Elsewhere Catastrophe

This essay explores the problem of what I call “elsewhere catastrophe”: a conviction that catastrophe always occurs outside the US nation, traditionally to the south and the east, or happens to racialized bodies that themselves constitute a kind of beyond. At the same time, American literary history reminds us that the vast knowledge traditions developed by those who faced and still face the structures of ongoing settler colonialism and slavery may provide the best available answers, the strongest critical traction, for facing this century. The project of American literary catastrophism derives in part from a body of theory that Caribbean intellectual history has been developing and refining since the first invasion of the archipelago—and the practice of American literary catastrophism must embrace the many traditions that tell stories, create verse, and generate knowledge about how to live in the midst of world-ending. Through brief readings of Tommy Orange, Herman Melville, and N. K. Jemisin, I propose American literary catastrophism as the project of assembling a broad literary tradition of the hemisphere required of our times. The project of American literary catastrophism . . . is both historicist and deliberately presentist; it moves between both modes . . . attending to an ongoing catastrophe that always recedes, eventually, from dominant public view and memory.