Introduction to First-Book Authors Colloquium

One of my mentors once lamented that as academics we do not spend enough time celebrating our milestones. We move too quickly on to the next thing or collapse from the exhaustion of the milestone before picking ourselves back up in time to move on to the next thing. Or both. (Stacy Alaimo is very wise.) I organized the inaugural First Book Celebration Roundtable at the 2022 Society for Utopian Studies (SUS) Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, as a way to break this cycle of toxic productivity. To create space, to take a deep breath, to celebrate the achievements of early career academics, our own and others’. I conceived of the First Book Celebration Roundtable for the Society for Utopian Studies conference after being invited to a similar event at the C19: The Society for Nineteenth-Century Americanists’ Conference, held March 31–April 2, 2022. As I spoke about my own book, (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) alongside others in one of my chosen of fields of expertise, nineteenth-century American literature, I realized how my work might participate in a broader conversation about nineteenth-century scientific discourse and transatlantic women’s culture.While I hope to (re)create this opportunity for other early career scholars, I want to do so intentionally by highlighting the work of first-time authors. The work of marketing one’s first book is often placed on the already-exhausted shoulders of the author themselves, especially as academic presses downsize staff and cut budgets. Moreover, as mid-career and senior scholars build their reputations and gain prominence and name recognition for their contributions to the field through additional publications, including multiple books and edited collections, public speaking events, and conference presentations, the work of self-promotion seems less onerous. Opportunities come to the seasoned scholar rather than the scholar searching for opportunities to showcase their work. For these reasons, the First Book Celebration Roundtable at the Society for Utopian Studies conference purposefully differs from the roundtable I participated in at C19: The Society for Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference in its emphasis on supporting the early career scholar. Writing a book is a significant milestone in one’s career, and as both the requirements of tenure and promotion change for this “millennial” generation of scholars and the resources to achieve such milestones decrease, the ability to produce a (first) monograph is less frequent, making this milestone all the more valuable for those who achieve it. Thus, it is my utopian desire to see—at every SUS conference going forward—a First Book Celebration Roundtable as a way of spotlighting the early-career scholar by showcasing their work outside of traditional venues, e.g., in-progress conference presentations, book reviews, etc.But, of course, the act of facilitating such opportunities does inherently raise the question: How do we support the next generation of utopian studies scholars? Will there even be a next generation for the founding scholars of the field to pass the torch to? As Patricia Ventura and Edward K. Chan highlight in White Power and American Neoliberal Culture (2023), this generation of academic writers faces challenges that previous generations have not, namely that they/we are writing in “a moment of danger” in the aftermath of a global pandemic, against anti-democratic white rage, and in the wake of growing authoritarianism and environmental collapse.1 The stakes are “absurdly profound” because they are higher than they’ve ever been as academics’ jobs are threatened by the toxic environment in which they write and by the urge to identify that toxic environment, with the possible consequence of institutional reprimand or even dismissal.2Each of the contributors to this issue’s FIRST-BOOK AUTHORS COLLOQUIUM appears keenly aware of the dystopian world they and their books inhabit. They know the stakes. Yet, they bravely call out those complicit in creating this toxic environment: settler-colonialists, white nationalists, venture capitalists, the military-industrial complex and its leadership, and anti-trans conservatives and gender critical feminists, among others. The vast influence and degree of mal-effect of these oppressors is enough to make anyone give up hope, especially as extinction awaits us just around the corner. But Patrick Whitmarsh, Anne Stewart, and K. Allison Hammer not only exude hope but they encourage solidarity, community, and cooperation as the path forward toward—or through—destruction. If, as Whitmarsh so aptly summarizes in his response, “angry planets, unruly alliances, and extinct utopias all involve parallel disruptions” and “these parallel disruptions strike at interrelated power structures,” then such parallel disruptions demand a collective optimism to undercut the violence that these systems of oppression engender. That optimism might be expressed in anger, in sadness, or in joy, but it nevertheless anticipates a future.This is not a state of cruel optimism. This generation of utopian studies scholars does not desire a form of attachment to but estrangement from the world they have inherited, a world that hierarchizes life based upon gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, (dis)ability, or even species. In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant theorized—or perhaps, prophesized—a state of existence in which a series of events that have the capacity to produce trauma becomes so commonplace that the event(s) themselves can no longer be perceived as exceptional, and therefore, traumatic. We have learned to live with the rise of populism and the decline of democracy. We have learned to live with climate change and an increase in natural disasters. We have learned to live with COVID-19 and the impact of debilitating illnesses on the body. We tread water, but do not drown, as Berlant might say. We learn to “navigat[e] what’s overwhelming,” as we become a generation who “figure[es] out how to stay attached to life from within it, and to protect what optimism [we] have for that” life even as our familiar world burns down around us.3 But, this generation of utopian studies scholars hopes for the burning down of our neoliberal world. Crisis becomes our language, extinction our vocabulary, and it is an expression of hope.This is precisely the argument Patrick Whitmarsh makes in Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science (Stanford University Press, 2023). Through an analysis of the work of contemporary writers Don DeLillo, Colson Whitehead, and Karen Tei Yamashita, among others, Whitmarsh theorizes extinction as a critical concept, defined as a scenario in which readers think futurity “not merely to the end of life itself but to the end of life as we know it.” This is an altogether more hopeful state in the wake of ongoing crisis because it suggests that life might emerge from the destruction, “otherwise.” In his essay for the FIRST-BOOK AUTHORS COLLOQUIUM, titled “‘Nothing you can believe is not coming true’: Utopianism and Extinction Studies,” Whitmarsh recodifies Anthropocene fiction as a utopian project rather than as a dystopian one. Catastrophe has already happened. Now what?, Whitmarsh seems to ask. In his response essay, “‘A Problem of Solidarity’ and Incommensurability,” Whitmarsh explores “collective and planetary solidarity” represented in the work of his peers, as a shared answer to the “Now what?” question.Certainly, Whitmarsh and Anne Stewart share more than just an archive of texts in their books. Stewart’s Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) traces the influences of emergent globalization throughout the 1990s in readings of decolonial fiction by Colson Whitehead, Octavia Butler, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among others. Yet, she argues that we might understand climate catastrophe as the agential expression of an angry planet, Earth, who protests the violence that humans enact toward its resources and peoples. In “Utopia and the Decolonial Imperative,” Stewart proposes the dismantling of our present, born from the recent past (the 1990s), while also locating hope in the deployment of decolonial movements such as “Land Back,” as well as in the use of Indigenous intelligence undergirding the Fourth World model. While Stewart acknowledges solidarity among minoritarian communities as being significant to the shared vision of the FIRST-BOOK AUTHORS COLLOQUIUM contributors, her response, titled “Time Travelling to Utopia,” locates the question of “time crisis” as a shared concern: Whose time is it? Whose timelines dominate our conception of the present? Stewart encourages readers to once again look to Indigenous and Black knowledges of time, as we engage in modes of resistance to the effects of colonization by “traveling not into [the past], but forward with the past.”K. Allison Hammer’s Masculinity in Transition (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) exemplifies the growing demand for scholarship in queer utopian studies. Hammer traces the emergence of “toxic masculinity,” which they recodify as “normative masculinity,” through an archive of performance art, trans poetry, Western films and streaming media, and working-class and “white trash” fictions about labor and unionization. They ultimately argue for the practice of making “unruly alliances” as a means of resistance against normative masculinity, as well as a form of radical care and empathy in the wake of the emotional duress and exhaustion of resistance work. In their essay for the First-Book Authors Colloquium, entitled “‘Unruly Alliances,’ Female Phallicism, and Other Forms of New Masculinities,” Hammer explores the utopian potential of such “unruly alliances” and its unruly culture, which requires practitioners to “giv[e] way to the unknown,” to meet precarity with uncertainty, to embrace risk and vulnerability in the wake of crisis. Like Whitmarsh, Hammer opines that such risks might create a better outcome rather than a worse one; at the very least, they would move toward the dismantling of the power structures of racial capitalism, and that alone is better for everyone. Meanwhile, in their response essay, entitled “Reframing the Anthropocene,” Hammer locates solidarity with her peers and the larger scholarly community in the experience of failure: failure, they argue, is not only a condition of life for queer individuals, but also for peoples of color, queer or not, who are likely to experience the impacts of catastrophe and extinction first—and perhaps most profoundly.This collection of essays and responses showcased in the following FIRST-BOOK AUTHORS COLLOQUIUM offers insights into the pulse of current early career scholarship, as well as into the future of our field. It suggests that environmental dystopias, indigenous utopias, and queer utopias are primary subjects of inquiry, as early career scholars work to make reparations for prior generations’ exclusion of minoritized literatures, film, and art. If, at its most basic level, the field of utopian studies investigates the ways in which writers critique their own society while also offering alternatives for a better future,4 then we might consider early career scholars themselves to be utopists working through their desire to process contemporary crisis through the study of the (recent) past.5 And as they do so, they are not afraid to theorize solutions in the form of extinct utopias, angry planets, and unruly alliances.