A World Laid Waste

Globalisation and neo-liberalism have seen the rise of new international powers, increasingly interlinked economies, and mass urbanisation. The internet, mobile communications and mass migration have transformed lives around the planet. For some, this has been positive and liberating, but it has also been destructive of settled communities and ways of living, ecologies, economies and livelihoods, cultural values, political programmes and identities. This edited volume uses the concept of waste to explore and critique the destructive impact of globalisation and neo-liberalism. By bringing to bear the distinct perspectives of sociologists of class, religion and culture; anthropologists concerned with infrastructures, material waste and energy; and analysts from accounting and finance exploring financialization and supply chains, this collection explores how creative responses to the wastelands of globalisation can establish alternative, at times fragile, narratives of hope. Responding to the tendency in contemporary public and academic discourse to resort to a language of the ‘laid to waste’ or ‘left behind’ to make sense of social and cultural change, the authors of this volume focus on the practices and rhetorics of waste in a range of different empirical settings to reveal the spaces for political action and social imagination that are emerging even in times of polarisation, uncertainty and disillusionment. This inter-disciplinary approach, developed through a decade of research in the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), provides a distinctive perspective on the ways in which people in very different social and cultural contexts are negotiating the destructive and creative possibilities of recent political and economic change.

In a plague-ravaged medieval city, survival is a harsher fate than death. As corpses accumulate around her, Agnes, a young widow possessed of supernatural strength, must weigh her obligations to the dead and dying against her desire to protect what little remains. Laid Waste is a graphic novella about love and kindness among vermin in the putrid miasma at the end of the world. As with her evocative debut book, Black is the Color, Julia Gfrörer's delicate, gothic drawing style perfectly complements the period era of the book’s setting, bringing the lyricism and romanticism of her prose to the fore.

After humble beginnings as faltering British colonies, the United States acquired astonishing wealth and power as the result of what we now refer to as modernization. Originating in England and Western Europe, transplanted to the Americas, then copied around the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this process locked together science and technology, political democracy, economic freedom, and competitive capitalism. This has produced for some populations unimagined wealth and material comfort, yet it has also now brought the global environment to a tipping point beyond which life as we know it may not be sustainable. How did we come to endanger the very future of life on earth in our heedless pursuit of wealth and happiness? In Laid Waste!, John Lauritz Larson answers that question with a 350-year review of the roots of an American "culture of exploitation" that has left us free, rich, and without an honest sense of how this crisis came to be. Larson undertakes an ambitious historical synthesis, seeking to illuminate how the culture of exploitation grew out of the earliest English settlements and has continually undergirded U.S. society and its cherished myths. Through a series of meditations on key concepts, the story moves from the starving times of early Jamestown through the rise of colonial prosperity, the liberation of the revolutionary generation, the launching of the American republic, and the emergence of a new global industrial power by the end of the nineteenth century. Through this story, the book explores the rise of an American sense of righteousness, entitlement, and destiny that has masked any recognition that our wealth and success has come at expense to anyone or anything. Part polemic, part jeremiad, and part historical overview, Laid Waste! is a provocative and bracing account of how the development of American culture itself has led us to today's crises.

“A graphic account of the horrors, the brutality and sometimes wanton destruction of warfare, particularly of civil war.” —Charleston (SC) Post and Courier In the first reissue of these documents since 1865, A City Laid Waste captures in riveting detail the destruction of South Carolina’s capital city. William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870), a native South Carolinian and one of the nation’s foremost men of letters, was in Columbia and witnessed firsthand the city’s capture and destruction. A renowned novelist and poet, who was also an experienced journalist and historian, Simms deftly recorded the events of February 1865 in a series of eyewitness accounts published in the first ten issues of the Columbia Phoenix and reprinted here. His record of burned buildings constitutes the most authoritative information available on the extent of the damage. Simms historian David Aiken provides a historical and literary context for Simms’s reportage. In his introduction Aiken clarifies the significance of Simms’s articles and draws attention to factors most important for understanding the occupation’s impact on the city of Columbia. “A shrewd viewer of the war scene in Columbia, famed Southern writer William Gilmore Simms published stinging, courageous exposés of the doings of the Northern forces, even when threatened with arrest. The restoration of his candid firsthand accounts of the destruction wrought by Sherman’s forces against the South Carolina capitol and its inhabitants is a great service to all who study and appreciate Southern history and literature.” —James Everett Kibler, author of Our Fathers’ Fields

What does a wicked immortal want with psychotherapy? Same things humans do. Even if that immortal is the Devil. While he walks the Earth through the eons, he yearns to understand why Father doesn’t love him, why his childhood was darkened by siblings snubbing him and casting him out of the family. Who can the Devil seek comfort from? Why, from anyone he pleases of course — bluesman Robert Johnson; scientist Max Tegmark; inventor Nikola Tesla; crooner Dean Martin. Or from Sigmund Freud himself! Didn’t we just say he’s immortal?

After humble beginnings as faltering British colonies, the United States acquired astonishing wealth and power as the result of what we now refer to as modernization. Originating in England and Western Europe, transplanted to the Americas, then copied around the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this process locked together science and technology, political democracy, economic freedom, and competitive capitalism. This has produced for some populations unimagined wealth and material comfort, yet it has also now brought the global environment to a tipping point beyond which life as we know it may not be sustainable. How did we come to endanger the very future of life on earth in our heedless pursuit of wealth and happiness? In Laid Waste!, John Lauritz Larson answers that question with a 350-year review of the roots of an American "culture of exploitation" that has left us free, rich, and without an honest sense of how this crisis came to be. Larson undertakes an ambitious historical synthesis, seeking to illuminate how the culture of exploitation grew out of the earliest English settlements and has continually undergirded U.S. society and its cherished myths. Through a series of meditations on key concepts, the story moves from the starving times of early Jamestown through the rise of colonial prosperity, the liberation of the revolutionary generation, the launching of the American republic, and the emergence of a new global industrial power by the end of the nineteenth century. Through this story, the book explores the rise of an American sense of righteousness, entitlement, and destiny that has masked any recognition that our wealth and success has come at expense to anyone or anything. Part polemic, part jeremiad, and part historical overview, Laid Waste! is a provocative and bracing account of how the development of American culture itself has led us to today's crises.

Black is the Color begins with a 17th-century sailor abandoned at sea by his shipmates, and as it progresses he endures, and eventually succumbs to, both his lingering death sentence and the advances of a cruel and amorous mermaid. The narrative also explores the experiences of the loved ones he leaves behind, on his ship and at home on land, as well as of the mermaids who jadedly witness his destruction. At the heart of the story lie the dubious value of maintaining dignity to the detriment of intimacy, and the erotic potential of the worst-case scenario. Julia Gfrörer’s delicate drawing style perfectly complements the period era of Black is the Color, bringing the lyricism and romanticism of Gfrörer’s prose to the fore. Black is the Color is a book as seductive as the sirens it depicts.

May He, beloved, fulfil your expectation who hath awakened it: for though I feel confident that what I have to say is not my own, but God’s, yet with far more reason do I say, what the Apostle in his humility saith, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.” I do not doubt accordingly that you remember my promise; in Him I made it through whom I now fulfil it, for both when I made the promise, did I ask of the Lord, and now when I fulfil it, do I receive of Him. Aeterna Press