Sustainability and Population in American Literary History
This panel investigates sustainability and population in American literature from Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian writings to early twentieth-century eugenicist tracks. It excavates an overlooked corpus of American sustainability writings well before the term “sustainability” officially appears. Specifically, it proposes that discourses of sustainability emerge from literary depictions of the American population—its fertility, racial makeup, and geographic distribution. This panel thus responds to recent calls for a more rigorous definition of sustainability and reveals American literature’s foundational yet troublesome role in the development of sustainability discourses. It argues that sustainability, as it emerges from this American literary genealogy, harbors deep within it a fantasy of population “perfection”—a fantasy rooted in agrarian conceptions of an Edenic New World.
Our interest in defining a literary tradition of sustainability comes at a pivotal moment, as literary critics are debating the role of the humanities in worldwide sustainability efforts. Currently, scholars understand sustainability as a global and contemporary concept, officially defined in the UN’s 1987 Brundtland Report as “development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Following this definition, sustainability scholars fall into two categories: those who endorse and work to revitalize the notion (e.g. Keller, LeMenager/Foote, Phillipon, Slovic, Sweet) and those who critique sustainability, at times advocating that we abandon the concept altogether (e.g. Colebrook, Markley, Mentz, O’Grady, Pinkus). Both camps observe the haziness of sustainability’s definition. Who are these “future generations” we aim to sustain? In addressing this question, we analyze portrayals of sustainable and unsustainable “future generations” and locate their reproductive, racial, and agricultural features.
Meanwhile, scholars ranging from Paul B. Thompson to Gillen Wood gesture towards the American roots of sustainability. They invoke Jeffersonian agrarianism—its values of small farming and democracy—as an early version of sustainability, punctuated by the work of Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Bill Vitek. Such a genealogy produces a paradox worth tackling: that sustainability is a global concept with roots in a “nation-based” tradition. Confronting this paradox, we chart an unacknowledged literary history—one that, for the first time, links Jefferson to the Brundtland Report through their shared ideas of what makes a population sustainable.
Recent attempts to theorize sustainability’s place within the humanities include ALH’s special issue “Sustainability in America” (Spring 2012)—developed from the 2011 MLA panel “American Sustainability”—the “theories and methodologies” section of PMLA (May 2012), the 2013 MLA panel “Sustainability and Pedagogy,” and the inaugural issue of Resilience (2014), featuring scholars such as Stacy Alaimo, Lawrence Buell, and Paul Outka. While scholars have shown the value of the humanities in sustainability studies, we have not defined what this scholarship looks like in practice. What is the difference between sustainability studies and ecocriticism? Is sustainability synonymous with environmentalism? How do we locate sustainability within our respective fields and objects of study? As an extension of these conversations, we argue that examining American population writings implicate the agrarian vision of demographic utopia in the development of sustainability discourse.
Our panel sketches a broad genealogy of sustainability in a variety of literary and cultural forms—demographic charts, novels, ethnology, and literary journalism. We identify early sustainability discourses, examining their population “improvement” agendas and modes of demographic representation. To start, Molly Farrell reads Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) as a precursor to Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)—a contribution to debates about how populations reproduce and under what ecological and legal conditions. Revealing the colonial roots of population thinking, she contends that Jefferson’s attempts at demographic representation remain haunted by human figures that resist quantification, particularly children and the reproductive bodies of women. Farrell demonstrates the gaps between human experience and numerical representation of that experience, problematizing Jefferson’s construction of a New World sustainable population. Moreover, she shifts how we read Jefferson in relation to sustainability—from agrarian progenitor to demographic writer.
Analyzing the racial contours of this Jeffersonian demography, Abby Goode highlights an agrarian dimension of black nationalist writings in the Civil War and postbellum eras. These writings, Goode argues, respond to a conception of sustainability that either renders the black population in the U.S. categorically unsustainable or ignores the slave labor that makes the “New World” so abundant. Focusing on Martin Delany’s Condition… (1852), she shows how black emigrationist arguments upend the myth of U.S. agrarian utopia—the ideal of a “New World” with unparalleled agricultural and population fertility—and envision a utopian future of small farming, democratic landowning, reproductive vigor, and population improvement. She thus reveals the role of black nationalism in imaginatively disseminating a nascent notion of American sustainability beyond the borders of the U.S. Goode concludes with an account of how black nationalist writings such as Delany’s imagine American sustainability elsewhere in Africa and the Americas, while maintaining, at times, the Americanness of sustainability.
Ushering issues of race, reproduction, and sustainability into the twentieth century, Holly Schreiber explores eugenic-conservationist discourse in Henry Herbert Goddard and Elizabeth Kite’s eugenicist tract The Kallikak Family (1912) and John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1968). She notes that Goddard and Kite “diagnose” inferior intelligence based on non-agricultural subsistence practices, concluding that the Pineys should not be permitted to reproduce. Schreiber argues that these researchers’ desire to control the Pineys’ reproduction stems from a culturally embedded, conservationist drive to preserve untouched wilderness for the elite. She therefore turns to John McPhee’s literary journalism, which reframes the Pineys’ subsistence practices as an alternative to environmentally exploitative behavior. Yet even here, Schreiber observes traces of eugenic–conservationist discourse, revealing the persistence of Progressive Era attitudes about poverty, environmentalism, and population management. She thus demonstrates how mainstream conservationist discourse frames what is worth sustaining and who is unsustainable.
Finally, Stephanie LeMenager, an established voice in sustainability scholarship, will respond to these papers’ attempts to bring population and American literary history into the field. Examining sustainability through the lens of population, our panel reveals the concept’s embeddedness in American literary history; it launches a conversation about the vexed and far-reaching literary genealogy of this crucial concept in the humanities.