Forming Attachments: Aesthetic Education and Ecological Crisis
How do we determine what we cannot stand to lose in the face of our ecological crisis? What attachments to people, objects, landscapes, histories and futures will govern our experience and response to an unsettled life on this changing Earth? To put it almost too simply, what do we care about now and how will our forms of care evolve as the conditions of life become less certain, more chaotic? Forming Attachments: Aesthetic Education and Ecological Crisis deepens and explores these questions by taking seriously the way attachments are made and unmade. In that way, this book is the first sustained study of “attachment” as a concept in the Energy and Environmental Humanities and as a cultural and aesthetic preoccupation. By thickening and clarifying attachment we can begin to see more clearly the relationship between the commitments, relations, and ideas that make life livable and desirable and the material conditions that shape and often limit our lives. In our moment of cascading ecological crises, understanding more precisely the relay between, on one hand, the affective, emotional, and rational and, on the other, the material basis and infrastructures of life could not be more urgent. Works of art, and how we go about engaging them, can open up for us ways of understanding how attachments have been made and how we might remake them.
This book takes up a range of novelists, poets, and visual artists to examine five features or conditions of attachment: attention, proximity, transition, intensity, and futurity. By looking closely and patiently at works by Octavia Butler, Craig Santos Perez, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Jeff VanderMeer, Jesmyn Ward, and others, we see the processes by which attachments are formed and sustained, unmade and diminished.
Portions of this project have been published in Resilience, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/Modernity’s Print Plus Platform, Cultural Dynamics, and my chapter “Bakken Aesthetics: Art and Attachment in the Era of Tough Oil,” in Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil, eds. Mary Thomas and Bruce Braun (University of Minnesota Press, 2022).