451, is educated in order to transcend her social role. However, while Sonmi-451 ultimately becomes a godlike figure to subsequent civilization, her education is ultimately co-opted by her society—one dependent on the literal cannibalization of the non-human figures as they age.

Chapter 4 1 See Diana Mafe (2011) and Edward Gallafent (2006) for discussions of class in the film adaptation of The Constant Gardener. 2 I’m using the term “post-cosmopolitanism” here in a different way than Andrew Dobson does in Citizenship and the Environment (2003), where postcosmopolitanism signals a “thickly material account of the ties that bind, created not by mental activity, but by the material production and reproduction of daily life in an unequal and asymmetrically globalizing world. In this conception, [cosmopolitical responsibility is] ‘produced’ by the activities of individuals and groups with the capacity to spread and impose themselves in geographical, diachronic, and … ecological space” (2003: 30). This parallels my own use of “cosmopolitanism” throughout this book.

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3 This is particularly emphasized in the film adaptation with its tagline “Love. At any Cost.” 4 The film, for instance, does not entirely resist this narrative of civilizational hierarchies. The Sudanese that attack Lorbeer’s refugee camp at the end of the film are depicted as almost prehistorical invaders. This scene does not appear in the novel. 5 See, also, the repeated connections made by former president Trump and the Republican Party between Central American asylum seekers at the US border and the MS13 gang. 6 While both novels were published pre-9/11 and thus before significant changes to border security globally, it nonetheless remains true that, even before 9/11, borders were more permeable for some than others. 7 While there has been a vast array of scholarship on cosmopolitanism, after the publication of Feeling Global (not least of which by Robbins himself), that suggests the political possibilities of the concept, there does still remain a tension between the aesthetic and political operation of cosmopolitanism. For more on this term, see the introduction to this book.

Afterword: Risky Cosmopolitanism in a Pandemic 1 Grace Blakeley suggests that “the stagnation of the past decade represented the death knell of the speculative mania that characterized the era of financialisation, which collapsed under the weight of its own excesses in 2008. Amid the pandemic, we have witnessed its replacement—state monopoly capitalism—begin to emerge” (2020: vii). She goes on to predict that “we will increasingly see private planning of the economy. Free market, competitive capitalism—if it ever actually existed—is dead” (2020: 33). Blakeley’s argument is in opposition to Andreas Malm’s call for a modified “war communism,” which he also calls “ecological Leninism,” which understands the state as the only adequate force to respond to the Covid and climate crises (2020: 148–54). As part of Malm’s call for ecological Leninism, he suggests that forms of mutual aid can’t possibly instigate the large-scale initiatives necessary for responding to either Covid or climate change (2020: 131). Indeed, he reads mutual aid as “a symptom of a deeply dysfunctional state beholden to the most depraved factions of the dominant class” and that those that “made the greatest difference to the most vulnerable were probably those that took upon themselves tasks the state ought to have shouldered if only it hadn’t been so lousy—a minus sign, not a plus” (2020: 123; emphasis in original). This negative interpretation of mutual aid is worth considering as Malm is correct that the need for mutual aid indexes the failure of the nation-state. However, this very failure might give us pause before imagining the state as the best solution to the current crises. The state has and continues to be a violent colonial framework—a form that has repeatedly demonstrated its disinterest in the most vulnerable and one that many are right to be skeptical of. In Dean Spade’s discussion of mutual aid, drawing on the work of trans of color scholarship, he posits that “mutual aid gives people a way to plug into movements based on their immediate concerns, and it produces social spaces where people grow new solidarities. At its best, mutual aid

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Notes actually produces new ways of living where people get to create systems of care and generosity that address harm and foster well-being” (2020a: 2). Where Malm sees mutual aid as akin to charity, Spade argues that it is, instead, a pathway to imagining the world differently—and, perhaps, to creating the large-scale change necessary outside of the state monopoly capitalism that Blakeley describes. Indeed, as I submit this book back to the press, the first round of vaccines is beginning to be dispersed. The dispersal of vaccines is, unsurprisingly, globally uneven as residents of the Global South are not expected to receive access to the vaccine until 2022 or 2023; this is the result of the Global North both hoarding vaccine doses and refusing to waive patents and intellectual property rights for Global South countries (which limits the expanded global production of the vaccine). The number of GoFundMe campaigns jumped 60 percent between March 20 and March 24, 2020 alone (Popper and Lorenz 2020). While “anthropocentric” is often lobbed by way of critique, that is not how I use it here. Yes, Spade’s work (and the critical traditions he draws from) focuses on human survival, rather than broader ecosystemic survival; however, this speaks to the particular urgency of his work’s focus and does not preclude thinking about mutual aid more expansively. Mutual aid, in other words, doesn’t have to mean abandoning ecological concerns. In fact, there are numerous mutual aid groups and cooperatives deliberately framed around land sovereignty that foreground the link between human and ecological survival. This was Judith Butler’s characterization of our current moment during a webinar organized by the MLA on “Graduate Education Postpandemic,” held on December 9, 2020.

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170

INDEX Note: ‘n’ after a page number indicates a note; ‘f ’ indicates a figure. Abrams, M. H. 121 Ahmed, Sara 11, 137–8 AIDS 63–7. See also viral infections “Along the Pipeline” (van Waarden) 96–7 Amar, Paul 15, 151–2 n.16 Amoore, Louise 21 Arendt, Hannah 6 Argos Collectif 99 Arrighi, Giovanni 15 Atwood, Margaret, Oryx and Crake 67–73 austerity 11–12, 150 n.9 authenticity and class status 30 in A Cook’s Tour (Bourdain) 34 and masculinity 33 in Stanley Park (Taylor) 33, 34, 35 in travel food narratives 28–9 Authers, Benjamin 118, 122 Baciagalupi, Paolo, The Windup Girl 84, 106–11 Ball, John Clement 122 Bauman, Zygmunt 9, 10 Beck, Ulrich 9, 10, 129, 135 Benn Michaels, Walter 66, 98, 156 n.9 Berlant, Lauren 136 Bernes, Jasper 17, 18 Bhabha, Homi 6 Bishop, Kyle 74–5 Biss, Eula 61 Black, Shameem 11, 43, 45, 113 Blackfish City (Miller) cosmopolitanism in 81 empathy as transmissible 79–81 global scope of 75–6, 78 infection in 77–8 spatiality in 74–5 Black Lives Matter 142

Blakeley, Grace 149 n.4, 154 n.11, 159 n.1 Botting, Fred 75 Bourdain, Anthony A Cook’s Tour 28–9 Kitchen Confidential 28 Braudel, Fernand 15 Brooks, Max, World War Z 73 Brophy, Sarah 154 n.7 Brouillette, Sarah 17, 18 Brown, Wendy 69 Burtynsky, Edward Oil 89–93 “Oxford Tire Pile #5, Westley, California, USA, 1999,” 90f Bush, Catherine, The Rules of Engagement 114–24, 127, 129–36 Butler, Judith 10–11, 19–20, 150 n.8 Butler, Octavia, Parable of the Sower 83–4 Byrd, Jodi 12, 16, 150 n.9, 151 n.12 capitalism. See also debt; financialization and Covid-19, 142–3 imperialism as end point 155 n.1 and individualism 148 in The Line of Beauty 61–2 in Oryx and Crake (Atwood) 69 and race 150–1 n.12 in Stanley Park (Taylor) 153 n.7 The Care Manifesto 148 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 91 Chakravartty, Paula 150–1 n.12, 151 n.15 Cheah, Pheng 5 Chiu, Monica 42, 44 class status and authenticity 30 in The Constant Gardener (Le Carré) 115 in A Cook’s Tour (Bourdain) 28

172

Index

in Flight Behavior (Kingsolver) 102–3 and food consumption 28–9 and food travel narratives 28–9 in The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst) 65–6 in Oryx and Crake (Atwood) 68 upward mobility in Lewycka’s works 50–1, 53 climate change and cosmopolitanism 88–9 and debt 84–6 and imperialism 85–6, 99 photographic projects 89–98 precarity of 86–8 and revelation trope 84 “slow violence” of 98–9 and usefulness of literature 157 n.15 climate refugees 99, 106, 155–6 n.4 Cloud Atlas (Mitchell) 158 n.23 collectivism and community in “Along the Pipeline” (van Waarden) 96–7 in Blackfish City (Miller) 79–81 and Covid-19, 144, 148 of laborers 51–2 mutual aid 144, 159 n.1, 160 n.4 in My Year of Meats (Ozeki) 41, 42–5 and precarity 9, 10, 12, 72 and responsible cosmopolitanism 137–8 in The Rules of Engagement (Bush) 120–1 in The Windup Girl (Baciagalupi) 108–9, 111 colonialism. See imperialism Conflict Kitchen 37–9, 39f Connell, Liam 17 The Constant Gardener (Le Carré) class status in 115 empathy in 114 engagement vs. complacency in 126–7 immigration documentation in 131–3 imperialism in 128 information gathering vs. usage in 115–17, 119–21 masculinity in 125 pastoral elements in 124–5, 127–8, 129 political engagement in 137–9

romantic love in 119–20 violence in 130 contagion. See viral infections A Cook’s Tour (Bourdain). See also food travel narratives authenticity in 34 and class status 28 food consumption as risk in 28–9 mediated risk in 153 n.4 and toxic masculinity 29 Corrie, Rachel 138–9 cosmopolitanism in Blackfish City (Miller) 81 and climate change 88–9 and community building 43 critical perspectives on 5–8 defined 3–4 as evolved behavior 120 in Flight Behavior (Kingsolver) 99 and food culture 27–8, 39 as individualistic 31, 119 in My Year of Meats (Ozeki) 42, 43 nonhuman 146 origins of term 5–6 and personal sympathy 11 and political engagement 119, 136–9 and privilege 1–2 rejection of, by local food movements 31 in rural places 97, 105 in Strawberry Fields (Lewycka) 53 in van Waarden’s photographs 97 viral 59, 60, 81 in World War Z (film) 77, 81 Cosmopolitics (Cheah and Robbins) 5 Covid-19 pandemic 141–8, 153 n.11, 159–60 n.2 Danticat, Edwidge 147 Dávila, Arlene 17 Davis, Mike 85 debt. See also financialization and climate change 84–6 and individual risk 13–14 morality of 151 n.15, 155 n.2 and neoliberalism 14–15, 151 n.13 and precarity 2–3, 20–1 and race 151 n.13

Index The Decameron Project 146–8 disease. See viral infections Dobson, Andrew 158 n.2 During, Simon 154 n.4 Elliott, Jane 50, 99, 150 n.7 Embry, Karen 73 empathy in The Constant Gardener (Le Carré) 114 critical perspectives on 113–14 in The Rules of Engagement (Bush) 114 as transmissible in Blackfish City (Miller) 79–81 Emre, Merve 17 ENDSARS movement 142 Fast Food Nation (Schlosser) 46 Ferreira da Silva, Denise 150–1 n.12, 151 n.15 Fielding, Heather 50–1 financialization. See also capitalism; debt and AIDS as symbol of risk 63–7 austerity 150 n.9 Blakeley on 159 n.1 defined 149 n.4 and individual risk 13–16 in The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst) 154 n.11 and precarity 12 and race 151 n.12 and spatiality 149 n.2 violence of 16 Fisk, Gloria 17, 18 Flight Behavior (Kingsolver) class status in 102–3 climate change in 84 as conveying scientific information 157 n.15 cosmopolitanism in 99 individualism in 107–8 local focus of 99–100 revelation trope in 100–2, 105, 111 rural vs. urban divide 104 spatiality in 98, 104–5 food consumption and restaurants with social justice focus 37–40

173

as risk in A Cook’s Tour (Bourdain) 28–9 food production in My Year of Meats (Ozeki) 40 spatial distancing of 46–7 violence of 46, 47–9, 153 n.11 food travel narratives. See also A Cook’s Tour (Bourdain) class in 28–9 imperialism of 26, 27–8, 30–1 individualism in 31 and masculinity 29–31 and race 29, 31 Foucault, Michel 14 Fuks, Julián 148 Furedi, Frank 9 Galchen, Rivka 147 Galloway, Alexander 59, 60, 76 Garrard, Greg 157 n.15, 158 n.17 gender 1, 43, 107, 117 Genesis (Salgado) imperial rhetorics of 95–6 as pre-population 157 n.11 revelation trope in 93–4 Rudel on 157 n.14 spatiality of 94 Ghosh, Amitav 87 Giddens, Anthony 9, 10 Gilroy, Paul 7–8, 138 globalization 9 Hacking, Ian 15–16 Hage, Ghassan 41 Halberstam, Jack 20 Hallak, Shuli, Invisible Networks 55 Hansen, Denise Rose 146 Hardt, Michael 123, 136 Harvey, David 145 Hattenstone, Simon 95 Hollinghurst, Alan, The Line of Beauty 61–7 homelessness 34 Huber, Matthew 87 immigration documentation 131–4 imperialism and climate change 85–6, 99

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Index

in The Constant Gardener (Le Carré) 128 in A Cook’s Tour (Bourdain) 29 and cosmopolitanism 4 as end point of capitalism 155 n.1 of food travel narratives 26–31 and Salgado’s photographs 95–6 Indigenous nations 142, 155 n.2, 155 n.19 individualism of capitalism 148 of cosmopolitanism 31, 119 and Covid-19, 144–5 in Flight Behavior (Kingsolver) 107–8 in food travel narratives 31 and oil-based economies 87 and risk 10, 12, 13–16 in The Rules of Engagement (Bush) 119 in Stanley Park (Taylor) 37 in World War Z (film) 77 Invisible Networks (Hallak) 55 Isin, Engin 9, 14

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian 50–1 Strawberry Fields 46–54 Lindner, Oliver 48 The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst) AIDS as symbol of financial risk in 63–7 capitalism in 61–2 class status in 65–6 financialization in 154 n.11 and Oryx and Crake (Atwood) 72 spatial organization in 74 LiPuma, Edward 12, 15 local food movements as rejection of cosmopolitanism 31 in Stanley Park (Taylor) 31–7 localization in Flight Behavior (Kingsolver) 99–100 risks of, vs. globalization 25–6 in The Windup Girl (Baciagalupi) 106 Love, Glen 121–2 Luxemburg, Rosa 149 n.2

Jayyusi, Lena 74 Joseph, Miranda 13

Ma, Ling, Severance 147–8 Macdonald, Graeme 87 MacRae, I. J. 156 n.8 Malm, Andreas 88, 141, 142, 159 n.1 Martin, Randy 13 Martin, Theodore 17 masculinity authenticity as form of 33 in The Constant Gardener (Le Carré) 125 and A Cook’s Tour (Bourdain) 29 in food travel narratives 29–31 and Portland train attack 1–2 May, Jeff 73 Mayer, Sylvia 102 McClanahan, Annie 20, 21 Mezzadra, Sandro 12 Miller, Sam J., Blackfish City 74–81 Mitchell, David, Cloud Atlas 158 n.23 Mitchell, Timothy 86–7 Mufti, Aamir 18 Mull, Amanda 145 Murphy, Patrick 98 mutual aid 144, 159 n.1, 160 n.4

Kagan, Dion 64, 154 n.9 Kantian philosophy 5–6 Keen, Suzanne 113 Kim, Jodi 149 n.2, 151 n.13 Kingsolver, Barbara, Flight Behavior 84, 98–105 Kitchen Confidential (Bourdain) 28 Klein, Naomi 9, 10, 69, 109 labor unions 51–4 Langley, Paul 13 Lanzendörfer, Tim 73 Lapavitsas, Costas 15 Lauro, Sarah Juliet 73 LaValle, Victor 147 Lazzarato, Maurizio 13, 151 n.13 Le Carré, John, The Constant Gardener 114–17, 119–21, 124–33, 137–9 Lee, Benjamin 12, 15 Leigh, Tiffany 38 Lewycka, Marina

Index My Year of Eating Dangerously (ParkerBowles) 30 My Year of Meats (Ozeki) collectivism and connections in 41, 42–5 cosmopolitanism in 42, 43 food production in 40 narrative structure of 44–5 readers of, as witnesses 45 sexuality in 41–2 and Stanley Park (Taylor) 45–6 Nash, Michael P. 99 Nealon, Jeffery 83–4 Negri, Antonio 123 Neilson, Brett 12 neoliberalism austerity 11–12 and debt 14–15, 151 n.13 and precarity 11–12 and risk 9–10, 12–16 networked culture consumer insecurity about 56, 58 and viral infections 58–60, 67–8 visibility of 55–6 Nikoleris, Alexandra 157 n.15 Nilges, Mathias 83 Nixon, Rob 98, 109, 146 Nyers, Peter 7 Oil (Burtynsky) as depopulated 156–7 nn.9–10 focus of 89–90 revelation trope in 90–1, 93 spatiality of 91–3 oil-based economies Burtynsky’s photographic projects 89–91, 90f and climate change 86–8 precarity caused by 92–3 orientalism 154–5 n.12 Oryx and Crake (Atwood) capitalism in 69 class status in 68 and The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst) 72 networked culture and viral infections in 67–8

175

spatial organization in 68–70, 74 “Oxford Tire Pile #5, Westley, California, USA, 1999” (Burtynsky) 90f Ozeki, Ruth L., My Year of Meats 40–6 Palumbo-Liu, David 43, 44 Parable of the Sower (Butler) 83–4 Parker-Bowles, Tom, My Year of Eating Dangerously 30 pastoral wilderness 121–5, 127, 129 Patrick, Dan 142 Peace Meal Kitchen 37–9 Polanyi, Karl 151 n.14 Portland train attack 1–2 post-cosmopolitanism 158 n.2 precarity. See also risk of climate change 86–8 collectivism in 9, 10, 72 critical perspectives on 8–12 and debt 20–1 defined 150 n.7 freedom from 155 n.15 as modern condition 143 and neoliberal capitalism 11–12 of oil-based economies 92–3 and privilege 4 vs. risk 12–13, 19 as spatial concern 70 in Stanley Park (Taylor) 34 and vulnerability 10–11 privilege. See also class status and cosmopolitanism 1–2 as distancing strategy 137 as “elsewhere,” 19 in Flight Behavior (Kingsolver) 102 and food travel narratives 31 and freedom from precarity 155 n.15 and immigration documents 130–2 as invisible 88–9, 134 in Oryx and Crake (Atwood) 68 and precarity 4 uses of 138–9 race and capitalism 150–1 n.12 and debt 151 n.13 and food travel narratives 29, 31

176 in The Windup Girl (Baciagalupi) 158 n.22 racial inequality 141–2 Rancière, Jacques 102 Ray, Sarah Jacquette 155–6 n.4 Razack, Sherene 123 restaurants 37–40 revelation, trope of of climate change 84 in Flight Behavior (Kingsolver) 100–2, 105, 111 in Genesis (Salgado) 93–4 in Oil (Burtynsky) 90–1, 93 in The Windup Girl (Baciagalupi) 111 risk. See also precarity critical perspectives on 8–12, 16–21 and debt 2–3 defined 9, 149–50 n.7 etymology of 13 and gender 1, 43 global vs. local 25–6 as individual choice 10, 13 and neoliberal capitalism 9–10 and neoliberalism 12–16 vs. precarity 12–13, 19 spatiality of 47 risky subjects, critical perspectives of, in cultural texts 16–21 Robbins, Bruce 5, 6, 7, 136 romantic love 119–20 Ross, Andrew 12 Roy, Arundhati 143–4 Rudel, Thomas K. 157 n.14 The Rules of Engagement (Bush) community in 120–1 empathy in 114 gender in 117 immigration documentation in 131–4 individualism in 119 information gathering vs. usage in 115, 116–19, 120–1 pastoral wilderness in 121–4, 127, 129 political engagement in 136 risks created by neoliberalism 135 romantic love in 120 violence in 122–4, 130 Russell, Karen 147

Index Salgado, Sebastião Genesis 93 “Iceberg between the Paulet Island and the South Shetland Islands, Antarctica,” 94f replanting project 157 n.13 Sandage, Scott 20 Sassen, Saskia 157 n.12 Saunders, Robert A. 73 Schoene, Berthold 74, 75 Severance (Ma) 147–8 sexuality 41–2, 154 n.5 A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Lewycka) 50–1 Shukin, Nicole 58 Simms, Andrew 85 Smith, Adam 113 Smith, Rachel Greenwald 18, 113 Smith, Zadie 145–6 Spade, Dean 144, 159 n.1 spatiality of Burtynsky’s photography 91–3 and financialization 149 n.2 in Flight Behavior (Kingsolver) 98, 104–5 of food production and processing 46–7 global vs. local risks 25–6 in The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst) 74 local food in Stanley Park (Taylor) 31–7 in Oryx and Crake (Atwood) 68– 70, 74 and precarity 70 of risk 47 of Salgado’s photography 94–5 of zombie texts 74–5 Standing, Guy 12 Stanley Park (Taylor) authenticity in 33, 34, 35 capitalism in 153 n.7 individualism in 37 local food in 32–7 and My Year of Meats (Ozeki) 45–6 precarity of homelessness in 34 Strawberry Fields (Lewycka) collectivism and community in 51–2

Index

177

cosmopolitanism in 53 cross-species bonds in 52–3 food production as violence in 46–9 labor unions in 51–4 upward mobility in 50, 53 Stripple, Johannes 157 n.15 Struck, Wolfgang 157 n.11 Sze, Julie 44

viral infections. See also Blackfish City (Miller); World War Z (film) AIDS as symbol of financial risk 63–7 disruptive forms of 73–4 global scope of, in zombie texts 75–6, 78 and networked culture 58–60, 67–8 vulnerability, and precarity 10–11

Tadiar, Neferti X. M. 13, 148, 149 n.2, 150 n.10, 152 n.18 Taylor, Timothy, Stanley Park 31–2 technology. See networked culture TeleGeography 55–6, 57f Tenngart, Paul 157 n.15 Terranova, Tiziana 59 Thacker, Eugene 59, 60, 76 Thatcherism 154 n.4 Toscano, Alberto 156 n.5 travel food narratives 28–9, 152 n.3 Trexler, Adam 89 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt 143–4

Wald, Priscilla 58, 59, 61 Whitehead, Anne 113 Whitehead, Colson, Zone One 147–8 The Windup Girl (Baciagalupi) climate change in 84 collectivism and community in 108–9, 111 gender in 107 local focus of 106 race in 158 n.22 revelation trope in 111 Woodward, Kathleen 16 World War Z (Brooks) 73 World War Z (film) global scope of 75–6 individualism in 77 infection as cure 76–7 spatiality in 74–5 World War Z (film), cosmopolitanism in 77, 81

van Waarden, Robert, “Along the Pipeline,” 96–7 Ventura, Paolo 145, 146 violence of climate change 98–9 in The Constant Gardener (Le Carré) 130 and corporeal vulnerability 10–11 of financialization 16 of food production and labor 46, 47–9, 153 n.11 of police state 141–2 in The Rules of Engagement (Bush) 122–4, 130 of war 150 n.8

Yúdice, George 17 “Zombie Manifesto” (Lauro and Embry) 73 zombie texts. See Blackfish City (Miller); World War Z (film) Zone One (Whitehead) 147–8

178