Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene Available to Purchase

If the Anthropocene is the age during which fossil capitalism indelibly inscribes its image upon the earth, it is also, by the same token, the age of vagrants, migrants, fugitives, and tramps—that is to say, the unsettling, unsettled persons who are both displaced by socioecological violence and, very often, conscripted to reenact it elsewhere. Perhaps it is not surprising that these figures play such an outsize role in literary history, given their intimacy with the planetary upheavals of the last several centuries.¹ Impeccable accounting principles have driven them between enclosed commons, the plantation complex, settler colonial outposts, company towns, mill districts, and other extractive enclaves. They haunt the shipping lanes, railroads, and highways that have enabled them to move, and to be moved, among the shadows of empire. Scholars agree that these itinerant, precarious figures are crucial to the rise of the novel and several other modern and contemporary...