This essay analyses how material formations of class are related to its symbolic trappings and why such an analysis may be currently relevant. Ecocriticism’s tendency to avoid work-based class analysis may be an effect of petroculture, whose flowing, accommodating logic reduces analysis to critique and reduces intervention to consumer choices. This essay argues that a confrontation between work, class, environmentalism, and narrative could be accomplished via the genre of the ‘boom narrative’. Boom narratives deal with signs of class stratification as well as the labour involved in resource extraction. Those based on actual events, such as the natural gas boom in North Dakota, travel widely, into journalistic and documentary coverage, and this coverage draws on and sometimes subverts boom narrative conventions. Television shows, including The Beverly Hillbillies and Dallas, helped instal petrocultural logic. An understanding of boom narratives’ appeal, and how their conventions get deployed, critiqued, and subverted intervenes in the flow of petrologic. Such intervention would require keeping work the focus of class, and keeping material effects of class the focus of narrative analysis. Intervention may also require more ecumenical approaches to genre, and rethinking scholarly modes of critique.

Climate justice is a term used for framing global warming and its manifold consequences as not only an environmental issue but also as involving ethical and political questions. In this chapter, I examine the usefulness of imaginative literatures from the Global South that focus on climate catastrophes and analyse them to probe the ways in which they add value. My central argument is undergirded by the idea that to achieve climate justice, it is necessary to involve disenfranchised groups in the policy-making process, for which imaginative literatures emerging from situated locations that give voice to their troubles become most pertinent.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is a strange creature within the constellation of international organizations involved in migration matters. It is both a leader and an outsider, within the system and outside it. The reasons for its ambiguous stance are numerous, be they political, legal, institutional or cultural. The agility of the IOM and its perpetual adaptation to its changing environment are a legacy of its turbulent history. Still today, its hybrid nature represents a key marker of its elusive mandate and its ambivalent relations with the United Nations (UN).

This chapter examines the relationship between climate stress, Indigenous sustainability, and sovereignty in the trans-Pacific context. Using the work of Keri Hulme (Maori), Craig Santos Perez (Chamorro Guam), Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (Marshall Islands), Nequo Soqluman (Bunun Taiwan), Rimuy Aki (Atayal Taiwan) as counter-narratives, I challenge readers to reconsider the centrality of the Indigenous subject by retrieving overlooked trans-Pacific Indigenous experiences. Instead of ‘small islands in the remote sea’, as Epili Hau’ofa puts it, the Pacific/Oceania should be re-visioned as ‘a sea of islands’, giving rise to unique Indigenous ways of life expressed through outstanding cultural landscapes and seascapes in the intangible heritage of traditions, knowledge, and stories. The Pacific Islanders are united in their concerns of rising ocean levels, the connection between militarisation and colonialisation of the seas, and the ecological impacts of climate change on the ocean. I argue that narratives and poetry from Pacific Indigenous communities forge a constellation of resistant practices in the era of global climate crisis. Indigenous texts from the trans-Pacific propel us to reconsider human transformation of planetary networks in which Indigenous agency plays an important role. They formulate Anthropocene problems and reconceptualise connectivity between humans and other species, lands and waters, as possible solutions.

International organizations engage in a vast range of activities that can be classified as ‘operational’. The United Nations’ administration of East Timor and Kosovo; inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); election observation by institutions such as the Commonwealth and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE); the deployment of troops on peacekeeping operations by the United Nations (UN), the African Union (AU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS); the assessment of refugee status and the management of refugee camps by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); the distribution of food aid by the World Food Programme (WFP); the deployment of experts by the World Health Organization (WHO) during a disease outbreak; and the conduct of Environmental Impact Assessments for development projects by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) all fall within this description.

This chapter considers the possibility of a form of literary realism fit for the Anthropocene, which would not only allow readers to participate and intervene in the disclosure of climate catastrophe but would also position them within a climate-conscious collective. It begins with a brief discussion of realism, particularly its reliance, as analysed by Fredric Jameson, on an interplay between readerly engagement with actions and consequences and readerly empathy with experiences and emotions. This realist effect is both rich in ethical potential for addressing climate crisis and deepens this crisis’s anthropogenic arrogance. In considering a new form of realism that would avoid this dilemma, the chapter deploys Gerard Genette’s structuralist theories of transtextuality, arguing for the relevance of these ostensibly external, but deeply integrated, aspects of narrative in extending realism’s ethical effects while building a collective consciousness. Using this as a framework, it then discusses two authors whose work, textually and transtextually speaking, responds in some way to climate crisis: Kim Stanley Robinson and Liu Cixin.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s political orientation has proven surprisingly difficult to characterize. During his own lifetime and political career, Tocqueville was a self-identified liberal and a figure on the French centrist-left. However, his political thought in the twentieth century has increasingly become associated with the conservative Right, especially in the United States. In this chapter, Richard Boyd identifies five major elements of Democracy in America that have strong affinities for central tenets of political conservatism. He further demonstrates how different figures on the conservative Right in the United States have drawn on these dimensions of Tocqueville’s political thought to bolster various strands of conservative thinking and policy. Whether a matter of foreign affairs, welfare reform, criticisms of the administrative state, affirmations of the centrality of religion to political life, or complaints about modernity and cultural decline, thinkers on the Right have found abundant intellectual resources in Democracy in America. As Boyd demonstrates, however, the Right has often deployed these arguments selectively and sometimes even at cross purposes in light of changing domestic and geopolitical circumstances.

Many thinkers have alleged that free markets are inimical to a sense of community. According to critics such as Robert Putnam, commercial societies tend to dissociate people from one another and to undermine the basis of civil society. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America seems to present a challenge to this view insofar as he regards the Americans as both exceptionally commercial and uniquely associational. If markets and associations are in tension with one another, how can they coexist in the United States? As Rachael K. Behr and Virgil Henry Storr argue in this chapter, a closer attention to Democracy in America suggests several ways in which commercial society and the spirit of association are mutually supportive. Markets foster a complex division of labor that requires mutual cooperation. Markets encourage a sense of enlightened self-interest that teaches citizens how they might engage with one another in mutually beneficial ways. Further, markets facilitate innovations in communication that make it easier for citizens to coordinate and freely associate for political change. Rather than giving rise to Tocqueville’s dreaded pathology of “individualism,” as critics have alleged, markets are instead conducive to active civic engagement and the free association of democratic citizens.

Following Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America regards mores or manners as of the utmost significance for democracy. Tocqueville further attributes to women and especially mothers the primary role of inculcating democratic habits of equality. His portrayals of women in Democracy in America are suggestive of the many ways in which gender, race, and class intersect with one another in Jacksonian America. Looking ahead, Tocqueville also anticipates what contemporary feminist theorist Judith Butler describes as “gender troubles.” In Botting’s view, both Tocqueville and Butler appreciate the complex ways in which women and their sexuality shape the mores and manners that animate the culture of democracy. In Tocqueville’s case, the transformation of American girls from objects of sexual desire coveted by the male gaze to mothers who bear primary responsibility for the transmission of manners takes place between volumes 1 and 2 of Democracy. Botting further suggests that Tocqueville’s shifting attitude toward women parallels his own marriage and an increased ability on his part to identify with the sacrifices of young American wives.

Notwithstanding his reputation in the contemporary United States as a sort of political conservative, Tocqueville in his own lifetime was very much a figure of the centrist-left. In the French politics of his day, Tocqueville was closely associated with various causes of reform, most notably the abolition of slavery. In this chapter, Robert T. Gannett, Jr. reminds us that Tocqueville’s calls for decisive action and concerns with social reform were appreciated by many figures on the political Left in the twentieth century. These Left interpreters of Tocqueville range from postwar intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt and Albert Salomon to latter-day communitarian thinkers such as Robert Putnam and William Galston to community organizers such as Saul Alinsky and Gene Sharp. Gannett reveals how Tocqueville plays a major role in the writings of Alinsky and Sharp and thus indirectly shaped the theory and practice of community organizing as it has come to be known in the United States and throughout the world.

This chapter explores the relationship between democracy and Christianity through the lens of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. As Tocqueville noted, unlike the European nations of his own day where the forces of democracy and proponents of religion were at odds, the United States in the 1830s is characterized by a harmony between religion and democracy. Tocqueville sees a number of ways in which these two forces may be mutually supportive. First and most importantly, Tocqueville regards Christianity and its affirmation of the equality of all human beings as an important source for democracy. He also finds American religion to be supportive of democratic government in the sense that it counters democratic tendencies toward cultural mediocrity, the tyranny of the majority, the pathologies of individualism, and secular materialism. Not only is Christianity necessary for the formation of democratic governments, in Tocqueville’s view, but their long-term flourishing requires a certain moderation on the part of religious believers. While it might seem that Christianity is the only religion capable of preserving democracy, a closer reading of Democracy in America would suggest otherwise.