Beyond an Environmental “Hermeneutics of Suspicion”

This essay engages debates about hopeful critical scholarship in the environmental humanities via an analysis of the figure of the Babushka of Chornobyl in literature, film, and photography. The argument for hazardous hope unfolds in two steps. First, the article discusses how contaminated environments like the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, where the Babushkas live, invite an interpretative move that models what Paul Ricoeur and, more recently, Rita Felski have problematized as the hermeneutics of suspicion. Such a move involves a mistrust of what is at the surface, calling for the exposure of hidden material agencies beyond what can be sensorily perceived. This suspicious disposition is also the critical stance of much environmental humanities scholarship, even when it attempts to be hopeful. Second, the article proposes that the cultural texts it examines not only model a suspicious gaze but can also easily be read suspiciously—as glossing over the harrowing realities of a precarious life in a sacrifice zone. Yet they also show us pockets of beauty, joy, and community and hint toward reformulations of environmental futurity that cannot easily be accounted for via such suspicious criticism. In that, they invite us to leave behind, if only temporarily, the hermeneutics of suspicion and to explore hazardous hope in a contaminated environment.