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Accepted Paper:
Anthropocene Play, Fugitive Void: Notes on the Anthracite Underground in NE Pennsylvania
Jerome Whitington
(New York University)
When a sinkhole opens up a fugitive void in a legacy coal mining community, I attempt to unravel its fleeting nature in contrast to forms of anthropocene play involving off-road vehicles, guns and fire, which offer their own momentary sense of euphoric enjoyment.
Paper Abstract:
Glen Lyon, Pennsylvania, sits in the southern corner of the anthracite coal fields of the Wyoming Valley, a former patch town or glorified labor camp for extensive underground and strip mines that closed up here by the early 1960s. In September 2023 a sinkhole opened up inside a housing complex, prompting a flurry of local news and speculation in a part of the country where I have been studying energy investment in legacy coal mining communities. When I subsequently paid a visit, the sinkhole had been closed up and filled in, but in fact the same hole had made an even more dramatic appearance some 40 years earlier. This paper discusses my attempt to ethnographically unravel a fugitive void in the underground, the fleeting nature of the sinkhole in contrast to the enduring legacies of a mineral substance that is ubiquitous in day-to-day life yet economically irrelevant. I juxtapose this against the forms of anthropocene play involving off-road vehicles, guns and fire, through which mostly men engage in physically intensive and intimate activities on the abandoned mine lands, the mountainous piles of mine refuse, and the feral, early-succession ecologies that have grown up over the past sixty or so years. I take this anthropocene play as a particular enactment of joussance, a fleeting sense of euphoric enjoyment or a bodily configuration of affect and enactment that is momentarily unqualified and affirming.