This essay tracks the interrelated histories of the cod and the whale from John Smith’s colonial American vision of abundance to the near disappearance of the living resources he described as inexhaustible. Working at the intersections of animal studies, food studies, and the environmental humanities—and considering cultural artifacts from Smith’s tracts and Herman Melville’s fiction to Cheryl Savageau’s poetry and the underwater sculpture of Jason deCaires Taylor—the essay reads the commodification and consumption of these creatures as constitutive elements of an extinction-producing economy. Within this reading, the cod and the whale appear as exemplary figures not only for the important distinction between the edible and the exotic animal—wild food and wildlife—but also for the larger historical relation between “animal capital” and mass extinction.

If you'd like a PDF, send me an email at jbarnard@wooster.edu.

In this paper, I perform close readings of several of the narratives included in the "This American Life" podcast episode "Harper High School" in order to continue the project of rethinking sovereignty outside of the framework of the state as it is lived and practiced in everyday life. Drawing on Bonnie Honig’s reformulation of sovereignty as a modality of power that is not possessed by a singular authority but instead embodied in the collective activity of a people, I use these narratives to assist in theorizing a politics that seeks not emancipation but rather the enactment of futures that are more egalitarian. Such a politics is best conceived as a struggle against forms of violence enacted at specific sites rather than as expressions of resistance against unified forms of domination. To undertake this analysis, I begin by briefly outlining Honig’s line of inquiry, after which I turn to the specific narratives documented by "This American Life," reading them not merely as the chronicles of life in Englewood but as theoretically fecund exemplars of collective and individual sovereignty. Finally, I conclude by exploring what the reading of such narratives as instances of sovereignty can reveal for us regarding politics more generally. Conceiving of the characters in these narratives as sovereign actors seeking to survive rather than as either helpless sufferers (those who experience violence) or criminals (those who act violently) helps to illuminate the complex political dynamics that sustain poverty and produce violence in locales such as Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood.

This paper uses George Orwell’s theorization of Newspeak in 1984 to argue that disciplinary society is not primarily about spatiality but instead the restriction of semantic play. In his “Postscript on Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze argues that “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt” and that the Foucauldian analysis of disciplinary society is inadequate for capturing the techniques of “societies of control,” which are concerned with the abstract quantification and management of the data that composes “dividuals.” By examining the techniques of totalitarian control theorized in Orwell’s writings, we can see that spatial and semantic delimitations are only ever two elements of the same process: enclosure is always partially constitutive of and constituted by historically contingent forms of linguistic rationalization that restrict both the practices and the potential interpretations of practices available to subjects. The tendency of disciplinary society is thus to simulate a metaphysics of substance that generates the fictive interiority of conceptually and spatially self-contained subjects and objects. As Orwell demonstrates through the passionate affair between Winston and Julia, the investment of eros thus poses the greatest risk to disciplinary society, not because there is some sort of ontologically primary desire that always haunts systems of meaning but because erotic attachment, understood broadly, tends to destroy the artificial distinction between subjects and objects on which disciplinary society — of which both totalitarian and control societies are variants — depends.

This article argues that Stephen Greenblatt's chapter on "Twelfth Night" ("Fiction and Friction") from his 1988 book "Shakespearean Negotiations" anticipates many of the arguments about queerness in the early 2000's--particularly those on Renaissance literature. However, like Shakespeare himself, Greenblatt ultimately draws back from the "queazy" corporeal implications of queerness in ways that implicate his argument in Shakespeare's own swerve from same sex to heterosexual couplings at the end of "Twelfth Night."

This paper reads the few references to sodomy in Boccaccio's "Decameron"; I argue here  that Boccaccio presents the sodomist as a patriarchal authority figure who blocks heterosexual desire between an aspiring young man and a desiring young woman.  Considering work on ideas of sodomy in fourteenth century Florence, it also considers how this alignment represents a meta fantasy of displacing literary patronage from a male to female patron.

In this paper, I argue that the generic incoherence of Henry VIII became inevitable once Shakespeare radically disrupted political and cultural Jacobean form by representing Henry VIII's Roman Catholic and annulled queen, Katherine, as the benevolent female protagonist of the play. As such the play could neither fit the dominant Jacobean form of the History play--the patriotic and Protestant-inflected Elect Nation play--nor that of Shakespearean Romance. While Katherine shares with Romance female protagonists such traits as the move from the mother to the daughter, the trial for calumniation, and a divine vision, cultural censorship made it impossible to create the classic providential Romance ending by which Katherine would be succeeded by her daughter Mary, who, like so many of Shakespeare’s Romance heroines, experienced a loss of identity and exile before taking her place as wife and queen. Instead, politics dictated that Mary be replaced with the Protestant Elizabeth, whose very existence was despised by the historical Katherine.  The other possible Romance pairing would be that of Anne Bullen and her daughter Elizabeth; but Jacobean politics also dictated that Anne be erased from this providential Romance narrative. Furthermore, the mute baby Elizabeth is not someone who can heal a family or nation the way that Imogen, Marina, Perdita, or even the indecisive Emilia could--not only via their agency but also via marriage and the promise of a new generation, something which Elizabeth never achieved. We are left, then, with an ironically mismatched pairing of the aged (as she is presented in the play) Katherine and the baby Elizabeth--markers of the way that the Master of the Revels might be seen in many ways as a co-author, or at least co-inspirer, of the play, and, as such, co-distorter of any coherent genre identity.