Western American Literature

The essays that comprise Planet Work sketch out an array of concerns surrounding the definition of the "Anthropocene" and provide self-aware scholarship that accounts for all that might—or might not—be included within that term. In particular, much of [End Page 385] the defining premise of the volume is to identify the role of labor, an action distinct from work, to construct a nexus of enriched narratives that plot the epochal confluence of capitalism, neoliberalism, extractionist practices, and climate change. Editor Ryan Hediger widely addresses this constellation of social, economic, biological, and ecological issues as "modern environmental trauma" (2). The studies that exemplify this trauma span time and space, ranging from harnessing fire in David Rodland's elemental analysis to hypercontemporary contexts surrounding COVID-19.

The three-part collection starts with the section "Questioning 'Anthropocene' Frames," which rehearses debated timelines, human and nonhuman labor practices, and the onset of industrial technology. This helpful literature review dramatizes the scholarly debates of the Anthropocene and aims to construct a foundation for the remainder of the volume.

These foundations are destabilized in section two, "Rethinking Work in the Anthropocene," with essays that close-read roughly two hundred years' examinations of work situations, including democracy in the "slaveryocene" (Hediger 73); the centrality of horses in the English novel (Akilli); the rhetoric of freedom in postbellum agricultural debates (Clausen); and the laboring trope of coming of age in postmodern fiction (Wanat). Especially insightful is James Armstrong's "The Work of the Globe," which provides perceptive contrasts between space-age advancement and the erasure of laboring human populations in the display of the Unisphere at the 1964–65 World's Fair.

Section three, "Learning from Leisure in the Anthropocene," hosts the most impactful essays of the collection, offering careful close reading, theoretical cross-examination, and cultural study that account for narrative practices, social engagement, and the specialization of marketplaces alongside the contested labor/leisure binary. One highlight is Jennifer K. Ladino's poignant essay about the National Park Service that examines the "emotional labor" of rangers in the National Park Service (187). Ladino identifies the homogeneity of conservationist visibility in the marketplace—à la Ken Burns—alongside the growing diversity of contemporary rangers who embrace stewardship amid a precarious, neoliberal economy. [End Page 386] Ladino aptly points to "rangering as a particularly relational kind of work, a labor that refuses to participate in capitalism-as-usual" and identifies the role of human work in planet-based care (193), a position some of this collection's authors advance as a futile endeavor. This "framework of care" (126) is interrogated further in Will Elliot and Kevin Maier's examination of skiing and the climate-centric perspective that winter recreation provides studies of the Anthropocene. Elliot and Maier argue that the solitary and stark symbol of snow advances historical and social understandings of environmentalism and that skiing's complicated capitalist roots contribute to the embodied importance of play in nature as a site for activist reframing.

To its benefit, Planet Work spans a bevy of topics for academic research, including colonial and postcolonial practices, the intersectional confluence of working bodies, and a frequent reference to haunting and trauma related to "modern" technologies. These trends help to diagnose disrupted, relational ecologies between humans and nonhumans across the social, cultural, biological, and technological spheres that comprise the Anthropocene field of study.

However, in casting such a wide net, the volume can read as discontiguous and forced, offering only a few essays that complement sustained discussions. Additionally, the broad reach of the collection's scope meant that each author needed to advance the boundaries of their work, which resulted in making empty academic gestures rather than content- and audience-focused development. Most jolting was the alienating use of "we" across largely uninviting scholarship, notably in the gatekeeping advanced by the coda. To this end, more collaborative scholarship from within work-related fields such as labor studies...