Transscalar Critique

Contemporary African American writing negotiates the twinned crises of anthropogenic climate change and anti-Black violence by thinking in new ways about scale

• Uses Black Studies and African American literature to intervene in humanistic accounts of the epoch we now know as the Anthropocene
• A comprehensive overview of the myriad ways in which scale has been taken up in contemporary literary criticism, the environmental humanities, and Black Studies
• Brings together public policy and literature to argue for the causal role that literature plays in shaping a more sustainable and equitable future

The history of the contemporary is a history of crisis – most centrally, the twinned crises of environmental destruction and anti-Black violence. Transscalar Critique argues that contemporary Black literature navigates this crisis by taking a transscalar approach, understanding crisis as working on multiple scales simultaneously, from the molecular to the geological, from the economic to the aesthetic. As a consequence, this book proposes transscalar critique as a mode of literary criticism. Organized around specific crises and authors, Transscalar Critique argues that crisis offers a window into how competing analytical, artistic, and planetary frameworks collide. In a moment of crisis, questions of race, geology, politics, epistemology, and ontology are brought into focus in surprising and unexpected ways and Transscalar Critique uses the literary, critical, and public policy responses to these events to reveal connections between the human and nonhuman worlds.