In How the Earth Feels Dana Luciano examines the impacts of the new science of geology on nineteenth-century US culture. Drawing on early geological writings, Indigenous and settler accounts of earthquakes, African American antislavery literature, and other works, Luciano reveals how geology catalyzed transformative conversations regarding the intersections between humans and the nonhuman world. She shows that understanding the earth’s history geologically involved confronting the dynamic nature of inorganic matter over vast spans of time, challenging preconceived notions of human agency. Nineteenth-century Americans came to terms with these changes through a fusion of fact and imagination that Luciano calls geological fantasy. Geological fantasy transformed the science into a sensory experience, sponsoring affective and even erotic connections to the matter of the earth. At the same time, it was often used to justify accounts of evolution that posited a modern, civilized, and Anglo-American whiteness as the pinnacle of human development. By tracing geology’s relationship with biopower, Luciano illuminates how imagined connections with the earth shaped American dynamics of power, race, and colonization.
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. The “Fashionable Science” 1
1. “The Infinite Go-Before of the Present”: Geological Time, Worldmaking, and Race in the Nineteenth Century 31
2. Unsettled Ground: Indigenous Prophecy, Geological Fantasy, and the New Madrid Earthquakes 57
3. Romancing the Trace: Ichnology, Affect, Matter 87
4. Matters of Spirit: Vibrant Materiality and White Femme Geophilia 114
5. The Natural History of Freedom: Blackness, Geomorphology, Worldmaking 137
Coda. Ishmael’s Anthropocene: Geological Fantasy in the Twenty-First Century 171
Notes 181
Bibliography 211
Index
Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), which won the 2008 MLA Prize for a First Book. She co-edited, with Ivy G. Wilson, Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (2014), and “Queer Inhumanisms,” a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, with Mel Y. Chen (2015).
