Papers by Kerstin Oloff
Revista Hispánica Moderna, 2011
... Representation and Rupture in the Age of Globalization: Narrative Strategies in Manlio Arguet... more ... Representation and Rupture in the Age of Globalization: Narrative Strategies in Manlio Argueta's "Cuzcatlán donde bate la mar del sur" and the Debate on Subalternity. Autores: Kerstin Oloff; Localización: Revista hispánica moderna, ISSN 0034-9593, Vol. 64, Nº 2, 2011 , págs. ...
Journal Articles by Kerstin Oloff
Published in Green Letters, 2012.
The zombie enters the age of petromodernity with George A. Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead (196... more The zombie enters the age of petromodernity with George A. Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead (1968). Building on the argument that the zombie
is an essentially ecological figure (Oloff 2012), I argue that zombie
aesthetics are animated by the combined logics of exploitation (of
alienated labour-power) and appropriation (of resources, lands, energy and
unpaid labour). Marking a clear shift in zombie aesthetics, Romero's
landmark film transformed the zombie-labourer into the human-flesh-consuming petro-zombie horde. While oil, through the film industry, had
been crucial to the globalization of the zombie from the start, an overt
preoccupation with oil belatedly seeped into zombie aesthetics, only a few
years before the global oil crisis of 1973.
Sugar's relation to literary, and more broadly cultural, aesthetics is well studied. For good rea... more Sugar's relation to literary, and more broadly cultural, aesthetics is well studied. For good reasons, much of this existing scholarship focuses on aesthetics in relation to colonial plantations and their lasting legacies. Yet, while the longue durée of capitalism continues to be indispensible for an analysis of the role of sugar, significant changes occurred from the 1870s onwards, which laid the foundations for today's highly uneven, globalised world food system. It is in this context that Dominican and Dominican-American literary aesthetics are particularly revealing, as they register the impact of the rapid integration of the Dominican Republic into the world market through the sugar industry. As I argue, while the political ecology fuelling the foundational romance Enriquillo by Manuel de Jesús Galván (1882) is consciously repressed in the service of producing a national fantasy, the "critical irrealist" aesthetics of Ramón Marrero Arristy's Over (1939) possess at least some disruptive potential. It is in this context that Junot Díaz's insistent focus on style, genre and aesthetics take on their full significance, placing The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao (2007) at the vanguard of thinking around the "worlding" of literary studies as well as about the role of cultural production in what the environmental historian Jason W. Moore calls the capitalist "world-ecology."
This is a long pre-print draft of an article co-authored with Kerstin Oloff, and published in a s... more This is a long pre-print draft of an article co-authored with Kerstin Oloff, and published in a special issue of Humanities on "Blue Humanities," edited by Alexandra Campbell and Michael Paye. Please do not cite without permission from the authors.
Abstract: Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the transoceanic histories of unfree labour, colonialism and imperialism. In this essay, we contribute to the emergent discipline of critical ocean studies by delineating the contours of a subgenre that we call the “Oceanic Weird.” We begin with a brief survey of earlier examples by authors such as William Hope Hodgson, Frank H. Shaw and, most famously, H.P. Lovecraft, who were writing in the context of a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by an emergent US imperialism. Lovecraft’s stories, including “Dagon,” “The Temple,” and The Call of Cthulhu,” are both ecophobic and racialized, and teem with fears of deep geological time, natural immanence, and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilizations. As we show, they register the oil-fueled, militarized emergence of US imperial and naval dominance. Subsequently, we turn to Rita Indiana’s neo-Lovecraftian novel, La mucama de Omicunlé [Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas 2019], which is set in the Dominican Republic and is part of a noticeable efflorescence of eco-critical gothic, SF, and Weird Caribbean fiction in recent years. We explore the ways in which the novel refashions Old Weird and ecophobic tropes in order to represent the intertwining of marine ecological crisis and forms of oppression rooted in hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class. In the quasi-apocalyptic future of Indiana’s novel, the sea is portrayed as a gravesite of dead and lost humanity, of dying reefs, and nonhuman flora and fauna. However, it is simultaneously imagined as the “dark side of the planetary brain”: a generative site of creativity and Afro-Caribbean and Taíno spirituality, a submarine repository of ancestral memory that can be accessed through oceanic submersion. Yet, firmly situated within a context dominated by colonial and imperial legacies, the novel ultimately emphasizes the historical constraints on this capacity to imagine and enact alternative futures.
Chapters by Kerstin Oloff
Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System, 2021
Re-thinking Identities: Cultural Articulations of Alterity and Resistance in the New Millenium. , 2014
The international ramifications of the figure of the zombie have become hard to ignore, especiall... more The international ramifications of the figure of the zombie have become hard to ignore, especially given the recent, still ongoing, zombie renaissance.
"Zombies, Gender and World-Ecology: Gothic Narrative in the work of Ana Lydia Vega and Mayra Montero", 2016
in The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics, ed. by Michael Niblett and Chris Campbell
Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America, 2016
Published in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America, edited by Mark Ander... more Published in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America, edited by Mark Anderson and Zélia M. Bora (Lexington, 2016). pp. 79-98
in Ordiz, I. & Casanova-Vizcaino, S. (eds.), Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture: Ro... more in Ordiz, I. & Casanova-Vizcaino, S. (eds.), Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture: Routledge, 2016.
World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent, ed by S. Deckard and S. Shapiro, 2019
This is a draft version of chapter nine for the edited collection "Plotting the Crisis" (Palgrave... more This is a draft version of chapter nine for the edited collection "Plotting the Crisis" (Palgrave McMillan).
Books by Kerstin Oloff
part of Ecology of a Zombie, 2023
This chapter will examine the female zombie across a range of different texts, from the US and th... more This chapter will examine the female zombie across a range of different texts, from the US and the Caribbean. As social reproduction theorist Tithi Bhattacharya reminds us, if "the spatial separation between production (public) and reproduction (private) is a historical form of appearance, then the labor that is dispensed in both spheres must also be theorized integratively" (2017: 9). Thus, the (presumably male) zombie worker on the sugar plantation needs to be contrasted with the female
Ecology of the Zombie, 2023
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Papers by Kerstin Oloff
Journal Articles by Kerstin Oloff
Night of the Living Dead (1968). Building on the argument that the zombie
is an essentially ecological figure (Oloff 2012), I argue that zombie
aesthetics are animated by the combined logics of exploitation (of
alienated labour-power) and appropriation (of resources, lands, energy and
unpaid labour). Marking a clear shift in zombie aesthetics, Romero's
landmark film transformed the zombie-labourer into the human-flesh-consuming petro-zombie horde. While oil, through the film industry, had
been crucial to the globalization of the zombie from the start, an overt
preoccupation with oil belatedly seeped into zombie aesthetics, only a few
years before the global oil crisis of 1973.
Abstract: Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the transoceanic histories of unfree labour, colonialism and imperialism. In this essay, we contribute to the emergent discipline of critical ocean studies by delineating the contours of a subgenre that we call the “Oceanic Weird.” We begin with a brief survey of earlier examples by authors such as William Hope Hodgson, Frank H. Shaw and, most famously, H.P. Lovecraft, who were writing in the context of a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by an emergent US imperialism. Lovecraft’s stories, including “Dagon,” “The Temple,” and The Call of Cthulhu,” are both ecophobic and racialized, and teem with fears of deep geological time, natural immanence, and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilizations. As we show, they register the oil-fueled, militarized emergence of US imperial and naval dominance. Subsequently, we turn to Rita Indiana’s neo-Lovecraftian novel, La mucama de Omicunlé [Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas 2019], which is set in the Dominican Republic and is part of a noticeable efflorescence of eco-critical gothic, SF, and Weird Caribbean fiction in recent years. We explore the ways in which the novel refashions Old Weird and ecophobic tropes in order to represent the intertwining of marine ecological crisis and forms of oppression rooted in hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class. In the quasi-apocalyptic future of Indiana’s novel, the sea is portrayed as a gravesite of dead and lost humanity, of dying reefs, and nonhuman flora and fauna. However, it is simultaneously imagined as the “dark side of the planetary brain”: a generative site of creativity and Afro-Caribbean and Taíno spirituality, a submarine repository of ancestral memory that can be accessed through oceanic submersion. Yet, firmly situated within a context dominated by colonial and imperial legacies, the novel ultimately emphasizes the historical constraints on this capacity to imagine and enact alternative futures.
Chapters by Kerstin Oloff
Books by Kerstin Oloff
Night of the Living Dead (1968). Building on the argument that the zombie
is an essentially ecological figure (Oloff 2012), I argue that zombie
aesthetics are animated by the combined logics of exploitation (of
alienated labour-power) and appropriation (of resources, lands, energy and
unpaid labour). Marking a clear shift in zombie aesthetics, Romero's
landmark film transformed the zombie-labourer into the human-flesh-consuming petro-zombie horde. While oil, through the film industry, had
been crucial to the globalization of the zombie from the start, an overt
preoccupation with oil belatedly seeped into zombie aesthetics, only a few
years before the global oil crisis of 1973.
Abstract: Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the transoceanic histories of unfree labour, colonialism and imperialism. In this essay, we contribute to the emergent discipline of critical ocean studies by delineating the contours of a subgenre that we call the “Oceanic Weird.” We begin with a brief survey of earlier examples by authors such as William Hope Hodgson, Frank H. Shaw and, most famously, H.P. Lovecraft, who were writing in the context of a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by an emergent US imperialism. Lovecraft’s stories, including “Dagon,” “The Temple,” and The Call of Cthulhu,” are both ecophobic and racialized, and teem with fears of deep geological time, natural immanence, and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilizations. As we show, they register the oil-fueled, militarized emergence of US imperial and naval dominance. Subsequently, we turn to Rita Indiana’s neo-Lovecraftian novel, La mucama de Omicunlé [Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas 2019], which is set in the Dominican Republic and is part of a noticeable efflorescence of eco-critical gothic, SF, and Weird Caribbean fiction in recent years. We explore the ways in which the novel refashions Old Weird and ecophobic tropes in order to represent the intertwining of marine ecological crisis and forms of oppression rooted in hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class. In the quasi-apocalyptic future of Indiana’s novel, the sea is portrayed as a gravesite of dead and lost humanity, of dying reefs, and nonhuman flora and fauna. However, it is simultaneously imagined as the “dark side of the planetary brain”: a generative site of creativity and Afro-Caribbean and Taíno spirituality, a submarine repository of ancestral memory that can be accessed through oceanic submersion. Yet, firmly situated within a context dominated by colonial and imperial legacies, the novel ultimately emphasizes the historical constraints on this capacity to imagine and enact alternative futures.