Modernism and Its Environments by Michael Rubenstein;Justin Neuman;

Author:Michael Rubenstein;Justin Neuman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350076044
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

FIGURE 6 Deborah Kerr’s bird hat, frame shot from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Another invasive species that impacted American ecosystems was the boll weevil, a beetle that feeds on the buds and flowers of the cotton plant and was responsible for more economic damage than any agricultural pest in US history, according to the US Department of Agriculture. The poet Jean Toomer, a self-professed amalgam of “French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian” ancestry, records the ecological and economic catastrophe of the boll weevil plague that devastated the cotton economy of the rural South in his poem, “November Cotton Flower”:

Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold,

Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old,

And cotton scarce as any southern snow,

Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow . . .

Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take

All water from the streams. (7)

Plagues of insects are among the oldest of literary tropes, dating at least to the book of Exodus, but the infestation of Anthonomus grandis moved north across the Mexico/Texas border in 1892 and spread through the cotton-growing regions of the American south at the staggering rate of 150–200 miles per year, reaching all growing regions by 1920. Not only ecologically but also culturally invasive, the beetle sparked folk songs especially popular among the poor of cotton-growing regions, a group that “often suffered the most” from the economic dislocations caused by the blight (Hall n.p.). These dislocations were, in turn, major drivers of the Great Migration.

Many farms not destroyed by the blight were driven under by the Great Depression in the subsequent decade, or fell victim to the Dust Bowl droughts presaged by the dry streams and parched soils in Toomer’s poem. Economic losses to American cotton producers from the original infestation through 2013, when a multi-decade boll weevil eradication program was declared complete, are estimated to have exceeded twenty-three billion dollars, according to data gathered by the US Department of Agriculture.

To prevent erosion on railroad sidings and abandoned farms, a government-funded project paid farmers to plant kudzu, a perennial vine native to Asia that was first displayed in the United States at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In our own time, kudzu is known as the plant that swallowed the South after having destroyed entire ecosystems. The economic and ecosystems costs of invasive kudzu are almost impossible to monetize. Mono-crop farming, desertification, drought, invasive species, and extinction events: all of these are aspects of modernism’s environments.

Bird in Space and Ectopistes migratorius, elation and extinction, are two extremes in the vast archive of modernism. Bird in Space is not a commentary on species loss, and Kafka’s beetle Gregor Samsa knows nothing of the beetle Anthonomus grandis, but to elucidate the shaping force and pervasive influence of animal encounters and species discourse in the art and literature of modernism, to bring Brancusi’s bird into dialectical tension with Ectopistes migratorius and Kafka’s beetles into dialogue with Toomer’s, we turn to the methods and insights of animal studies.

The interdisciplinary field of animal

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