If allegory is a mode of indirection—etymologically other speaking—then its desirability as a form in the midst of environmental crisis might seem counterintuitive. At this beyond-belated point of political inaction, surely the more directness the better? Directness infused Greta Thunberg's address at the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit as she informed world leaders that they are “still not mature enough to tell it like it is,” even as “people are suffering, people are dying.” Thunberg's rhetoric was sweeping and grand-scale, propped up by damning statistics. Allegory, by contrast, requires translation across scales; it uses the micro to get to the macro, summons the local to hint at the global. At a previous UN climate event in 2014, Marshallese spoken word poet and activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner performed “Dear Matafele Peinam”—an address to her seven-month-old daughter, in which she promises to fight so that the lagoon they walk past on their morning walks will not “devour” the islands. With an embodied and immediate knowledge of climate change, Jetñil-Kijiner draws on the allegorical trope of the island-as-world to convey something both about the Marshall Islands facing rising waters and our collective condition, albeit an unevenly precarious one.
In Allegories of the Anthropocene, Elizabeth DeLoughrey reads Jetñil-Kijiner and others as allegorical artists for the Anthropocene, the age of humans as a geological force. Throughout, DeLoughrey argues that allegory has surfaced as a salient Anthropocenic form for representing ecological rupture. Further, allegory is the apposite form for the Anthropocene for its attempt to grapple with the antinomies of two scales—situated experience and planetary totality—as well as deep-past and deep-future understandings of time. While much contemporary environmental media perpetuates classical Western allegory's Crusoe-esque (and profoundly colonial) fascination with ahistorical, isolated islands, DeLoughrey is primarily interested in engaging a Global South island archive. If the dominant brand of Anthropocene discourse tends towards an undifferentiated species “man,” then DeLoughrey suggests we might read allegory in order to “parochialize” or “provincialize” environmental universalisms.
As scholars in the environmental humanities have long insisted, climate change and the Anthropocene are problems of narrative. In other words, it matters how we tell and receive and retell these stories of “human impact.” It matters who gets to speak them, and what systems are implicated. In announcing the “Age of Man” and competing over the stratigraphically legible origins of our collective species impact, geologists obscure the world-altering Anthropocenes that have already occurred since the beginnings of European territorial expansion. In Allegories of the Anthropocene, DeLoughrey centers postcolonial and Indigenous island literatures and artworks as having experienced the “world-threatening apocalypse,” and mediated it through allegory, long before the Anthropocene was hailed as an epoch (83). By paying attention to these perspectives, we can better recognize empire—and its articulations as settler colonialism, militarism, and racial capitalism—as integral to the Anthropocene story.
The language of provincialization should indicate DeLoughrey's indebtedness to postcolonial methods, Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe (2000) in particular. In addition to postcolonialists, Allegories of the Anthropocene should be of interest to anyone in the fields of Indigenous studies, island studies, and the environmental humanities. It must also be emphasized quite how committed Allegories is to the study of a literary form and its reinventions across different geographies. DeLoughrey is most of all in conversation with Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1927), showing how allegory emerges in moments of rupture and crisis, and how ruins might be experienced as “flashpoints” for illuminating the violence of modernity. The first three chapters of the book involve the material ruins of empire, prompted by three anthropogenic touchpoints: agriculture (which DeLoughrey considers in the aftermath of plantation slavery in the Caribbean, literally excavated from the soil); nuclearism (via the invisible radiotoxic isotopes left behind by US, British, and French nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific); and globalization (via the material form of waste, as negotiated by “disposable” peoples conceived as “matter out of place”) (103). Following Kathryn Yusoff in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018), DeLoughrey reads each of these anthropogenic “origin stories” from specific experiences of racialization. Far from reinforcing a hunt for origins, Allegories brings human histories of dispossession, toxicity, and creative survival to the fore where they might get lost in the geologic fixation on sediment. These chapters include subtle engagements with Jamaican author Erna Brodber, Māori writers Hone Tuwhare and James George, Tahitian author Chantal Spitz, Dominican artist Tony Capellán, Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, and Jamaican novelist and sociologist Orlando Patterson.
If the first three chapters are concerned with history, the final two explore how Māori author Keri Hulme and Marshallese poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner rework the classical allegorical vehicles of the island and the ocean as sites for thinking futurity in collaboration with more-than-human others. DeLoughrey's concluding analysis of Jetñil-Kijiner's poem “Tell Them” invokes the radical pedagogical potential of allegory, and reveals how the poem models an Indigenous ethics of interrelation, obligation, and care. It is powerful that this rich and careful book should end with a turn to the reader, showing how allegory at its most potent is about the entanglement, not leap, between part/whole or island/planet. Such a recognition of the island “in the world” rather than “as the world” is a recognition of responsibility—to act on the poet's hope that we might “tell” others about the Marshall Islands, the historical and ongoing concentration of risk in racialized places, and the different worlds that can be brought into being through the work of allegorical imagination (182).
