on Queer Lasting

Grace King (GK): What would you describe as the key intervention of Queer Lasting in the space of queer ecocritical studies?

Sarah Ensor (SE): This book is propelled in part by a very basic but also important – and maybe counterintuitive – question, which is what contemporary environmental thought’s (and more broadly, contemporary liberatory thought’s) seemingly necessary emphasis on the future or futurity has rendered unthinkable. It is asking after paradigms of care and forms of persistence that have been cast into shadow by this emphasis on futurity across fields. With regard to queer ecocriticism, the brilliance of the queer intervention into ecocriticism has involved the calling into question of essentially every norm that has been taken for granted in the field of environmental studies. I think, in some ways, the only limit – the only place that hasn’t been touched by queer theory – is this emphasis on futurity. If you look at the temporal emphasis of queer ecologies, it’s still very future-oriented, and is committed to developing queer ecological futures, trans ecological futures, and so on. I should say that was also my early work. My early work was all about non-reproductive futurity, and I was totally on team future. I’m in no way critical of this; it’s a necessary move to say that to be queer does not mean that you’re simply fucking, or giving up on, the future. That said, I think that queer ecology’s reluctance to question futurity has also, then, neutralized some of the most transformative insights of queer life and culture, and what they have to teach to environmental thought and ethics.

But I also think that, in regard to how my work is different from other work in queer ecologies, it’s too simple to say that futurity is, in queer ecology, simply a topical or thematic consensus. It also really shapes the predominant methodologies of the field. Queer ecology has been pretty committed to a model of queer that understands queer as out ahead of the curve, at the cutting edge, at the avant-garde. There are conceptual, political, and historical reasons for that. But I’m really interested in models of queerness that I’ve drawn mostly from nineteenth-century literary studies that would understand queerness as also being about catching up to what’s behind us, about residual possibilities, about not always being out in front. I’m curious about queerness as where we might have been, but didn’t quite get. Relatedly, a lot – not all, but a lot – of work in queer ecology is quite contemporary in its archive, and, in some ways, tends toward cultural studies more so than the kind of formalist literary criticism that I’m most excited about. I’m really interested in residual and nominally outmoded things.

Sammy Moriarty (SM): There is a beautiful, complementary temporal loop between your earlier work on “spinster ecology,” where you consider the potential for “alter[ing] our notion not only of where the future lies but also of how (or whether) it arrives,” and Queer Lasting’s attendance to the residual, anachronistic forms of queer possibility. Have the two projects been in dialogue as you’ve written the book, or was arriving at Queer Lasting a very different process, despite these resonances?

SE: In some ways, “Spinster Ecology” is the residual but deeply relevant piece of my own thought: it has been metabolized into the book but isn’t there on the page. I’m clearly still very concerned with how we go on, and how we persist, so in some respects [the book] is a terminological shift. If we lessen our attachment to the future as a galvanizing apparatus for how to live, what becomes possible? In that regard, my interest is in “futureless-ness” now, a loosening of attachment to the future. That becomes a grammatical shift with regard to the grammars of living; in the book, I speak of the attachment to the nominal [noun-based] future that scripts our actions. If we take that attachment off the table, I think it opens the grammars and geographies of living. The book is still about hoping for forms of queer ecological living and lasting and caring and communing, but I am now a believer that “the future” may actually be impeding the project of persisting, as much as it is also animating it. The ethical underpinning has not changed, but my sense of how we might best get there has shifted.

GK: Your method of bridging the 1890s and the 1980s is so exciting because it highlights the non-linear, recursive movements of queer literary and cultural production. Why do you think it’s so important that scholars in literary studies, especially in nineteenth-century American studies, experiment with trans-temporal readings like the one you offer in Queer Lasting? Are there any risks to this approach that you’ve had to consider as you wrote the book?

SE: A lot about this book, and its method, has arrived by accident. It’s not like I thought to myself, “what the field of nineteenth-century literary studies needs is a thorough engagement with the 1980s!” A tremendous amount of what I do happens intuitively, weirdly, indirectly.

My method is one that I’ve had to find my way through and learn to take seriously as I did it. My dissertation was in nineteenth-century American literary studies, and then my first job was in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, but I most often taught post-1865 American literature. The more I happened to be reading around in the 1980s and 1990s, the more I started hearing echoes and resonances with earlier periods. I’ve always been obsessed with regionalism and the narrative that it is a futureless, dying genre; the more that I read 1980s literature, the more I thought: “Maybe regionalism isn’t futureless.” Maybe there are these descendants – they’re just not emerging on a literary historical model based on conscious influence. I began to sense profound, real, but totally unintentional echoes; for example, between Cather’s The Professor’s House and the work of Allen Barnett, or between Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs and Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. Under parallel pressures of futurelessness, certain kinds of analogous formal, stylistic or even ethical experiments arise in terms that we cannot see if we are thinking as a literary historian focused on influence or resemblance. My book isn’t a rejoinder to historicism, but it asks what else becomes possible if we open the apertures of our thinking.

SM: In Chapter 4, “Cruising the Planet,” a cruising Samuel Delany comes into fleeting “contact’’ with Sarah Orne Jewett, and the lights of Dunnet Landing in The Country of the Pointed Firs and the marquee in Delany’s Times Square flicker together. It brought to mind Delany’s description of fiction writing as “trying to create a false memory with the force of history.” How does your methodology offer a new way to think about these contingent traces in the generous dance of what you recognise as the “queer rhythm of making contact and letting go?”

SE: What interests me about Delany is the question of to what extent these alternative possibilities in his work are speculative, or something else. Delany is known for imagining these other worlds, but part of what he’s doing in Times Square is describing the other worlds that have already been here–extant alternatives as opposed to speculative ones. There’s a difference between finding possibility in the speculative and finding possibility in the past subjunctive, or taking seriously the real presence of what-could-have-been, not as a lost past but as an energy of possibility that is still with us. This thinking draws from Elizabeth Freeman and her writing on the “undetonated possibilities of the past.” With regard to the Delany quote you noted, the memory isn’t “false.” The flicker was real. What that flicker could still become now–or maybe can only now become–is real.

SM: Of course, we need to talk about your wonderful readings of grammar. You make the fascinating provocation on p. 15 of your Introduction that “grammar, far from being an esoteric concern, in fact conditions epistemological and political possibility.” You demonstrate this by turning to the “grammars of whiteness” and reframing the concept of persistence in a nonproprietary, queer mode. How do we square experiments like this with recent work, like Kadji Amin’s Disturbing Attachments, which show how certain forms of white, colonial queerness has thrived and does thrive off of that very grammar? Queer Lasting navigates this in really compelling ways with your idea of grammar’s “slightness.”

SE: On the one hand, when I talk about grammar, I am interested in the relays between text and world. There are grammars in which we live, as thinkers like Robin Wall Kimmerer or Joshua Whitehead show us; the grammars of the languages that we speak naturalize certain forms of relation and make other forms of relation unthinkable. On the other hand, the fact that grammar is esoteric, that it seems far afield from political work, is also important to me. There are things that grammatical experimentation does in a literary work that are not yet possible to enact in the world as we know it. For example, William Wordsworth’s “Nutting” (1799), ends with a “Touch—,” this intransitive touch that doesn’t touch anything–which isn’t a thing I can do with you in the world in my body right now, but it can happen on the page. It’s important to me there that the grammar is not yet in and of the world. That is to say, I do think grammar is embodied and political, and it matters that sometimes the page is out in front of the body or the community.

I also have noticed that queer theorists often engage in grammatical experiments without calling attention to them; consider, for example, the role of the gerund in book titles like Feeling Backward, Touching Feeling, Growing Sideways. Grammatical experimentation is part and parcel of queer thought - and especially queer rethinkings of temporality - but is rarely called attention to as such within queer studies. But the work of thinkers working outside or somewhat askance to the field–Christina Sharpe, Tina Campt, Mel Chen, Joshua Whitehead–has called attention to grammar as a conditioning force of political possibility and impossibility. This includes grammar as a force of colonial whiteness and of proprietary logics. At the same time, it is clearly not true that changing grammar will unmake colonialism. But this is where the “slightness” comes in. I consider the possibility of a daily, quotidian slight intervention into grammar that is still tethered to broader workings of power.

SM: I was really moved by the recognition that emerges in your reading of Margaret Ronda’s Remainders of “a quandary common to much scholarship and activism today: the fact that we often find ourselves arriving to situations late.” Especially thinking about the accelerating, multiple apocalypses—both human and environmental—in which we live, it made me wonder about what Queer Lasting has looked like in the classroom or academy for you? How can we come to terms, especially with students, with the pain and frustration that often comes with this queer “lateness,” alongside its potential for new possibilities?

SE: Tying this back to grammar, there are certain choreographies of living that are normalized by the structures in which we live–that can mean the structure of English grammar, or the structure of a semester or a quarter. What feels important for me in the classroom is to de-routinize that temporality by decoupling the time of learning from the time of the syllabus. Learning does not line up with predetermined calendars. One example would be an assignment I designed called an “afterthought,” which I originally generated for a graduate seminar, mostly to account for the fact that the grad syllabus is such a utopian document, chock-full of things you won’t get to discuss. Each student signs up for a week of class, and after the week is over, they write an “afterthought” to take stock of what we did in the week and, more importantly, to reflect on what we didn’t do and could have done. What can they see about the materials and class conversations only after the fact? I now do a version of this assignment in every class I teach.

This book is similarly recursive. It returns to the same texts multiple times; it assumes that it hasn’t exhausted its work in any one chapter. There’s something similar about the rhythm of the afterthought assignment. Just because a week of the semester is over doesn’t mean we’re moving on. We’re figuring out what we’re carrying with us and how, and what we can see only in retrospect. With this assignment, students are supposed to braid together the things their classmates said with discussion posts or materials that we didn’t cover in class–so it’s an invitation for them to listen differently or attend differently. This is also a way of tuning our attention to different temporalities of learning. What if “late” doesn’t mean what we think it means? What if lateness is actually galvanizing or collectivizing–a source of a different kind of possibility than being early or in advance? We’re all often late, so let’s figure out how to be there together.

GK: If this book is about the forms of creativity and production that emerge from terminal regions, then I have to ask about the experience of finishing this book as a terminal region of sorts. What does it feel like for a book project to end? Did you find new questions emerging as you “terminated” the project, and if so, what are they?

SE: This book is propelled by mixed feelings–it’s about all that remains and becomes possible in terminal regions, but it also acknowledges that living in a terminal region comes with profound grief and anger. This is partly why it took me a long time to write the book. Being “at the end” of things is a complicated experience; there’s a relief to being done, but a sadness to being done. There’s a sense of “now what?” that comes after the project. To the extent that this book is trying to figure out how to live, that’s not my project–that’s a collective project. I’m excited for the book to be read and the conversation to continue.

There may be two other books coming out of this project. One is about the queer temporalities of pedagogy, drawing on my experiences teaching queer studies at three quite different public universities in the United States. I’m interested in the specific vitality–or necessity–of queer pedagogy in the context of discussions about “the end of the English major” and “the extinction of higher education.” The other book project comes out of an observation that humanistic queer ecologies doesn’t yet have a theory of its own reading practice, which may be tied to the fact that queer ecologies has inclined toward cultural studies more than “traditional” literary studies. So I am working on a book about queer ecological reading that also rethinks the genealogy of the field by tracing it back to the prevalence of ecological metaphors and figures in early queer studies.

SM: Have you driven up behind any cars with a bumper sticker that asks: What will your spinster aunt have been breathing all along? I want one, even though I can’t drive!

SE: I haven’t, but one of my former students did make me a drawing of Rachel Carson and Sarah Orne Jewett and it features a banner with that phrase!