Necrocracy in America: American Studies Begins to Address Fossil Fuels and Climate Change

American studies’ short lifetime is concurrent with the gradual expansion of de jure democratic rights to the entire populace regardless of race, gender, class, and sexuality, a project it has often seen as fundamental to its academic (and political) mission. It is also concurrent with the maturation of oil capitalism in the United States and around the world. So profoundly has petroleum affected the contemporary politics, identities, and subjectivities of American life that some scholars have asked whether the United States is a democracy or a necrocracy.¹ This term refers to the rule of deceased former rulers but also denotes the ancient flora and fauna that became, millions of years postmortem, fossil fuels: oil, natural gas, and coal. If observers once imagined that the legacy of the United States would be its experiment with democracy, there is now little question that one of its enduring legacies will be the development and dissemination of a way of life premised on consuming fossil fuels at a staggering rate. Future historians may remember the United States in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries principally as the progenitor of the rising seas, extreme weather events, volatile climate, and acidified, littered oceans that plague their times. The human experience of this “slow violence” is already tangible—scientists estimate that three hundred thousand people already perish every year as a result of anthropogenic climate change, while three hundred million are negatively affected.² Moreover, it disproportionately affects the people that most American studies scholars study and support: groups marginalized and powerless because of their race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and/or nationality. The World Bank reports that 75–80 percent of the damages and costs of climate change will be suffered by countries in the global South,³ and scholars predict there may be two hundred million climate refugees by 2050, primarily from the poorest and most vulnerable countries.⁴ We can infer that climate change will ultimately stand alongside the European colonization of the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade as among the most egregious collective acts of injustice in history.

One might not know that we are in the midst of an unprecedented global crisis (in which we are, individually and collectively, deeply complicit) from reading American Quarterly or attending the American Studies Association’s annual conference, however. American studies, the academic discipline arguably most dedicated to progressive political engagement, social justice, and activism, has for the most part ignored climate change and the still-accelerating consumption of fossil fuels despite our awareness of the catastrophic environmental and human consequences. This lacuna is particularly surprising given the United States’ central role in extracting and consuming fossil fuels, developing and normalizing oil capitalism, and denying climate science. If climate change was once seen primarily as a scientific, technological, economic, or policy issue, and thus beyond the purview of the humanities, it is increasingly recognized as a problem deeply rooted in social, cultural, and political systems.

As climate change and the consequent social, economic, and political destabilization becomes a regular feature of our news cycle and daily lives, scholars and students are responding; while humanities and social science budgets are being slashed nationwide, the emerging interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities is gaining recognition and environmental studies departments are rapidly expanding. Whereas anthropology, sociology, geography, history, philosophy, religious studies, and literature increasingly turn their focus toward climate change and its effects, American studies—another interdiscipline that arose to fill a set of intellectual and cultural voids—has remained aloof, beyond a dedicated but relatively small group of scholars who make up the Environment and Culture Caucus. In the last fifteen years, for example, American Quarterly has published only five articles or...