Homesickness: Of Trauma and the Longing for Place in a Changing Environment by Ryan Hediger (review)

In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, Ursula K. Heise calls for an eco-cosmopolitanism that asks us to think about our environment and ourselves in planetary terms. In this framework, we are called to consider the global rather than the local, even though ecocriticism has traditionally focused on the latter. Ryan Hediger complicates that idea in Homesickness: Of Trauma and the Longing for Place in a Changing Environment, drawing on disability theory to interrogate cosmopolitanism's possibilities for individualism and human agency. Writing from a posthumanist perspective, Hediger insists on human weakness, mortality, and interdependence and defines homesickness as "the gap between the ideal hopes of cosmopolitanism and the material reality of human limitations" (4). He later elaborates:

First, in a changing world inhabited by mortal, changeable creatures, we never really 'have' a home, and so we are always to some extent homesick. Second, our desire for home is shorthand for a set of important hopes worth defending—serious and genuine relationships to places and their biotic regimes and landforms; membership in vital cultures, human and nonhuman; and resistance to capital-infused forms of globalization that threaten differences and turn life and place into mere resources.

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Hediger defends homesickness as neither sentimental nor reactionary. His densely theoretical introduction draws on the work of a host of twenty-first-century scholars working in the environmental humanities, including Timothy Morton, Cary Wolfe, Timothy Clark, and Gary Snyder, in addition to Heise. Hediger consciously adopts a generous approach to other scholars, even when he disputes some of their conclusions.

In the first chapter, a close reading of Annie Proulx's "The Half-Skinned Steer," the Wyoming short story's arresting central image haunts the protagonist, emphasizing the fundamental uncanniness of mortality. Hediger briefly draws connections to Proulx's better known works, her 1997 short story "Brokeback Mountain" and 1999 novel The Shipping News. Hediger argues that the satire, irony, and dark humor characteristic of Proulx's style mark it as homesick.

Chapter two examines sickness-at-home and entrapment by place in two novels, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980) and Peter Hedges's What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1991), and then draws compelling connections from those literary works to the 2014 protests against an incident of police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri. The chapter analyzes the literal act of burning down a house—which figures in both books and in the 2014 protests—as an example of weak agency (much like suicide) and as a telling "icon of the Anthropocene" on a planet where humankind is, through climate change and other global environmental damage, literally destroying its own home (114).

In Chapter 3, Hediger argues that Ernest Hemingway's complexity has often gone unrecognized and asks his reader to "understand Hemingway as postnational, as cosmopolitan and even eco-cosmopolitan" (117). Hemingway frequently wrote of making a "home" in a place where he was staying temporarily with a woman he loved, and he later wrote of his nostalgia for places (including Michigan, Paris, East Africa, and Spain) in which he had enjoyed spending time. Particularly interested in Hemingway's homesickness for Africa, Hediger first discusses Hemingway's overtly expressed homesickness for Africa in Green Hills of Africa and Under Kilimanjaro before moving on to an extended discussion of David Bourne's homesickness for "an imagined perfect past" in The Garden of Eden (131). Hediger draws on the work of Donna Haraway to suggest and then model posthumanism as an appropriate critical approach for analyzing Hemingway's work because of his profound interest in nonhuman nature. He argues that just as Catherine's letter to David (GOE 237) marks a loss of innocence in their marriage, language marks a parallel loss of innocence in the elephant tale at the heart of the novel. During that childhood trauma, David's empathy for the elephant alienates him from his own...