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  • Making Trouble
  • Daniel Herbert (bio)
Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material edited by Jane Arthurs and Iain Grant. Bristol, UK, and Portland, OR: Intellect Books, 2003. 202 pages (paperback). $30.00.
The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America by Kevin Rozario. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 313 pages (hardcover). $27.50.

It often feels that disaster, catastrophe, calamity—call it what you will—functions as a dominant modality of our lives, and it seems we spend as much time and energy seeking to prevent disasters as we do trying to understand and recover from them. Yet the apparent ubiquity of calamities belies the historical and cultural processes through which disasters have been "produced," that is, understood, construed, and even manufactured as a discernible type of event. Two recent volumes examine the intersections between culture and disaster in provocative ways: The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America, by Kevin Rozario, and the collection Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material, edited by Jane Arthurs and Iain Grant. Although they differ in their methodologies and in their specific analyses, both books assert that calamities and crashes [End Page 468] are constitutive of modernity, as indeed, for Rozario, modernity itself obeys a catastrophic logic. Whereas the essays collected in Crash Cultures map various "crashes"—of stock markets, of cars, etc.—onto a number of cultural texts, Culture of Calamity engages in a rich historical account of the social contexts in which specific calamities have occurred and the subsequent cultural changes they helped engender. Given the vast number and extensive history of spectacular representations of massive destruction, the continued theorization and historicization of disasters and accidents seems an important pursuit, as evidenced by, for instance, the cultural analysis of Otto Friedrich's The End of the World: A History or Ulrich Beck's sociological work on the "risk society." Both Crash Cultures and Culture of Calamity make fascinating contributions to this endeavor, and the volumes will appeal to cultural critics who wish to deepen their understanding of the topic.

Looking at the development of the American imagination of disaster, Culture of Calamity interweaves textual analysis of various cultural works with numerous primary and secondary historical sources that detail select natural and man-made disasters. Rozario's study begins with the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Although occurring in Europe, it initiated the ongoing connection between modernity and calamity, inasmuch as calamities have since operated and been perceived as opportunities for renewal and improvement. Rozario shows how earthquakes and fires in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century America were construed as blessings, as messages from God that the faithful needed to reform; people felt grateful that God had not destroyed the world entirely. Although significantly informed by Puritan religious faith, this phase in disaster thinking also synthesized economic and political imperatives.

Rozario then devotes two chapters to the earthquake and resulting fire that occurred in San Francisco in 1906, first examining the event itself and then charting the ensuing responses. As an important precursor, however, he describes the proliferation and reform of the insurance business following the New York City fire of 1835, which in turn "engendered a sense of security in the face of nature's recurrent harms, by spreading the cost of calamities from individual victims to communities" (83). By the time of the San Francisco earthquake, there was a sentiment that disasters were good at engendering economic growth, indicating the increasingly secular view of calamities. This logic found its cultural response following the earthquake and fire, when all manner of people discussed "spectating" the fire like a thrill ride similar to those offered at Coney Island. In this "culture of calamity," Rozario argues, people are excited by calamities, which break up the monotony of modern life and provide "adventure, [End Page 469] escapism, and entertainment" (105). Further, at this point he details the interpenetration of capitalism and calamity. Specifically, Rozario interrelates the material destructiveness of disasters with the "creative destruction" necessitated by perpetual capital accumulation, asserting that disasters mimic the destructive forces of capitalism and simultaneously promote economic growth by clearing the field for the production of destroyed materials. "Progress," it seems, requires...

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