Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories by Roger Whitson (review)

The unprecedented effects of the Anthropocene on the environment seem to counter the fact that on the geological time scale, humans are almost nonexistent. At the same time, conceptualizing linear, anthropocentric time can enable us to critique and understand the environmental consequences of human existence. Roger Whitson addresses these concerns in his recent monograph Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories, published in Routledge's Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature series. In the book, Whitson challenges anthropogenic, hegemonic conceptions of time and the world using techniques from steampunk and the digital humanities. As each of Whitson's five chapters demonstrates, time and existence have not only been anthropocentrized, but Westernized and whitewashed as well. To challenge such perspectives, Whitson argues, we might borrow methods from steampunk's response to capitalism, globalization, industrialization, and Westernization.

In each of his five chapters, Whitson introduces a variety of steampunk literary and material objects, digital humanities projects, and visual artifacts. Using these objects of analysis as examples, Whitson displays how we might appropriate the concepts of what he calls retrocomputing, alternate histories, and tinkering and maker culture to conceptualize time in a manner that challenges Westernized, anthropocentric narratives. In this way, the "pastness of the future, or the futurity of the past" with which steampunk and related DH projects experiment question and destabilize the Anthropocene (p. 12). Whitson also argues for an increasingly interdisciplinary, open-access Victorian Studies, citing public DH Steampunk projects and conversations occurring on social media platforms as evidence that the discipline has a captive, active audience outside academia that it should more pointedly work to engage.

Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of Plan 28, a public DH initiative to build Charles Babbage's analytical engine, as an example of how publics outside of academia engage with, support, and develop the field of DH. Later in his book, Whitson discusses another example of public DH: Jake Von Slatt's steampunk projects that "[practice] repair" of nineteenth-century technology to "resist the commodified temporality of innovation and obsolescence" that leads us to cast aside anything worn, broken, or outdated as disposable (p. 150). Von Slatt's projects, such as the steampunk RV, exemplify public engagement with not only steampunk technology, but DH projects as well. Using these examples of public DH work, Whitson argues against the anthropocentric concept that "technology must always be equivalent to human history or perception," instead discussing how technology itself can replace the human as the subject (p. 41). Steampunk can, in this way, critique linear temporalities to move past anthropocentric conceptions of history.

In chapter 2, Whitson introduces multicultural, non-Western, and imagined conceptualizations of time to challenge "Anglo-European colonialist nostalgia rooted in fantasies of white dominance" (p. 67). The chapter begins with a close reading of James Ng's 2-D designs that imagine what technology might look like had the Industrial Revolution occurred in China rather than in England. Like the Clock of the Long Now, a public DH project that attempts to measure ten thousand years analogically, Ng's work depends upon conceiving of the past and the present outside of the human perspective. As Whitson discusses, the Clock of the Long Now faces a variety of problems: for example, what might happen to the clock if it survives human existence? In this perspective of post- or nonhuman time, anthropocentric time is underlined as miniscule in the scale of geological time. As Whitson concludes, such "anthropogenic computing" does not work to preserve the present like a time capsule, but focuses on the negative understanding of "geological deep time" that will ultimately witness human extinction (p. 124).

Chapter 4 turns toward Engels's theories of labor in relationship to steampunk ethos and perspectives, specifically "a nonhuman form of digital labor" that appears in many works of fiction (p. 129). While, on the surface, technology appears to liberate people from labor, devices like the steam...