In 1856 and 1857, in response to a prophet’s command, the Xhosa people of southern Africa killed their cattle and ceased planting crops; the resulting famine cost tens of thousands of lives. Much like other millenarian, anticolonial movements—such as the Ghost Dance in North America and the Birsa Munda uprising in India—these actions were meant to transform the world and liberate the Xhosa from oppression. Despite the movement’s momentous failure to achieve that goal, the event has continued to exert a powerful pull on the South African imagination ever since. It is these afterlives of the prophecy that Jennifer Wenzel explores in Bulletproof.Wenzel examines literary and historical texts to show how writers have manipulated images and ideas associated with the cattle killing—harvest, sacrifice, rebirth, devastation—to speak to their contemporary predicaments. Widening her lens, Wenzel also looks at how past failure can both inspire and constrain movements for justice in the present, and her brilliant insights into the cultural implications of prophecy will fascinate readers across a wide variety of disciplines.

Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond

Literature & Fiction

Wenzel, Jennifer

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

In 1856 and 1857, in response to a prophet’s command, the Xhosa people of southern Africa killed their cattle and ceased planting crops; the resulting famine cost tens of thousands of lives. Much like other millenarian, anticolonial movements—such as the Ghost Dance in North America and the Birsa Munda uprising in India—these actions were meant to transform the world and liberate the Xhosa from oppression. Despite the movement’s momentous failure to achieve that goal, the event has continued to exert a powerful pull on the South African imagination ever since. It is these afterlives of the prophecy that Jennifer Wenzel explores in Bulletproof. Wenzel examines literary and historical texts to show how writers have manipulated images and ideas associated with the cattle killing—harvest, sacrifice, rebirth, devastation—to speak to their contemporary predicaments. Widening her lens, Wenzel also looks at how past failure can both inspire and constrain movements for justice in the present, and her brilliant insights into the cultural implications of prophecy will fascinate readers across a wide variety of disciplines.

Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment

How has our relation to energy changed over time? What differences do particular energy sources make to human values, politics, and imagination? How have transitions from one energy source to another―from wood to coal, or from oil to solar to whatever comes next―transformed culture and society? What are the implications of uneven access to energy in the past, present, and future? Which concepts and theories clarify our relation to energy, and which just get in the way? Fueling Culture offers a compendium of keywords written by scholars and practitioners from around the world and across the humanities and social sciences. These keywords offer new ways of thinking about energy as both the source and the limit of how we inhabit culture, with the aim of opening up new ways of understanding the seemingly irresolvable contradictions of dependence upon unsustainable energy forms. Fueling Culture brings together writing that is risk-taking and interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from literary and cultural studies, environmental history and ecocriticism, political economy and political ecology, postcolonial and globalization studies, and materialisms old and new. Keywords in this volume include: Aboriginal, Accumulation, Addiction, Affect, America, Animal, Anthropocene, Architecture, Arctic, Automobile, Boom, Canada, Catastrophe, Change, Charcoal, China, Coal, Community, Corporation, Crisis, Dams, Demand, Detritus, Disaster, Ecology, Electricity, Embodiment, Ethics, Evolution, Exhaust, Fallout, Fiction, Fracking, Future, Gender, Green, Grids, Guilt, Identity, Image, Infrastructure, Innervation, Kerosene, Lebenskraft, Limits, Media, Metabolism, Middle East, Nature, Necessity, Networks, Nigeria, Nuclear, Petroviolence, Photography, Pipelines, Plastics, Renewable, Resilience, Risk, Roads, Rubber, Rural, Russia, Servers, Shame, Solar, Spill, Spiritual, Statistics, Surveillance, Sustainability, Tallow, Texas, Textiles, Utopia, Venezuela, Whaling, Wood, Work For a full list of keywords in and contributors to this volume, please go to: http://ow.ly/4mZZxV

Yaeger, Patricia

Fordham University Press

The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature

How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming. The Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed across space and time. Reading for the planet, Wenzel shows, means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale. Impressive in its disciplinary breadth, Wenzel’s book fuses insights from political ecology, geography, anthropology, history, and law, while drawing on active debates between postcolonial theory and world literature, as well as scholarship on the Anthropocene and the material turn. In doing so, the book shows the importance of the literary to environmental thought and practice, elaborating how a supple understanding of cultural imagination and narrative logics can foster more robust accounts of global inequality and energize movements for justice and livable futures.

Review The Disposition of Nature is a tour de force. It will set a new bar for the burgeoning field of ecological criticism, and will become a foundational text for the environmental humanities. The research is of astounding range and quality, it is written with gorgeous clarity and elegance, and its intellectual ambition leaves one breathless.---Mary Louise Pratt, New York University, A world is not the world. The globe is not the planet. These deceptively simple but powerful claims inform Jennifer Wenzel’s impressive contribution to debates about global capitalism and energy regimes, environmental justice, and world literature. Wenzel brilliantly analyzes images and imaginations of the planet in the intellectual tradition of vernacular cosmopolitanism: constructions of the world from below rather than above, from the socioeconomic margins rather the elite. The result is a powerful affirmation of the value of postcolonial perspectives in discussions of the Anthropocene as well as a trenchant critique of the recent world literature paradigm. A must-read for anyone interested in environmental justice and its relation to literature and narrative.---Ursula K. Heise, University of California, Los Angeles, Product Description Shortlisted, 2020 ASAP Book PrizeHow do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming.The Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed across space and time. Reading for the planet, Wenzel shows, means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale.Impressive in its disciplinary breadth, Wenzel’s book fuses insights from political ecology, geography, anthropology, history, and law, while drawing on active debates between postcolonial theory and world literature, as well as scholarship on the Anthropocene and the material turn. In doing so, the book shows the importance of the literary to environmental thought and practice, elaborating how a supple understanding of cultural imagination and narrative logics can foster more robust accounts of global inequality and energize movements for justice and livable futures. Review The Disposition of Nature is a tour de force. It will set a new bar for the burgeoning field of ecological criticism, and will become a foundational text for the environmental humanities. The research is of astounding range and quality, it is written with gorgeous clarity and elegance, and its intellectual ambition leaves one breathless.---Mary Louise Pratt, New York University, A world is not the world. The globe is not the planet. These deceptively simple but powerful claims inform Jennifer Wenzel’s impressive contribution to debates about global capitalism and energy regimes, environmental justice, and world literature. Wenzel brilliantly analyzes images and imaginations of the planet in the intellectual tradition of vernacular cosmopolitanism: constructions of the world from below rather than above, from the socioeconomic margins rather the elite. The result is a powerful affirmation of the value of postcolonial perspectives in discussions of the Anthropocene as well as a trenchant critique of the recent world literature paradigm. A must-read for anyone interested in environmental justice and its relation to literature and narrative.---Ursula K. Heise, University of California, Los Angeles, About

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wenzel, Jennifer. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Wenzel, Jennifer

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wenzel, Jennifer. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond

Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond

Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment

Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment

The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature

The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature