Futures after progress: Hope and doubt in late industrial Baltimore By Chloe Ahmann. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2024. 366 pp.

Imagine Chloe Ahmann faced with writing about Curtis Bay, South Baltimore, where her ethnographic fieldwork was a slow-motion, yet also often literally explosive, collision between past and future. The past “progress” that shaped this long-term dumping ground for the surrounding city and nation was still all around—from the dirty air to the troubled bodies and memories of its residents—yet so was the hope that things could be different very soon with a newly proposed incinerator, known as the Fairfield Project, which was either going to change everything for the better or ruin it further … depending on where one was standing. And where can you start reviewing such a beautifully written and necessary book like this? Look, she tells us, this is what the modern industrial world has done to some landscapes and lives on behalf of others, and yet her focus is not solely on suffering or hopelessness. Rather, as the title reveals, Futures is about what the future means in Curtis Bay and, by analogy, for all of us living, albeit in many different ways, in the afterworld of progress. The book is divided into two parts: an introduction, five chapters, five short vignettes, and an epilogue. One might be tempted to divide the two parts into old and young, right and left, white and Black, given that the first three chapters of part 1 are mostly about detailing histories among the oldest residents, mostly white, some of whom support the Fairfield Project thinking they've lived with worse. Meanwhile, the final two chapters, which make up part 2, are largely spent on the activism against the incinerator, focusing especially on a small group of much younger and more diverse students. But Ahmann makes clear that these divides are not so simple, even if some of her interlocutors do see it in that way. In fact, it is to the book's credit that they appear very much to share a world and to have been shaped in different but connected ways by it. Ahmann's first chapter is a layered history showing how the toxic burden that Curtis Bay residents have shouldered was a necessary by-product of how the future was once imagined, specifically in terms of progress. The analysis connects these moments in history through various “cuts,” spatial, epistemic, and temporal, with a compounded, lingering effect on Curtis Bay's environmental and political possibilities. One clear example is the temporal cut from the ineffectiveness of late 20th-century environmental regulations to connect polluted air to ameliorative or collective action. In search of abstract and isolable units of pollutability, “risk assessment was built to make the future tractable through intracorporeal forms of knowledge,” Ahmann explains, “in service of largely corporate interests” (p. 78). Risk becomes a political tool, in other words, which limits our ability to imagine how things could be otherwise. But Ahmann also recognizes that documenting the lingering scars in Curtis Bay “tells us very little about how people live these contradictions: how they hold together worlds and conceive political projects, how they navigate uncertainty, what they do with the mess the future made” (p. 85). That is the primary goal of the rest of the book. Here she explains that living in a dangerous world of open-ended “risks” means abiding the subjunctive, the as if. In many ways, this is the focus of Futures, and it is plain to see why residents, “despite knowing full well that their vulnerability has been produced over generations of exposure and neglect … appropriated the state's fixation on the future” (p. 97). Ahmann quickly points out that residents are not merely pawns of corporate and state hegemony but people making do in difficult circumstances. They may have to reckon with various disavowals or cuts but engage in “countless micro-practices entailed in making harm go numb in order to survive” (p. 129). That takes form among some older residents in the hope that the Fairfield Project will revive the community and manage what they see as material and (racialized) human waste run amok. The problem is not that they have been duped. Ahmann is too good an ethnographer for that kind of reductive explanation. For her, support for the incinerator is not learned helplessness but conditioned hope, “yearnings for renewal reflect[ing] a deep ambivalence about the sorts of futures that seemed credible, given real-life limitations” (p. 161). Over conversations during bingo or while looking at old photographs in their homes, these older residents readily concede what experience tells them: that it could be worse, that it has been worse, and that there is no escaping dumping in Curtis Bay. While part 2 finds residents similarly centered on the subjunctive, contending with what could be and has been, their opposition to the incinerator is where they find alternative futures. “It was often difficult to tell whether the point of all this work was to stop the Fairfield Project or to help people feel in charge of their own lives” (p. 197). Evidence for this assessment comes later when activism prevents the incinerator from being built, yet Ahmann's interlocutors continue fighting other, different, but related forms of injustice. If subjunctive moods can be limiting, if they narrowly frame possible worlds as repetitions of what came before, they can also be empowering. Cotheorizing with her interlocutors and fellow activists (p. 180), Ahmann relates this to prefigurative politics: “Students seized on this opening by collapsing ends and means and engaging in prefigurative work, finding ways to live out something close to their ideal world” (p. 205). Futures is on the activists’ side, and the book says as much but takes everyone seriously. There is so much to admire about this book, and I have left out so much. I also forgot to add a note of criticism, seemingly mandatory in reviews such as this. OK, here's one: Why do we have to wait so long for another book from Ahmann?