Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narrative, and Ethics for Perilous Times by Kate Rigby (review)

In Dancing with Disaster, Kate Rigby tackles the difficult question of climate change action in the context of literary cultural studies and foregrounds two central critical tasks for environmental humanists. The first is to "explore . . . what might be learned from the historical reconsideration of past disasters" in the light of our present "ecosocial imperilment" (2). The second is to explore "whether narrative fiction . . . foster[s] deeper reflection on . . . different kinds of disaster narratives" (2). Rigby frames these tasks within larger concerns about how we can both acknowledge our vulnerability to "earth's eventfulness" and "dance" in a "rehearsed and responsive . . . multispecies performance . . . of an interactive and even 'intra-active' . . . material-discursive modis vivendi in the midst of uncertainty" (21). Her approach is both active and activist and she brings fresh energy to the overwhelming challenge that climate change poses for all of us in the twenty-first century.

The book's formal organization around the four elements, with chapter titles like "Moving Earth," "Breaking Waves," and "Spreading Pestilence," offers an excellent framework for Rigby's central discussion of the fraught phrase "natural disaster." Rigby clearly and carefully historicizes "natural disaster" as a term invented in the nineteenth century designed to disrupt an earlier "punishment paradigm" that saw climate events as "a response to human wrongdoing" (3), a punishment from God. Indeed, Rigby's historical focus is one of the great strengths of her book where her grounding in Romanticism enables her to move lithely around in literary history covering authors, cultures, and eras from Goethe, Hendrik von Kleist, and Mary Shelley to Theodor Storm, Colin Thiele, and then finally to Alexis Wright's 2006 novel, Carpentaria, the subject of Rigby's final chapter, "Driving Winds." According to Rigby's narrative, a secularized, modern understanding of climate events as "natural disasters" where "nature followed its own mechanistic principles that were entirely separate from human morality and social relations" (3) replaced this earlier punishment conceptualization. While she concedes that this "natural disaster" thinking reduced "victim blaming" and "promoted practical measures such as early warning systems and improved building codes" (4), Rigby also takes the time to analyze the term in the context of knowledge production and she moves through an examination of how "natural disaster" uncritically widens the epistemological divide between nature and culture, a divide which has ironically led to a failure to acknowledge "the multiple human and nonhuman agencies and processes that go into the making of eco-catastrophe" (6).

Rigby's assertion that stories have enormous power emphasizes that what we discern from past and current environmental disasters informs our responses to current and future ways of being. This is borne out in her skillful analysis in "Breaking Waves" of Theodor Storm's Der Schimmelreiter (The Dyke Master) from 1888, where she shows how reading the main character, Hauke Haien, from an ecological materialist perspective illuminates the failings of the nature-culture divide through his "illusion of individual self-determination, puritanical self-denial, and the attempted mastery of nature" (97) in the context of managing a flood-prone ecosystem on the Northern European west coast of North Frisia. By refuting popular interpretations of this German classic, in which "Storm's fictional hero embodied nothing less than the 'poetic ideal of the work of dyke-construction'" (98), Rigby not only shifts the onto-epistemological discussion of "natural disaster," but she demonstrates how willful misreadings of Der Schimmelreiter have helped to efface ecologically proven historical methods of managing flood cycles and she astutely connects such misunderstandings to twenty-first-century "natural disasters" like Hurricane Katrina. This is quite a feat of critical choreography and while the structural use of the metaphor of dance that recurs sporadically throughout the text is not as well developed as it might have been, Rigby's critical trajectories make for a dynamic reading and thinking experience.

The maturing of Environmental Humanities as a scholarly practice...