“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with,” Donna Haraway writes in her 2016 monograph Staying with the Trouble (12). This sentence can be understood as a manifesto for the entrance of new materialism into environmental cultural studies. At its best, new materialism marks the particularity of intimate material relations and refuses familiar Western narratives of the bounded, individualized human subject; at its worst, it shades into totalizing claims of material and epistemological novelty (“the Anthropocene”) and struggles to locate footholds for necessary critique. To recognize that “it matters what matters we use” is to reframe new materialism such that it might engage in environmentalist cultural critique without retreating to humanist imaginations of human subjectivity. Together, Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed and Rebekah Sheldon’s The Child to Come demonstrate that new materialism and cultural critique can be usefully, and excitingly, brought together in the context of environmental catastrophe.
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