I’ll be presenting my paper “Scavenging the Ecobody: Making Oddkin in Scavengers Reign.” Hope to see you there! Here’s the abstract while you wait.

Scavengers Reign (2023) is an animated eco-horror series created by Charles Huettner and Joseph Bennet that follows five stranded astronauts as they negotiate the speculative flora and fauna of the planet Vesta-1 to find a way to contact their ship, Demeter 227, and return to their home planet. While scavenging archetypes abound in film and television, scavenging is typically portrayed as a parasitic activity, a one way relationship characterized by the search for and collection of anything usable from discarded waste. However, I argue that in Scavengers Reign, scavenging is an affective and material collaborative relationship with one’s environment that employs the minor intimacies associated with the use of fine motor skills (as in hair cutting, surgery, and drawing) to extract, combine, and implement life supporting strategies. Character’s intimate interactions with holes, incisions, perforations, slits, tentacles, wires, and tongues abound on Vesta-1, suggesting that a scavenging lifestyle is not fundamentally parasitic, but sensuously and viscerally interdependent.

While some scavenging relationships in the series are reduced to use value, and often portrayed as destructive—characters extract a certain chemical to power an organic flashlight contained in a clear amoeba-like organism—a large part of scavenging is improvisational, speculative, and life giving, imagining potential values for unexpected components encountered during a picking. In effect, what the characters of Scavengers Reign largely cultivate to survive is the adaptive qualities of a sensual knowledge. Without the experience gained through the small hands-on intimacies of scavenging, which supports the praxis of this pedagogy, these characters could not survive with the new forms of life they encounter regularly on Vesta-1.

In fact, scavenging throughout the series increasingly relies on the recognition of a growing permeability between technology, human, plant, and animal life to such a degree that each survives only by embodying the process of porosity and repurposing portions of each other’s bodies. While this permeability might evoke negative body horror tropes (the exploitative, malicious, torture-porn) or lead to a generic type of rebirth or transcendence, it instead “stays with the trouble” (to evoke Donna Haraway) lingering in the complex mutations that slip between plant/human/animal. While the body horror of Scavengers Reign might be read as a speculative future of our Anthropocene—when our planet tires of humanities generally parasitic relationship to its resources and returns the treatment—I assert that it is much more productively considered through the way in which it poses scavenging as a complex mode of living and sustaining the porous relationality of “oddkin” (à la Donna Haraway). In this sense, survival on Vesta-1 unsettles current plant, human, tech, and animal boundaries in an effort to mutate new ways to live.

I’ll be presenting a paper titled “Recipes for Wildness: Taste in Ronald Johnson’s A Line of Poetry a Row of Trees and The American Table” at the 30th Annual American Literature Association Conference this year. The panel includes Mark Scroggins, Devin King, and Sally Connolly. The abstract is included below. Hope to see you there!

Recipes for Wildness: Taste in Ronald Johnson’s A Line of Poetry a Row of Trees and The American Table

Although Ronald Johnson’s early poetry is filled with Early American discoveries of wild apples, Indian Corn and Floridian oranges, and his later work includes prize winning cookbooks, his gastrophilosophy remains largely unexplored. This dearth is in part due to the nature/culture dualism that haunts the Transcendentalist lens typically used to theorize Johnson’s poetry. However, I argue that Johnson developed a theory of taste from encounters with matter’s dynamism that intervenes in this historical division of nature and culture. Beginning with his 1964 collection of poetry A Line of Poetry a Row of Trees, and culminating in his popular cookbook from the 1980s, The American Table, Johnson’s performative notion of taste suggests that “wild” metamorphoses in the unique phenomena emerging at the inseparability of word and world are analogous to gustatory experiences. Like poetic practice, taste is the embodied participation in the specific material (re)configuration of nature/culture relations through which boundaries, properties, and meanings are enacted. Taste, for Johnson, acknowledges matter’s role in food’s becoming, and therefore provides an understanding of how discursive practices make meaning. In addition, Johnson’s performative practice has a critical facet; it savors “wildness,” the disruption of boundary making practices that assume the separation of discursive and physical matter. This paper proposes that only by juxtaposing the recipes of representation, which linger in Johnson’s early collection, with the culinary practices of his later cookbooks, can we fully understand how his performative taste productively mixes a volatile American culinary past into a wild future.

While you’re waiting on the panel, check out Sam Amadon’s great essay on Ronald Johnson’s Cookbooks.

I'll be presenting at the SLSA conference in a panel on Appetite and Creativity with Stacey Balkan and Iemanja Brown. The panel reconsiders various forms of consumption as creative acts. My paper examines Ronald Johnson's late cookbooks and early poetry. It's titled "Wild Enchantment: Taste in Ronald Johnson's The American Table and A Line of Poetry a Row of Trees."

ABSTRACT

At mid-century American gastronomy was defined by exploration. Chefs and cookbook authors, such as James Beard, were encouraging home cooks to discover and experiment with the globalized influx of international foodstuffs. During this rich period, New American poet Ronald Johnson wrote award winning cookbooks. However, existing scholarship rarely addresses the ways in which they nuance the many relationships to food that he investigates in his poetry. My paper intervenes in this oversight by examining key alimentary motifs in his gastrophilosophy, namely how he translates the wildness of natural ingredients into performative rhetoric, how his notion of appetite creatively recombines regional and nationalist ideologies of the past, and how he practices taste as a process of embodied discovery. By reassessing the alimentary metaphors in his first book of poetry, A Line of Poetry a Row of Trees (1964), through his late cookbook, The American Table (1984), I argue that Johnson critiques the destructive tastes of early American colonization and replaces them with an appetite for the differential material relations common to enchantment. Food in Johnson’s poetry is a vehicle for sharing the vital substance of material relations across temporal and cultural limits. Food in Johnson’s cookbooks performs the ethical relationship to materiality Johnson’s poetry evokes by imbricating the cook in the shared unpredictability of culinary practice. In sum, reading Johnson’s work as a gastrophilosophy shows how taste can revitalize an essential and ethical dimension of enchantment in the American ethos of expansion.

Hope to see you there!