The Great Depression is uniquely poised for literary-critical reevaluation, following the reorienting new lenses of Economic Criticism and the New History of Capitalism. Thinking (more) materially has permitted literary scholars in particular to better apprehend the textured record of modern lives: one where production and consumption infuse interior landscapes and unsettle divisive ontologies; where objects and goods occupy central space in the cultural imaginary and affective ecologies; where the human, natural, and built worlds overlay in unruly, disruptive ways; and where the tyranny of the human subject collapses into a broader network of interconnection that imperils the hoary axioms of civilization itself. This chapter offers a reading of Richard Wright’s posthumously published novel The Man Who Lived Underground (written just after the Depression) in the context of US Southern, African American, and Native American perspectives on the destabilizing and dehumanizing consequences of economic collapse. These contrapuntal readings unveil an American modernity marked by profound, multivalent loss: where money fails to orient, so too does race, and the uncanny (and always, finally, imaginary) freedom from both measures is by turns exhilarating and insupportable.

This chapter develops the theoretical framework. It defines international orders as configurations of authority. It then conceptualizes representants as effectively integrating material and ideational features, while being irreducible to either. It explains how representants relate to discourses, and material resources, and highlights the value-added of representants in relation to cognate concepts, like Bourdieu’s symbolic capital, status symbols, or Pitkin’s representation. Representants do not come alone, but are embedded into semeiotic webs. On this basis the chapter develops four mechanisms through which representants constitute international orders: they characterize the units of international politics, they legitimize them, they position them in power relations towards each other, and they serve as tools for governing. Representants are constitutive of international orders, while also being the building blocks political agents use to change orders. The chapter develops two mechanisms of changes in representants. One focuses on struggles between actors over getting specific representants socially recognized. The other is an unintentional change in representants themselves. It outlines why some artifacts, practices, and language become socially recognised representants. The last section develops a semeiotics of materialism to study representants and capture the constitutive effects of material reality on a par with those of language.

The chapter starts with empirical teasers. The reliance on maps during the Congress of Vienna, Sanskrit poetics in premodern South Asia, the coronation in the Middle Ages, and the European Parliament’s staged plenary votes in the absence of formal competencies all find a mention. The chapter then defines representants as those practices, artefacts, and language that stand in for the units of the international system in international interactions. In comparison to existing theories of changes of international orders, a focus on representants carries some advantages. Approaches studying material capabilities omit how highly centralized orders can exist even if capabilities are widely distributed. Constructivists could do more to identify the transmission mechanisms through which abstract ideas affect practical politics. How exactly ideas are materially instantiated leaves its mark on historical events. Theoretically, the book’s aim is to anchor the macro-processes of international order’s stability and change in everyday and extraordinary embodied encounters. The focus is on scaling up (from new materialist and much of practice scholarship) and scaling down (from traditional scholarship on transformations of international order) at the same time. The chapter briefly summarizes the theory of change of international orders, and it provides an outline of the monograph.

When Roberto Dañino, former World Bank General Counsel, arrived in the institution, he found a department perceived to be at the verge of ‘marginalization’ – a dire state he diagnosed and soon attributed to the rigid ‘culture’ of legal practice. In tracing Dañino’s efforts to ‘make the department relevant again’, we get a glimpse of the situated, material, embodied institutional life of international law: the changes Dañino instilled were not manifested in formal legal sources but in the introduction of new cultural codes, professional prototypes (the ‘how to’ lawyer) and technical routines of risk management. In the domain of international institutional law – often oriented towards abstraction, comparison, or aspiration – such prosaic legal practices tend to be underplayed. This chapter signals two productive entry points for a turn to practice: (i) a focus on the shared and contingent criteria of competence – the ‘social grammar’ – that mark professional postures and performances, and (ii) a heightened attention for the practices of relationality, translation, and materiality through which law is composed – the string of ‘people and things’ that it assembles. This methodological orientation to professional scripts and material routines also offers a perspective on ‘critique’ that differs from familiar structuralist modes of analysis and intervention.

This essay uses concepts drawn from the field of New Materialism, which posits that material objects possess forms of agency that shape human culture rather than just being passively acted upon, to move the history of the book beyond common assumptions that “the book” is a physically coherent and obviously identifiable entity. Looking closely at how the transportation infrastructure of the nineteenth-century print market determined and complicated American understandings of what a book was, it uses the legal and aesthetic debates triggered by evolving distinctions between bound and unbound texts to explore the historically malleable nature of “the book.” Concentrating particularly on the US postal system, which constantly struggled to define and regulate the printed matter passing through it during the nineteenth century as publishers sought to access cheaper circulation rates by presenting book-like material in periodical formats, this study of quasi-books ranges from Washington Irving’s Sketch Book (1819–1820) through the “mammoth weeklies” of the 1840s to the “Library” series of the 1870s.

The materialist turn in contemporary literary theory – comprising of multiple discourses such as new materialism, posthumanism, ecocriticism, speculative realism, affect theory, and others – has been deeply influential in the field of nineteenth-century American literature. However, one key tension within these materialist theories is the question of its politics: how does a turn to materialism, which privileges the actual physical matter of bodies and things over the ideological and linguistic categories of ideas, advance any political or ethical imperatives? Is a world of matter a world without human meaning? This chapter outlines both optimistic and pessimistic perspectives on this question in recent nineteenth-century American literary study. It then seeks to redraw the political impasse between them as one of scale. To that end, I examine two mid-century texts – the anonymously authored “The Ultra-Moral Reformer” (1842) and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Sphinx” (1846) – as depictions of the challenges (and opportunities) of scalar distortion. These texts suggest that the political and ethical impasse within materialism can be described within materialist terms itself, and that doing so offers a way of understanding the value judgments inherent in materialist methodological commitments as scale dependent.

This chapter bridges environmental humanities and Black humanities by examining a figure largely, if curiously, excluded from the “ecocritical” canon: Charles Chesnutt, the first African American writer of commercially successful fiction. Reading literary environmentalism beyond the lenses of Romanticism or transcendentalism, Forbes finds in Chesnutt’s late nineteenth-century conjure tales a richly imagined Black environmental heritage that connected race and nature. Chesnutt’s short fiction featuring metamorphoses of humans into plants and animals represents a key node in an alternate, and nonlinear, Black environmentalist timeline. In contrast to environmentalisms that pit nature’s interests against humans’, the insights we see at flashpoints across this tradition, and crucially in Chesnutt’s conjure tales, belie narratives of human/nature separation that underpin most “white” environmentalisms. Moreover, his marshaling of racialized nonhuman agencies also helps us address persistent difficulties associated with new materialist theorizing. Fusing human/plant/animal agencies to frameworks of care and nurturance, characters in Chesnutt’s conjure tales weaponize “waste” against enslavement’s inhuman valuation systems.

The introduction takes the reader into the history of oil in the Ecuadorean Amazon in the twentieth century. Zooming out from the testimony of a former oil worker, a historical overview sheds light on the dynamics of oil extraction in the region by national and international companies. This history is analyzed from the interdisciplinary perspective of the Environmental Humanities, combining archival and oral sources, sociological and anthropological concepts, and a mixed-methods approach. From this vantage point, the changes in the rainforest brought by the oil industry can be narrated as a fundamental metamorphosis of the landscape, its ecology, and its inhabitants. Drawing from Amazonian and European notions of metamorphosis, four dimensions of this process are particularly relevant for the historical analysis: conceptual, material, toxic, and social. The metamorphosis as metaphor offers a perspective on historical change in the Amazon as a process driven by the conflictive interaction between the rainforest ecosystem and the narrative and material manifestations of the oil industry.