Micro: Region, History, Literature

Cave creatures in Thailand are a fine introduction to the multiple roles that the micro plays in region, history, and literary study. In 2006 the BBC released the award-winning documentary series Planet Earth across the UK, and a year afterward the Discovery Channel showcased it for cable viewers across the US. With over twelve hours of footage narrated by Sir David Attenborough (and subsequently Sigourney Weaver), the series spanned eleven episodes to include almost any taxonomy that Linnaeus could have imagined. A lengthy paean to global environments, it swept from panoramas of Venezuela's Angel Falls to close-ups of Costa Rican tree frogs. Planet Earth, my Netflix DVD sleeve states, "transports nature lovers from the Himalayan Mountains to the depths of the ocean and everywhere in between."

This emphasis on "everywhere in between" is especially true for scenes from the second disc of Planet Earth, one that includes segments entitled "Caves," "Deserts," and "Ice Worlds." In "Caves," the fourth episode of the series, viewers tour subterranean life-forms from Mexico to Borneo to the state of Texas to Southeast Asia. We are informed that "many caves are like islands, cut off from the outside world and from other caves. This isolation has resulted in the evolution of some very strange creatures. They are the cave specialists—troglobytes—animals that never emerge from the cave or see daylight." Planet Earth then introduces us to the pink-hued cave angel fish, a vertebrate which attaches to cave walls via a series of hooks. Attenborough informs us that "these troglobytes from Thailand are possibly the most specialized creatures on Earth for they live only in cave waterfalls. The entire population of these cave angel fish seems to be restricted to just two caves." A few scenes later we are transported to the Lone Star State, where "it's the same story with other troglobytes. There may well be less than a 100 Texas cave salamanders in the wild."

Humans, of course, are not salamanders, and the world of letters does not have gills, but we might take a cue from these "strange creatures" to think about the recent turn to planetarity and its relation to tiny spaces in American literary studies. Isolated cave fish may help us think further about how something like the sublocal functions underneath the nation-state as it pops up across the globe: not the ocean in its entirety or even a lake but this one waterfall; not a hemisphere in its entirety or even a town but a patch of a yard in front of that house on that street; not a range of mountains but a rock in a forest. A troglobyte—along with the four books under review—reminds us of the importance of the microregion in thinking about the planet at a disciplinary moment invested in tracking the immensity of our globe.

By microregion, I refer to a term akin to a microsite, a neologism from ecology. The OED states that the term microsite was coined in 1954 in the journal Ecological Monographs, but it appears to have been introduced as early as 1947 in that same publication. In his scholarly account of vegetation on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, ecologist Frank Edwin Egler defines a microsite as an "empirically determined small area lying within the continuous extent of one community. The idea is valuable in discussing such irregularities as the vegetation of large boulders within a forest, or of rock outcrops on the mid-slopes" (388). Taking this definition at face value (let us not forget the pre-statehood status of Hawai'i at the time of Egler's writing), we see that a microregion or a microsite is not just another way of...