New Materialisms

The works reviewed in this year’s essay on the New Materialisms raise questions about the field’s orientation to knowledge creation and to its subjects of study, critiquing universalizing discussions of the Anthropocene, questioning notions of ‘pure’ or ‘pristine’ Nature, and proposing considerations for ethical and scholarly attention. Along the way, they touch on the problems of human ontology, employ the New Materialisms as a method for scholarship across the disciplines and for applied scholarly and creative work, raise the question of the New Materialisms’ political stakes (or lack thereof), and attempt to negotiate relationships between Western academic knowledge-making and other forms and situations of knowledge. Following an overview of these questions in the introduction, the essay is divided into four sections: 1. Utopia Now, focusing on Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds; 2. Clutter Culture, which discusses Rebecca R. Falkoff’s Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding; 3. National Dirt, on Mieka Erley’s On Russian Soil: Myth and Materiality; and 4. Cartographies of the Anthropocene, which considers Anna L Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou’s multimedia online project Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene.