Abstract
This chapter argues that Benh Zeitlin’s film Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), in its scalar attention to flesh and the planet, dramatizes corporeal legacies that inhere in, and transcend, the US South. Beginning with a consideration of the non/human beasts in “the Bathtub” (the film’s island location), the chapter then goes on to show how a big storm that displaces the protagonists evokes memories of Hurricane Katrina in particular and the crisis of the Anthropocene in general. Exploring the overlaps between humans, animals, matter, and environment will reveal how Beasts scales up and down from racialized flesh to a planetary perspective.
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Notes
- 1.
Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 51.
- 2.
Anna Hartnell’s recent book After Katrina (2017) offers a different but connected sense of temporality in relation to New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, and the United States. She considers three “vantage points” of time: “‘American time,’ or the time of an American Century that seems to have run its course; ‘Katrina time,’ or the time of neoliberalism; and ‘New Orleans time,’ an interruptive temporality that resists both the fantasy of ‘American time’ and the nightmare of ‘Katrina time’” (20). Put another way, this chapter thinks relationally to Hartnell’s work in three ways: (1) that we see how the American Century’s fantasies collapse in the face of widespread ecological, cultural, and sociological fracture; (2) that the time of neoliberalism reveals precarity and devastation for those “outside” dominant US conceptions of the human; and (3) that the interruptions of “New Orleans time” might extend out into the bayous, as memories from the past and future shoot through the present moment.
- 3.
Sharon P. Holland , Marcia Ochoa, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “On the Visceral ,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20, no. 4 (2014): 397.
- 4.
Ibid., 392.
- 5.
Christina Sharpe, “Beasts of the Southern Wild—The Romance of Precarity I,” Social Text, September 27, 2013, https://socialtextjournal.org/beasts-of-the-southern-wild-the-romance-of-precarity-i.
- 6.
David Denby, “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” The New Yorker, June 29, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/beasts-of-the-southern-wild.
- 7.
Beasts of the Southern Wild. Hereafter cited in the text.
- 8.
We might also think, here, about the “sexual politics of meat”—Carol J. Adams’ argument that “animals’ oppression and women’s oppression are linked together”—which is surely evoked by this film’s interest in flesh, gender, and race. (Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, 2015, xxxiv).
- 9.
One interpretation of this film is that it is a form of magical realism, an extension of a genre that has consistently found modes to represent the difficulties and hardships of dispossession, trauma, and violence. I do not want to make such a reading here, because I think the film is more open to the idea that Hushpuppy is the only one to see the aurochs, but this is not fully clarified or explained.
- 10.
Natalie Cecire, “Environmental Innocence and Slow Violence,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 43, no. 1–2 (2015): 164.
- 11.
Patricia Yaeger, “Beasts of the Southern Wild and Dirty Ecology,” Southern Spaces, February 13, 2013, https://southernspaces.org/2013/beasts-southern-wild-and-dirty-ecology.
- 12.
Denby, “Beasts.”
- 13.
bell hooks, “No Love in the Wild,” NewBlackMan (In Exile), September 6, 2012, http://www.newblackmaninexile.net/2012/09/bell-hooks-no-love-in-wild.html.
- 14.
For instance, when hooks refers to the scene where Wink celebrates Hushpuppy’s physical strength—“you the man”—hooks calls this “transgender casting” that reveals Hushpuppy as embodying “maleness and sometimes femaleness” (hooks). The dubious description of gender norms as “transgender” is a problematic moment.
- 15.
hooks , “No Love.”
- 16.
Thomas Hackett, “The Racism of Beasts of the Southern Wild,” New Republic, February 19, 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/112407/racism-beasts-southern-wild
- 17.
Sharpe , “Beasts.” I should note here, though, that Sharpe’s contention is that the black characters are replacing the white people that live in this Louisiana location. However, as I will explain below, the inhabitants of this “real” watery world are actually Native people. As such, further levels of naturalized or evacuated precarity are layered across this film.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2016).
- 20.
Sharpe, “Beasts.”
- 21.
Yaeger, “Beasts.”
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Jacob Breslow, “The Queer Story of Your Conception: Translating Sexuality and Racism in Beasts of the Southern Wild,” in Queer in Translation, edited by B. J. Epstein and Robert Gillett (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 133.
- 24.
Stephanie Rountree, “Does the Subaltern Speak? Reimagining Hurricane Katrina in Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics 2, no. 2 (2015): 6–7.
- 25.
Daniel Spoth, “Slow Violence and the (Post)Southern Disaster Narrative in Hurston, Faulkner, and Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Mississippi Quarterly 68, no. 1–2 (2015).
- 26.
Anna Hartnell, “Writing the Liquid City: Excavating Urban Ecologies After Katrina,” Textual Practice 31, no. 5 (2017): 942.
- 27.
Ibid., 935.
- 28.
Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 102, 110, 107.
- 29.
Glenn Jellenik, “Re-shaping the Narrative: Pulling Focus/Pushing Boundaries in Fictional Representations of Hurricane Katrina,” in Ten Years After Katrina: Critical Perspectives of the Storm’s Effect on American Culture and Identity, edited by Mary Ruth Marotte and Glenn Jellenik (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014), 221.
- 30.
For more on the interrelations between disaster, the environment, and neoliberalism and capitalism, see Robert C. Bell and Robert M. Ficociello’s America’s Disaster Culture (2017). In this book, the authors show how even the term “natural disaster” is ideologically freighted in US culture.
- 31.
At the time of writing in 2018, the community has still not fully relocated, due to a stalled purchase of land. Not to mention, the Trump administration’s history with Native sovereignty, federal land, and environmental issues does not promise an easy and positive future for the tribes.
- 32.
For more, a short documentary by Jason and Rebecca Marshall Ferris called Can’t Stop the Water (2013) is available online.
- 33.
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2.
- 34.
Yaeger, “Beasts.”
- 35.
See, for instance: Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (2015); Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016); Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. (2015); Jason W. Moore (ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (2016).
- 36.
Naomi Klein, “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World,” London Review of Books 38, no. 11 (2016), https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n11/naomi-klein/let-them-drown.
- 37.
Jinthana Haritaworn, “Decolonising the Non/Human,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2015), 211.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Useful studies on the role of toxicity and environmental racism include Robert Bullard’s formative book Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality (1990) as well as Dorceta Taylor’s Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (2014).
- 40.
Stef Craps, “Introduction,” in “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene: A Roundtable,” Stef Craps et al, Memory Studies, online first (2017): 3
- 41.
Rick Crownshaw, “Speculative Remembrance in the Anthropocene,” in “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene,” 4
- 42.
Lucy Bond, Ben De Bruyn, and Jessica Rapson, “Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction,” Textual Practice 31, 5 (2017): 859, 855.
- 43.
However, a word of caution over the term planetary is necessary. As Jennifer Wenzel has warned, a planetary perspective that revolves around the human—as my analysis does here—might just be a “reconstructed post-anthropocentric humanism” or a “more-than-humanism.” Though, as she notes, the kind of attention I am bringing to the “shared plight of species being” (and, moreover, the plight of the planet itself) can begin to acknowledge the perils of our present moment on the Earth. So, while the flesh-to-planet narrative that I am charting here does not offer the radical vision of planetarity that Wenzel argues for—one that moves completely beyond the human—it nonetheless sees in Beasts an attention to the imbrication of the body in larger environmental networks. Jennifer Wenzel, “Planet vs. Globe,” English Language Notes 52, no. 1 (2014): 25.
- 44.
Susan Stanford Fraiman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2015), 8.
- 45.
Cecire, “Environmental Innocence,” 166.
- 46.
Yaeger, “Beasts.”
- 47.
It is significant that a number of the texts in this book have depicted mothers as absent presences that simultaneously nurture and expose their children. In Salvage, Mama’s love is often felt and alluded to; in The Help, black women partly inhabit the role of detached white mothers; and in Monster’s Ball, a black mother loses a husband and son, but a family of white men have lost and fail to mourn their mothers and wives.
- 48.
Hartnell , “Writing,” 944.
- 49.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 166.
- 50.
Sharpe, “Beasts.”
- 51.
Tavia Nyong’o, “Little Monsters: Race, Sovereignty, and Queer Inhumanism in Beasts of the Southern Wild,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2015): 251.
- 52.
Ibid., 256.
- 53.
Hartnell , “Writing,” 944.
- 54.
Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 15.
- 55.
Ibid., 18. Original emphasis.
- 56.
Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 8.
- 57.
Haraway , When, 18.
- 58.
More recent attempts to “back-breed” the aurochs are detailed here: Erik Stokstad, “Bringing Back the Aurochs” (2015).
- 59.
Nyong’o, “Little,” 259.
- 60.
Ibid., 265.
- 61.
Pieter Vermeulen, “Creaturely Memory: Shakespeare, the Anthropocene and the New Nomos of the Earth,” Parallax 23, no. 4 (2017): 384.
- 62.
Cecire, “Environmental,” 177.
- 63.
Nyong’o, “Little,” 266.
- 64.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement ‘Beyond the Human,’” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2015): 216 (original emphasis).
- 65.
Nyong’o, “Little,” 266.
- 66.
This is another moment that confuses the reality/fantasy of her trip to Elysian Fields, as where else would she have obtained the food?
- 67.
Cecire, “Environmental,” 175.
- 68.
Hartnell , “Writing,” 945.
- 69.
See, for instance, Sebastian Groes, “Introduction to Part III: Ecologies of Memory” (2016); Jennifer Wenzel, “Past’s Futures, Future’s Pasts” (2017), 6.
- 70.
Stef Craps, “Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory,” Parallax 23, no. 4 (2017): 479.
- 71.
Crownshaw, “Speculative,” 4.
- 72.
Cecire, “Environmental,” 175.
- 73.
Hartnell , “Writing,” 945.
- 74.
Sharpe, In the Wake, 14.
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Lloyd, C. (2018). “Fabric of the Universe Is Comin’ Unraveled”: Beasts of the Southern Wild, from Flesh to Planet. In: Corporeal Legacies in the US South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96205-4_6
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