Local Americanists Series: John Levi Barnard on "Meat, Climate, and the Dystopia of the Present in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Film"
Local Americanists Series: John Levi Barnard on "Meat, Climate, and the Dystopia of the Present in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Film"
John Levi Barnard, Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign will be giving a works-in-progress presentation on “Meat, Climate, and the Dystopia of the Present in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Film."
Abstract:
Part of a book tracing the interrelated histories of US empire, animal food systems, and mass extinction, this chapter traces the emergence of industrial meat production alongside that of the petroleum complex in the twentieth century. As with petroleum, meat’s centrality to American life is not only a matter of mass production and consumption, but of mass culture, from fiction and film to advertising and political rhetoric. In what follows I consider literary and cinematic representations of meat’s cheapness and abundance, before turning to speculative fictions and films that suggest the precariousness of that supply. What these alternating visions of abundance and scarcity reveal is a consuming culture that now appears both nonnegotiable and totally unsustainable, a conundrum that offers a specific iteration of what has become a general truism for critics of late capitalism: that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a world without meat. As a critical response to that truism, I ultimately offer some imaginative propositions for a possible future beyond both meat and petroleum.
John Levi Barnard, Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign will be giving a works-in-progress presentation on “Meat, Climate, and the Dystopia of the Present in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Film."
Abstract:
Part of a book tracing the interrelated histories of US empire, animal food systems, and mass extinction, this chapter traces the emergence of industrial meat production alongside that of the petroleum complex in the twentieth century. As with petroleum, meat’s centrality to American life is not only a matter of mass production and consumption, but of mass culture, from fiction and film to advertising and political rhetoric. In what follows I consider literary and cinematic representations of meat’s cheapness and abundance, before turning to speculative fictions and films that suggest the precariousness of that supply. What these alternating visions of abundance and scarcity reveal is a consuming culture that now appears both nonnegotiable and totally unsustainable, a conundrum that offers a specific iteration of what has become a general truism for critics of late capitalism: that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a world without meat. As a critical response to that truism, I ultimately offer some imaginative propositions for a possible future beyond both meat and petroleum.