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Accepted Paper:
On the possibilities of tragicomic environmental history
Aaron Sachs
(Cornell University)
The field of Environmental History has been dominated by a tragic metanarrative. What would happen if we tried out some more playful or even comedic approaches?
Paper long abstract:
Disciplinary narratives, like neighborhood reputations, tend to be sticky. They can exert an outsize influence on scholarship for decades. And History may be especially prone to certain tropes, as Hayden White famously argued in books like Metahistory (1973) and Tropics of Discourse (1978). When it comes to Environmental History, in particular, scholars have often found themselves trapped in a double whammy of tragic metanarratives. So this paper takes inspiration from the sister field of Ecocriticism, which in recent years has drawn energy from Queer Studies, Affect Studies, and Performance Studies, all of which incline toward at least some measure of playfulness. What could that spirit of play offer Environmental History? What are the political and intellectual stakes of telling stories with a comedic ending rather than a tragic one? Why do comedic narratives about the past seem somehow less true? Might there be productive ways of combining tragic and comedic approaches as we seek to refresh the narratives of Environmental History?