Kristin George Bagdanov | University of California, Davis (original) (raw)

Uploads

Papers by Kristin George Bagdanov

The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics, 2023

Energy shapes human existence at every turn, connecting every facet of daily activity to broader ... more Energy shapes human existence at every turn, connecting every facet of daily activity to broader scales of extractive capitalism, resource geopolitics, and the devastating effects of climate change. The intensifications of global warming have made energy transition and climate justice a matter of urgent collective concern, demanding a broader reckoning with the meanings and implications of energy at all levels of socioecological life. Over the past decade, scholarship in the environmental humanities has taken up this challenge, turning increasing attention to the development of energy systems as central components of capitalist-colonial modernity and its constitutive forms of sys temic violence, exploitation, and biospheric transformation. The energy humanities has developed as a distinctive subfield of the environmental humanities to consider how the flows, forms, and representations of energy shape socioecological relations at various scales and to grapple with the catastrophic effects of fossil capitalism. In this field, as Cara New Daggett writes, energy is analyzed "as more than a set of fuels and their associated machines, but also as a socio-material apparatus that flows through political and cultural life." 1 This turn toward energy in the context of global ecological crisis has opened new frameworks for approaching literary works as well as other forms of cultural expression. Authors who might not otherwise be classified as "environmental" writers find a new audience within the energy humanities, where a wide array of concerns-from working conditions to inflation to metabolic processes-can be understood within the context of energy. The cultural forms of energy systems include texts that explore the histories and dynamics of petrocultures, that critique the forms of exploitation and op pression built into modem energy regimes, that imagine alternative energy pasts and futures, and that model energy as a dynamic trope and figure. Yet while this field often takes up the "figures and metaphors" of energy in these works as they reflect and shape energy cultures, as Daggett argues,2 the focus of the energy humanities has largely remained on narrative and visual forms of cultural produc tion, with poetry occupying a minor area of study. In this essay, we tum to postwar American poetry as a key site for exploring figures and forma tions of energy, arguing that what we call "energy ecopoetics" offers sustained insight into energy's socioecological forms. In connecting energy ecopoetics to the energy humanities, we foreground not only the longstanding association of energy as a metaphor for how a poem's effects are generated and experienced, but also poetry's unique capacities for representing d yn amic forms of energy in relation to intensifying biospheric transformation, climate crisis, and the uneven extractive histories that un derscore them. Ecopoetics develops complex modes of attention to place, ecosystems, and ecologic al

Oxford Literary Review

In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Cr... more In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Criticism,’ Amiri Baraka was formulating his own version of nuclear futurity in Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Jazz Musical. Baraka's musical manifests and conceptualises atomic afrofuturism, a historically specific affirmation of black existence that was forged while facing nuclear apocalypse. Nuclear Criticism, which lost much of its exigency after the end of the Cold War, needs to evolve to account for the present nuclear era, as its focus on totalities leaves it ill-equipped for incorporating the disparate lived experiences of those who have already experienced the apocalypse and for whom nuclear apocalypse is a repetition or extension of white supremacy's agenda of extinction. This article offers a genealogy of atomic afrofuturism, examining how throughout the cold war period African American artists like Sun Ra, Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka were exploring the post-apoca...

The Oxford Literary Review, 2019

In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Cr... more In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Criticism,’ Amiri Baraka was formulating his own version of nuclear futurity in Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Jazz Musical. Baraka's musical manifests and conceptualises atomic afrofuturism, a historically specific affirmation of black existence that was forged while facing nuclear apocalypse. Nuclear Criticism, which lost much of its exigency after the end of the Cold War, needs to evolve to account for the present nuclear era, as its focus on totalities leaves it ill-equipped for incorporating the disparate lived experiences of those who have already experienced the apocalypse and for whom nuclear apocalypse is a repetition or extension of white supremacy's agenda of extinction. This article offers a genealogy of atomic afrofuturism, examining how throughout the cold war period African American artists like Sun Ra, Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka were exploring the post-apocalyptic conditions of black existence, including its conflicting temporalities and tenses, while much of America still believed the apocalypse was imminent, not immanent. And so it is Derrida's anti-apocalyptic missives together with Baraka's anti-nuclear musical that can offer the framework Nuclear Criticism so desperately desires for imagining the unimaginable.

Book Reviews by Kristin George Bagdanov

Book review essay covering eight poetry collections published in the past four years. Read online... more Book review essay covering eight poetry collections published in the past four years. Read online at Jacket2: http://jacket2.org/reviews/beast-therefore-i-am
Titles reviewed:
Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths, Elizabeth Acevedo, YesYes Books 2016
Beast Feast, Cody-Rose Clevidence, Ahsahta Press 2014
Bestiary, Donika Kelly, Graywolf Press 2016
You, Beast, Nick Lantz, Wisconsin University Press 2017
Like a Beast, Carly Joy Miller, Anhinga Press 2017
Beast, Frances Justine Post, Augury Books 2014
Ordinary Beast, Nicole Sealey, Ecco Books 2017
Beast Meridian, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Noemi Press 2017

A Review of Jamaal May's poetry collection HUM (Alice James Books, 2013), published online by 32 ... more A Review of Jamaal May's poetry collection HUM (Alice James Books, 2013), published online by 32 poems

Books by Kristin George Bagdanov

Tupelo Press, 2019

DIURNE is a procedural project, "a line each hour of waking / a poem each day of making," that ex... more DIURNE is a procedural project, "a line each hour of waking / a poem each day of making," that explores how poetry is durational rather than inspirational, work rather than epiphany. It is part autobiography, part journalism, part theory, and part apology for not being traditional "poetry."

"Whip-smart, allusive, aphoristic, cheekily instructive...shot with lyricism, endlessly playful, intimate, anxious, and often laugh-out-loud funny, DIURNE achieves with great grace and relative efficiency what the best examples of its subgenre have to offer: it limns a sense of consciousness through whatever's at hand as it places the noteworthy on equal footing with the banal."—Timothy Donnelly

Black Ocean, 2019

"In her debut collection, Kristin George Bagdanov offers a collection of poems that want to be bo... more "In her debut collection, Kristin George Bagdanov offers a collection of poems that want to be bodies and bodies that want to be poems. This desire is never fulfilled, and the gap between language and world worries and shapes each poem. FOSSILS IN THE MAKING presents poems as feedback loops, wagers, and proofs that register and reflect upon the nature of ecological crisis. They are always in the making and never made. Together these poems echo word and world, becoming and being. This book ushers forward a powerful and engaged new voice dedicated to unraveling the logic of poetry as an act of making in a world that is being unmade."

Conference Presentations by Kristin George Bagdanov

The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics, 2023

Energy shapes human existence at every turn, connecting every facet of daily activity to broader ... more Energy shapes human existence at every turn, connecting every facet of daily activity to broader scales of extractive capitalism, resource geopolitics, and the devastating effects of climate change. The intensifications of global warming have made energy transition and climate justice a matter of urgent collective concern, demanding a broader reckoning with the meanings and implications of energy at all levels of socioecological life. Over the past decade, scholarship in the environmental humanities has taken up this challenge, turning increasing attention to the development of energy systems as central components of capitalist-colonial modernity and its constitutive forms of sys temic violence, exploitation, and biospheric transformation. The energy humanities has developed as a distinctive subfield of the environmental humanities to consider how the flows, forms, and representations of energy shape socioecological relations at various scales and to grapple with the catastrophic effects of fossil capitalism. In this field, as Cara New Daggett writes, energy is analyzed "as more than a set of fuels and their associated machines, but also as a socio-material apparatus that flows through political and cultural life." 1 This turn toward energy in the context of global ecological crisis has opened new frameworks for approaching literary works as well as other forms of cultural expression. Authors who might not otherwise be classified as "environmental" writers find a new audience within the energy humanities, where a wide array of concerns-from working conditions to inflation to metabolic processes-can be understood within the context of energy. The cultural forms of energy systems include texts that explore the histories and dynamics of petrocultures, that critique the forms of exploitation and op pression built into modem energy regimes, that imagine alternative energy pasts and futures, and that model energy as a dynamic trope and figure. Yet while this field often takes up the "figures and metaphors" of energy in these works as they reflect and shape energy cultures, as Daggett argues,2 the focus of the energy humanities has largely remained on narrative and visual forms of cultural produc tion, with poetry occupying a minor area of study. In this essay, we tum to postwar American poetry as a key site for exploring figures and forma tions of energy, arguing that what we call "energy ecopoetics" offers sustained insight into energy's socioecological forms. In connecting energy ecopoetics to the energy humanities, we foreground not only the longstanding association of energy as a metaphor for how a poem's effects are generated and experienced, but also poetry's unique capacities for representing d yn amic forms of energy in relation to intensifying biospheric transformation, climate crisis, and the uneven extractive histories that un derscore them. Ecopoetics develops complex modes of attention to place, ecosystems, and ecologic al

Oxford Literary Review

In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Cr... more In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Criticism,’ Amiri Baraka was formulating his own version of nuclear futurity in Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Jazz Musical. Baraka's musical manifests and conceptualises atomic afrofuturism, a historically specific affirmation of black existence that was forged while facing nuclear apocalypse. Nuclear Criticism, which lost much of its exigency after the end of the Cold War, needs to evolve to account for the present nuclear era, as its focus on totalities leaves it ill-equipped for incorporating the disparate lived experiences of those who have already experienced the apocalypse and for whom nuclear apocalypse is a repetition or extension of white supremacy's agenda of extinction. This article offers a genealogy of atomic afrofuturism, examining how throughout the cold war period African American artists like Sun Ra, Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka were exploring the post-apoca...

The Oxford Literary Review, 2019

In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Cr... more In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Criticism,’ Amiri Baraka was formulating his own version of nuclear futurity in Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Jazz Musical. Baraka's musical manifests and conceptualises atomic afrofuturism, a historically specific affirmation of black existence that was forged while facing nuclear apocalypse. Nuclear Criticism, which lost much of its exigency after the end of the Cold War, needs to evolve to account for the present nuclear era, as its focus on totalities leaves it ill-equipped for incorporating the disparate lived experiences of those who have already experienced the apocalypse and for whom nuclear apocalypse is a repetition or extension of white supremacy's agenda of extinction. This article offers a genealogy of atomic afrofuturism, examining how throughout the cold war period African American artists like Sun Ra, Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka were exploring the post-apocalyptic conditions of black existence, including its conflicting temporalities and tenses, while much of America still believed the apocalypse was imminent, not immanent. And so it is Derrida's anti-apocalyptic missives together with Baraka's anti-nuclear musical that can offer the framework Nuclear Criticism so desperately desires for imagining the unimaginable.

Book review essay covering eight poetry collections published in the past four years. Read online... more Book review essay covering eight poetry collections published in the past four years. Read online at Jacket2: http://jacket2.org/reviews/beast-therefore-i-am
Titles reviewed:
Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths, Elizabeth Acevedo, YesYes Books 2016
Beast Feast, Cody-Rose Clevidence, Ahsahta Press 2014
Bestiary, Donika Kelly, Graywolf Press 2016
You, Beast, Nick Lantz, Wisconsin University Press 2017
Like a Beast, Carly Joy Miller, Anhinga Press 2017
Beast, Frances Justine Post, Augury Books 2014
Ordinary Beast, Nicole Sealey, Ecco Books 2017
Beast Meridian, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Noemi Press 2017

A Review of Jamaal May's poetry collection HUM (Alice James Books, 2013), published online by 32 ... more A Review of Jamaal May's poetry collection HUM (Alice James Books, 2013), published online by 32 poems

Tupelo Press, 2019

DIURNE is a procedural project, "a line each hour of waking / a poem each day of making," that ex... more DIURNE is a procedural project, "a line each hour of waking / a poem each day of making," that explores how poetry is durational rather than inspirational, work rather than epiphany. It is part autobiography, part journalism, part theory, and part apology for not being traditional "poetry."

"Whip-smart, allusive, aphoristic, cheekily instructive...shot with lyricism, endlessly playful, intimate, anxious, and often laugh-out-loud funny, DIURNE achieves with great grace and relative efficiency what the best examples of its subgenre have to offer: it limns a sense of consciousness through whatever's at hand as it places the noteworthy on equal footing with the banal."—Timothy Donnelly

Black Ocean, 2019

"In her debut collection, Kristin George Bagdanov offers a collection of poems that want to be bo... more "In her debut collection, Kristin George Bagdanov offers a collection of poems that want to be bodies and bodies that want to be poems. This desire is never fulfilled, and the gap between language and world worries and shapes each poem. FOSSILS IN THE MAKING presents poems as feedback loops, wagers, and proofs that register and reflect upon the nature of ecological crisis. They are always in the making and never made. Together these poems echo word and world, becoming and being. This book ushers forward a powerful and engaged new voice dedicated to unraveling the logic of poetry as an act of making in a world that is being unmade."