Introduction to “Letters from the Field”

Sookyoung Lee’s inaugural “Letter from the Field” launches a new series for the Modernism, Energy, and Environment forum. Lee’s letter outlines the genesis of this project and ranges over several factors—the histories and futures of climate catastrophe, intellectual infrastructure, authoritarian politics, fossil capital’s relentlessness, algorithmic dominance, academic labor—that increasingly shape, even threaten, the kind of work we find meaningful. Over the next several months, we will publish more letters from Caroline Hovanec, Anne Raine, and Joshua Schuster, and others. As these letters appear, readers should, and I suspect will, feel inspired, unsettled, and provoked into reflection and response. We hope you will submit your own letters (which can be featured here) as we all reckon with what it means to think, to write, and to teach in a time of accelerating and interrelated crises. Please email me.

—Thomas S. Davis, forum editor

Dear friends and colleagues,

I have been tasked with introducing “Letters from the Field”, a new series of blog correspondences on doing modernist studies while living through climate change and calamities. “Letters from the Field” grows out of conversations that have taken place at online and in-person events organized by the MSA’s Modernism and the Environment special interest group (SIG) over the past two years. We bring these conversations to forum on Modernism, Energy, and Environment in the hope of having the broader community participate in the exchange. To situate you in the conversation, I’ll provide an account of how this collaborative project came about before sharing my own reflections on what it might mean to think, act, and study together as things fall apart again and again.

When Molly Volanth Hall and Anne Raine first convened the SIG in Spring 2023, a large number of folks showed up to express a certain readiness and enthusiasm undergirded by the exigency and despair gripping us all. Especially in this moment of acute political crises and blatant attacks on public education in the US and elsewhere, the “environment” can serve as a strategic framework that adumbrates all facets of collective life and thus brings to light the deep causality behind various crises: a social fabric engineered by overproduction and overconsumption, resource hoarding and resource wars, the ideology of competitive self-interest and virulent xenophobia, the rise of authoritarian regimes and ever-refined mechanisms of biopolitics, increasingly precarious life and wildly uneven distribution of suffering, and a pathological unwillingness to account for oneself. These are big words, but the point is simple: what is climate change if not the culmination of all that modernity has reaped—the catastrophes both spectacular and “attritional”?[1] Insofar as aesthetic modernisms are premised on the rise of new forms of self-conscious responses to the contradictions of modernity, it is only logical that scholars of modernism are keen to articulate and inhabit new forms of thought and action that must emerge and are emerging.

From the start, then, this SIG has been concerned with how literary scholars and critics might channel their expertise towards direct action and engagement with the policy world. We have thus experimented with new kinds of offerings to the scholarly community, curating for example COP28 recordings for an online viewing-and-discussion series on issues of forced displacement and climate migration.[2] These discussions, which took place throughout the summer and fall of 2024, culminated in designing our workshop for the MSA in Chicago around questions of praxis and activism. The rich variety of documents that were submitted for the “Forms and Methods for Regenerative Futures” workshop, from course notes to public art projects to plans for making one’s campus more resilient to extreme weather events, were too illuminating and inspiring, we felt, not to be given a second life through a platform like this one at Print Plus.

The other impetus behind inviting letters from “the field” has to do with the way our conversation at the workshop kept returning to the first-order problem of the material conditions and the institutional conventions of academic labor. We are brought together by existing habits, spaces, and values, but these also often pose roadblocks to a more ambitious, radical envisioning of the commons. Are our professional modalities (individuated, product-oriented, dispassionate in tone) compatible with our ecological commitments (affective, community-oriented, undertaken without immediate or ostensible payoffs)? In what ways do the current infrastructure of universities and academia entrench us in nonaction?

Or are we overinvested in the idea that academic work should be unalienated? Many of us would like to argue that our work as teachers and knowledge producers can reinforce the ethics we impute to our work as modeling certain behavior and attention in defiance of the productive economy. Yet in thinking so, do we commit a fallacy of conflating different types of labor like organizing and critique? These are just some of the questions that were raised in the workshop and that we wish to continue exploring in letters to each other.

Perhaps there is a double-entendre to the “extinction event” facing us in particular—the dwindling breed of word-hoarders and archivists ill-adapted to the economy of abstracted data and infinite mediation. That our academic institutions are now so inhospitable to readers, critics, philologists, poets, and philosophers who fancy themselves to be the endemic creatures of this environment tells us something about the collusion of contemporary episteme with destructions of unprecedented scale. Few species require collaterals for their existence, and fewer still live with the ironic recognition that only with loss does remembering become available.[3] Now that we have rendered precarity the norm and security the exception (the 70 percent of our colleagues who are in contingent positions and the 1.7 trillion dollar debt held by our students attest to this fact), is not our impending demise the perfect occasion to theorize the relation between the disasters at our door and the resistance at our disposal?[4]

Realizing the limits of institutional imagination and mining the potential ingenuity of extra-institutional organization, then, might be the first step towards striving for a “better catastrophe.”[5] We need to think about where else we are willing to take our teaching, writing, and discoursing. The strange, new experience of huddling together in a dark theater to watch a movie, Walter Benjamin once argued, may be the basis of the practice called politics. In the way that masses hanging out together may give way to a general strike, more dialogic, collectively authored, commonly available modes of accessing each other’s ideas may go a long way in renovating the university and our own intellectual energies towards genuine resilience.

In launching Letters from the Field, then, we look to serve as each other’s ear, as public addressees open to personal responses. Beyond the sheer predilection we—especially the Woolfians and Mooreans among us—have for the epistolary habits of the analog age, there is a practical necessity to the formal demand. On my own, I rarely rise above an indolent agnosticism when faced with the impossible contradictions of modern life; but like a good agnostic, I can act without much conviction, so long as there is a means to continue refining my sense of unknowing through interlocution. My commitment needs little more than the good-willed prodding of others, but that catalyst is an absolute need.

As a case in point, one of the SIG’s practical goals—to reduce our carbon footprint by advocating for changes to the MSA’s conference format, especially regarding air travel—has triggered for me a small but persistent conundrum whereby my main scholarly interests, global studies and environmental humanities, now strike me as insolubly at odds with each other. Environmental humanities is deeply committed to decolonial and indigenous thought, and the global turn in modernist studies of the past two decades has enriched our field with a diversity of particulars in both textual traditions and scholarly voices. Indeed, our scholarship has been galvanized by robust networking (e.g. Modernist Studies in Asia, Australasian Modernist Studies Network, Société d’études modernistes, British Association for Modernist Studies), and the centrality of Anglo-American institutions has dissolved somewhat as more humanities conferences are taking place elsewhere and are attended by scholars from around the world. I have had the good fortune of learning from international colleagues at events in Hong Kong or Normandy and consider the distinct perspectives lent by distinct situatedness to be vital. Ecologically, on the other hand, I am putting out a larger carbon footprint as I practice our profession. The salutary development of a more genuinely cosmopolitan discourse is also another instance of linguistic and territorial incorporation in service of extractive industries.

I solicit your help in rethinking professional life, then, not so much to assuage a private anxiety of mine but to call on our trained ability to sustain and even enliven such contradictions through dialogue. For it is in the wonderous duration of heteroglossia that collective life emerges—Mikhail Bakhtin’s quintessentially modernist insight given a new life in a recent cli-fi novel.

If we are hesitant to admit that disasters have already befallen us, it is an unignorable fact in Yōko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, the first of a trilogy on the wanderings of Hiruko, who is made stateless after Japan and other unspecified areas of the “Far East” have fully submerged under water while she was living abroad in Denmark.[6] The book unfolds through vignettes told in multiple perspectives (“Knut Speaks,” “Akash Speaks”), and what unfolds are random events by which characters meet and undertake small adventures. Hiruko is featured in a local TV show as one of several panelists whose countries no longer exist. Hiroku’s “homemade language” of Panska—a grammatically fluid smashup of Scandinavian vocabulary that enables her to get by in the region —grabs the attention of a minimally-employed linguist named Knut, with whom Hiruko goes in search of a fellow stateless compatriot who is said to be offering a lecture on the umami of dashi in a local festival to be held in the museum of Karl Marx’s home in Trier.

Along the way, they are helped by Akash, an Indian student transitioning to a woman, and Nora, the partner of Tenzo the chef who was supposed to give the lecture but is stuck in Oslo. Tenzo, as it turns out, is an indigenous person from Greenland (he is told by Copenhageners not to describe himself as an “Eskimo” but rather “Inuit,” though Tenzo/Nanook notes that not all Eskimo are Inuit) who has been passing as someone from the “land of sushi” for work. They chat in a mélange of Panska, German, vernacular and textbook Japanese, and English (which Hiruko prefers not to speak since Danish authorities, given the flood of displaced people, send English-speakers to America, a “country with undeveloped healthcare system cannot live,” as she puts it), and they eventually set out to find another person who’s said to know Hiruko’s native language.

The narrative is picaresque rather than dramatic, generically close to a comedy of errors than an apocalypse. Survival and rebuilding consist not of shootouts and chases but of awkward friendships and staggered conversations, last-minute plans and bad food at local diners. What strikes me as so poignantly realistic about this post-disaster text is what we know to be the case now: that our interactions on the ground can indeed consist not of conflict and mistrust, but of fascination, curiosity, and reliance. How else to survive but by receiving help and expressing interest in each other’s life? How else to spend our time but in working for extemporaneous causes raised by others?

When Hiruko finally tracks down the man from the old country, she finds him completely mum and unreactive to her speech. So she just keeps talking, trying different words and honorifics, ventriloquizing different voices. Much later, as the group is lost in their own bickering, the old man rises to his feet and makes a long speech in silence. Only Akash understands and vocalizes the old man’s wish to go to “that place where they’re studying the loss of speech.” And so they move on together, travelers of multiple partial languages, endless chatter, and ordinary jokes in attendance of each other’s loneliness and loss. 

I look forward to the responses of my fellow travelers.