Abstract
This essay engages debates about hopeful critical scholarship in the environmental humanities via an analysis of the figure of the Babushka of Chornobyl in literature, film, and photography. The argument for hazardous hope unfolds in two steps. First, the article discusses how contaminated environments like the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, where the Babushkas live, invite an interpretative move that models what Paul Ricoeur and, more recently, Rita Felski have problematized as the hermeneutics of suspicion. Such a move involves a mistrust of what is at the surface, calling for the exposure of hidden material agencies beyond what can be sensorily perceived. This suspicious disposition is also the critical stance of much environmental humanities scholarship, even when it attempts to be hopeful. Second, the article proposes that the cultural texts it examines not only model a suspicious gaze but can also easily be read suspiciously—as glossing over the harrowing realities of a precarious life in a sacrifice zone. Yet they also show us pockets of beauty, joy, and community and hint toward reformulations of environmental futurity that cannot easily be accounted for via such suspicious criticism. In that, they invite us to leave behind, if only temporarily, the hermeneutics of suspicion and to explore hazardous hope in a contaminated environment.
The Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) has, in the last decades, become a symbol of the simultaneous coexistence of environmental hope and harm.1 Maybe most prominently, British broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough narrates parts of his life story in A Life on Our Planet (2020) from the zone, while shots from the overgrown town of Prypiat also close the “Forests” episode of his successful Netflix series Our Planet (2019).2 Both documentaries position the lush greenery and wildlife of the restricted area as a testimony to nature’s capability to “bounce back” after a major techno-environmental disaster. Scholar and educator Elin Kelsey cites the zone’s growing wolf population as an example of finding hopeful stories in a gloomy scenario.3 On the other hand, some scholars have remained skeptical of such uses of the CEZ as a symbol of nature’s resilience. Nicole Seymour writes in response to Kelsey, “Simply put: yes, the wolves are thriving, but they are also radioactive. . . . The wolves of Chernobyl exceed the boxes of despair and hope, and challenge our equation of wildlife with purity.”4 Whether the radiation in the zone has ended up harming or protecting animals more is debated, and even scientists who suspect that the overall impact of radiation on wildlife is minimal admit there is a lack of reliable data.5 What is certain is that while a significant portion of the radioactive decay happened within a few weeks and months after the accident in 1986, areas around the reactor are still and will remain some of the most radioactively contaminated places on earth.
Despite the presence of ionizing radiation, the zone is not devoid of humans. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, thousands of people lived (mostly temporarily) in or commuted into the 2,600-square-kilometer restricted area.6 Many of them worked in decommissioning, research, or maintenance. Additionally, some initially evacuated people illegally reentered the area in the months and years after the accident to settle back down. By 2020 only a hundred or so of these “self-settlers” remained.7
The Babushkas of Chornobyl, old women portrayed as leading idyllic, simple lives in the abandoned villages of the zone, have particularly garnered the attention of writers, journalists, and filmmakers as well as tourists and tourism agencies. Living off state subsidies, family support, and the contaminated land, these female returnees have become, like the trope of thriving contaminated wildlife, symbols of the ambiguous state of the zone.8 In this article I focus on the literary and visual forms that circulating stories about the Babushkas of Chornobyl take—and the way they elucidate the tensions that emerge from what Susie O’Brien calls “compromised-resilience narratives.”9 I analyze a documentary, a photography book, and a novel about the Babushkas, all of which address the troubling experience of living in a compromised environment. By inviting new critical perspectives on the lives of the Babushkas, these stories offer glimpses of “hazardous hope.”
Via my analysis of the cultural representations of the Babushkas, I also bring forth a second, more theoretical argument. The diverging narratives of the zone lend themselves to thinking through the affective stance, disposition, or sensibility that (environmental) cultural criticism takes and the related conceptualizations of critique that are at stake in recent debates about hopeful scholarship. Representations of radioactively contaminated environments serve this purpose well because they invite a critical response that is structurally similar to what Paul Ricoeur has called a “hermeneutics of suspicion”: potentially and actually contaminated environments invite a mistrust of what is at the surface, calling for the exposure of hidden material agencies and risks beyond what can be sensorily perceived. In the academic context, such a critical stance of mistrust translates into the scholarly gesture of uncovering the unsaid, the hidden meaning, the implicit hegemonic biases, or even the unconscious of a cultural text—a gesture that undergirds much of contemporary criticism. Inspired by literary scholar Rita Felski’s push toward a postcritical disposition in scholarship, I suggest that a self-reflexive consideration of the “critical style and scholarly sensibility” underpinning humanities scholarship will help to make sense of the uses and limits of the concept at the heart of this special section, hazardous hope.10 In doing so, I hope to open up a small space for what are sometimes perceived to be unacademic notions, such as hope, beauty, and joy, and to heed Nicole Seymour’s call to take seriously unserious affects like fun, sentimentality, or irony in the face of environmental doom and gloom.11
This is not to say that scholars should not make good use of suspicion as a critical disposition. Prominent environmentalist and proponent of nuclear power James Lovelock, for instance, shows very clearly the questionable political traction that the portrayal of thriving Chornobyl wildlife can have when he suggests that a solution to the problem of nuclear waste could be to dispose of it in highly threatened ecosystems—because the presence of radiation would keep out humans and thus protect the nonhuman life within it. He even goes so far as to speak of a “preference of wildlife for nuclear-waste sites,” ignoring not only the lack of scientific consensus on the impact of radiation on ecosystems but also the evidence that livelihood often trumps bodily integrity for humans, especially if the effects of the hazard in question remain uncertain and displaced into the future.12 Furthermore, anthropologist David Bond suggests that certain theorizations of toxicity in contemporary theory tend to overwrite the very real, material effects that it has on affected communities.13 Reading for such blind spots, implicit presumptions, and ideological undercurrents remains an important tool for finding our way in a complex present and into an unknown future.
The Habit of Reading Hope Suspiciously
Hope, psychologists propose, is essentially the ability to envision pathways toward a positive future, and to envision them so vividly that one becomes motivated to take action to move along on such a path.14 Taking this definition seriously, environmental humanities scholars talk with growing frequency about the need for hopeful scholarship in times of destruction and disruption.15 Yet cultural critics have also long warned that the hopeful narratives of futurity that the global economic order proposes continuously exclude millions of people from that very future by denying them access to and rendering them dispensable to the orders of production and consumption that dominate globalized societies. The slowly unfolding climate crisis only makes it harder to maintain a positive outlook, as many hopeful narratives of the future, especially those centering on growth or progress, become not only unreachable but also less desirable. This “crisis of futurity” engenders despair, the very opposite of hopefulness.16 It asks us to realize that access to the future, much like the riches of the present, will be unevenly distributed.17
In this context it is not an easy task to abandon the suspicion that hope is mere “cruel optimism.”18 Indeed, proponents of hopeful scholarship in the environmental humanities and environmental history worry about the potential pitfalls and political misuses of hopeful stories in an overall rather hopeless moment. For example, Graeme Wynn, in the 2019 presidential address to the American Society for Environmental History, said: “Hope may be false, but it can inspire. It is not a strategy for change, but it can allow us to envisage other, better ways of being.”19 Tina Adcock, in a call for a reorientation of environmental history scholarship away from “declensionist” and toward more “ascensionist” narratives and cases, suggests that the latter are avoided because scholars might fear that “sunny-side-up narratives would leave their readers feeling complacent.”20 Hope becomes a means to an end (“to envisage other, better ways of being”), and yet, these quotations suggest, the scholar must keep in mind how terrible things truly are and not allow hope to seduce them into complacency.
Under which conditions and tensions can hopeful stories be told without falling into suspicious territory that—while paying lip service to hope—ultimately marks it as a symptom of a false consciousness that ignores the dark truths hiding beneath the surface? I see a fruitful overlap here between hope debates in the environmental humanities and recent discussions in literary and cultural criticism about the use of suspicion as the dominant critical stance. Nudged on by Bruno Latour’s worry that critique has “run out of steam,” Felski has argued that Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” has silently developed to become the dominant interpretative stance of much contemporary cultural criticism.21 The “hermeneutics of suspicion” is marked by a mistrust of the surface, which is thought of as deliberately or unintentionally deceptive. Calling hope false or fearing that it will evoke complacency is precisely the interpretative gesture that a suspicious reading might bring forward.
At this point, Felski argues, abandoning suspicion as the driving force of criticism even puts professionalism at stake. She proposes that the suspicious “stance of detachment” that marks scholarship today has become “synonymous with professional culture”—though this demarcation of professionalism remains largely invisible.22 Within a field that attempts to address environmental injustice and inequalities, it is essential to observe and take into account the machinations of distance, detachment, attachments, affliction, and privilege. Beyond wider questions of methodology, making the critical “disposition” of a research project transparent can inch us a step closer to this goal.23 Understanding the impact that practices of suspicious reading have on academic argument will make it possible, Felski suggests, to move toward other critical practices and affective registers without abandoning suspicion as one critical stance among many.
Hope, along with other affective reactions like laughter or sarcasm, is often marked as an inappropriate response to the accumulating environmental crises of the present. Yet in limiting our scholarly modes of engagement to those that are serious, critical, awed, or worried, we stymie the range of responses to those deemed appropriate, and we also limit who is allowed to respond and whose responses are taken seriously. Working critically on hope in or about contaminated environments will therefore, I propose, require a careful consideration of the role of the critic, their critical stance, and the types of affect such a stance brings to the fore.
The concept of hazardous hope can make the pitfalls and limitations of hopeful narratives explicit without abandoning hope altogether as a place from which criticism can emerge. Framing hope as hazardous can strengthen our grasp of the unstable terrain and unjust social and economic orders that undergird the accumulating environmental crises of the Anthropocene—while also refusing to fully subsume a hopeful under a suspicious reading. Hazardous hope’s impetus is the “yes, and” or “yes, but” that does not always make for the most appealing and straightforward story but that might more adequately represent the messy environmental politics of the present. The “constitutive contradiction” of nuclear landscapes—which continuously complicate the boundaries between apocalyptic and bucolic, contaminated and thriving—makes them a prime example for thinking about the messy environmental politics of the present and the ambiguous concept of hazardous hope.24 The complex reality of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone allows for a negotiation of the affordances and political uses of hope in environmental discourses.
My aim is not an investigation of the realities of living in the zone or the hopefulness of the Babushkas’ lives as they are lived by them on a day-to-day basis. This type of research is beyond my expertise as a literary and cultural scholar working from Western Europe (more precisely Germany, Denmark, and Sweden) and mostly with Western European and North American cultural texts; scholars working on the ground and with different methodologies are much better equipped to do this work.25 Instead the cultural analysis I offer seeks to uncover how the figure of the Babushka of Chornobyl—the old lady living in and off a radioactively contaminated environment, as it is presented in cultural discourse—lends itself to thinking about the affordances and potential pitfalls of hope in a place where a noncontaminated future is still unimaginable.
I examine representations of the “Babushkas of Chornobyl” in a 2016 documentary of the same name, in the 2015 novel Baba Dunjas letzte Liebe (Baba Dunja’s Last Love) by German author Alina Bronsky, and in the photography book Bound to the Ground (2016). Across media, the portrayal of the Babushkas invites reflection on the aesthetics of pastoral representation and the politics of suspicion as a critical or ideological stance. In that sense, this article is also a contribution to the philosophical field of “environmental hermeneutics,” which concerns itself with “the art of interpretation” vis-à-vis natural environments.26
The stories of the Babushkas invite two divergent interpretations. On the one hand, they can be read suspiciously as glossing over the disastrous impacts of the nuclear accident and hence downplaying the toxic realities and compromised futures with which the inhabitants of the zone are confronted. Such downplaying is, at least partly, the result of a successful rebranding of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone as a tourist destination since 2011. On the other hand, the cultural artifacts also allow for hopeful moments of community, beauty, and joy to emerge, thus modeling new modes of care and compromised resilience beyond imperatives of purity and futurity. To take the perspective of hazardous hope is to accept both readings simultaneously, without subsuming one under the other. Hazardous hope allows us to read the lives of the Babushkas of Chornobyl beyond narratives of victimhood—while also taking into account the material realities, inhibited futures, and broader cultural-political contexts of contamination.
Iconographies of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone: Suspicious Surfaces
After the disastrous meltdown of reactor 4 at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, the surroundings were covered in large amounts of radioactive material. As radiation levels rose, an exclusion zone, initially measuring ten kilometers and later thirty kilometers in radius, was drawn around the site, and evacuations were instated accordingly (if somewhat belatedly). Since then the borders of the inaccessible zone have been redrawn and extended slightly to account for irregular fallout patterns. In the area that is today’s Ukraine alone, over five hundred thousand people were displaced in the months and years after the accident, and only a few have been officially allowed to return to areas now deemed safe enough for human habitation.27
Since around the turn of the millennium, the Ukrainian side of the zone has become a revered destination for adventurous travelers and journalists.28 In 2011 the Ukrainian government announced the official opening of the zone to tourism in a more strategic manner. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of visitors have paid licensed agencies for day trips or short overnight tours.29 Since this strategic reopening a popular iconography of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone has developed, littering the internet with innumerable, almost identical images of abandoned classrooms, eyeless dolls, papers strewn about in abandoned high-rise buildings, the Prypiat Ferris wheel, and the remains of the Duga missile defense radar. Many of these photos include a hand holding a Geiger counter to make the invisible threat of radiation visible—because the most interesting feature of the zone, its radioactivity, is only perceptible via technological mediation. This oscillation between the surface and deeper, hidden realities—between what is foreground and what is background—is a defining feature of the zone’s representation.30
Images of the Babushkas of Chornobyl, old ladies with colorful headscarves standing in front of their weatherworn but beautifully painted huts, have also become deeply entrenched in the touristic Chornobyl imagination. These older women are part of a larger group of evacuees—estimated at around one thousand in the years after the accident and today reduced to around one hundred—who returned to the CEZ after the accident. They reappropriated their homesteads (illegally, but tolerated by authorities) and continued a modest life marked by hard farm labor, fishing, hunting, and foraging in the woods of the zone. Today the majority of the surviving resettlers (or self-settlers; samosely in Ukrainian) are women. Many are far beyond their seventies or eighties but still subsist by farming and foraging, albeit with the help of state pensions and support from their families outside the zone.31
Betrayed Eden: The Babushkas of Chornobyl in Documentary and Photography
The 2015 documentary The Babushkas of Chernobyl, directed and produced by Holly Morris, accompanies a handful of elderly women as they go about their daily lives in the zone. They fish, tend to garden plots and chickens, and visit each other for cordial, sentimental, and boozy get-togethers. The documentary derives its narrative structure from the crosscutting of several storylines: the bucolic huts and gardens of the elderly ladies are contrasted with the disrupted and regulated landscapes around the reactor, scientists speaking about the disastrous impact of the 1986 nuclear disaster, young “Stalkers” illegally entering the restricted area, and an interview with another group of women whose village, Lukashi, was bulldozed after the accident, making it impossible for them to return.
The most notable and abrupt crosscutting happens right at the beginning of the documentary. The establishing shots are a celebration of rural life and the flower garden of one of the protagonists, Valentyna Ivanivna. While fishing in the Prypiat river, she proudly announces: “The Exclusion Zone is not a prison. In Kyiv, I would have died a long time ago, five times over. The air there is probably worse than it is here. . . . Here in the Exclusion Zone, life never stopped. The river flows just like before. The fish live here just like before.” The documentary then cuts to grainy, black-and-white footage of the exploded reactor 4 and of the evacuation in 1986. The soundscape changes from pleasant nature to menacing humming sounds and the inevitable beeping of a Geiger counter. Shortly after, Vita Polyakova, a guide from the tour operator overseen by the Ukrainian Ministry for Emergencies, points at the ruin of the reactor and remarks gravely that the zone is “officially deserted”: “It’s all closed forever.”32
Starting from this paradox—we live here, and we live well versus nobody is here, all is dead—the documentary carefully constructs a “compromised-resilience narrative.”33 The narrative continuously lures viewers with scenes of pastoral bliss, often through the charming humor of the Babushkas, only to immediately undermine or call into question such unambiguously positive affects. Depicting a pastoral idyll fallen out of time, the scenes transport the viewer into a setting left aside by technological development and the social safety nets of a state struggling to negotiate the biopolitical aftermath of the most severe nuclear accident in history.34 Throughout the documentary, the presence of radioactivity is underlined by the intra- and extradiegetic beeping of a Geiger counter. The nerve-racking beeping makes sure the viewer remembers the second, invisible layer of reality underwriting the idyllic landscapes and picturesque semiabandoned villages. In this continuous doubling of meaning, we encounter a central component of toxic narratives: the trope of the betrayed pastoral or betrayed Eden.35 The documentary follows that double structure in juxtaposing what is portrayed as the innocent, fertile landscapes of northern Ukraine and the pleasingly nostalgic lives of the Babushkas with the brutal reality that the land is dangerously contaminated. Moving across this binary, the documentary does not mention that the region of Polisia is characterized by sandy soil and marshes and has been highly engineered to accommodate agricultural activities—nor that its radioactive contamination, as Kate Brown stresses, began long before the 1986 accident happened.36 It mobilizes tropes of naturalness and purity in what Lawrence Buell describes as the “strategic purism” operational in toxic discourses.37
The photography book Bound to the Ground, a project by Dutch photographer Esther Hessing and journalist Sophieke Thurmer, similarly negotiates the tension between what is at the surface of the CEZ and what lies beneath the images of lush gardens and simple, colorful interiors.38 The overall design of the book points to the potential presence of radiation, with the use of bright yellow and black in the book jacket and section headings. The close-ups of mosses and flowers on the cover (their shape echoing the trefoil of the radiation warning sign) and multiple further close-ups of mosses and earth within the book invite an interpretative gesture of looking closely, searching for meaning beneath what can immediately be perceived. These close-ups alternate with wider-lens photographs of the rather mundane and often crumbling infrastructures of the zone, of the nearby town of Slavutych, and of the Babushkas in colorful headscarves, standing in their exuberant vegetable and flower gardens. These images of pastoral beauty employ, again, the spectacle of thriving greenery to underline the tension between surface and deeper realities—any impression of bucolic simplicity is complicated by the knowledge of what could potentially lie beneath.
So how do these representational strategies connect to the debates about hazardous hope and suspicious readings I introduced earlier? Read “suspiciously,” the celebration of beauty, community, and pastoral idyll can be understood as glossing over the biological, medical, economic, and social vulnerabilities of the women. In a parallel move to the “spectacle of nature” that Shiloh Krupar identifies in representations of US nuclear nature reserves, a “spectacle of the pastoral” (a nostalgic, simple, colorful mode of living off the land) allows for an obscuring of the toxic realities and hardships of this betrayed Eden.39 As becomes clear throughout the documentary, it is not a romantic notion of home that makes the Babushkas return to a highly radioactive area, but rather the impossibility of living a dignified life outside the zone. The choice between either having a roof over one’s head and food on the table or having bodily integrity is one that, scandalously, many people across the globe have to make, practicing a “dissociation of life from livelihood.”40 In such a reading, the hazardous hope that some kind of good life is possible within contaminated environments—evoking positive affects like joy and pleasure in readers and viewers—might ultimately work to naturalize the necropolitics of contamination.
This reading has merit, but it fails to fully do justice to either the cultural texts or the subjects portrayed in them, because it ultimately positions the Babushkas as victims without agency. The depictions of the Babushkas also constitute a negotiation of suspicion as a sensibility and an orientation toward the world. The Babushkas themselves, as they narrate their lives in the documentary and the texts in the photo book, reject a suspicious reading of their surroundings, which the documentary and photo book formally model, as they refuse to concern themselves too much with potential radiation and proudly show their pantries stacked with locally grown food and foraged dried mushrooms. The Babushkas, these narratives suggest, do not perceive the world around them as deceptive; instead, they trust the surface that has served and nourished them as a home. To take the Babushkas seriously as subjects and as agents of their lives is to acknowledge that reading their environment suspiciously is neither affordable nor desirable in their situation.
This is not to say that the Babushkas’ unsuspicious disposition, as brought forth by the documentary and photo book, is naive or uninformed. The documentary shows them undertaking health examinations, and several of the Babushkas have worked in the medical field or have had family or friends suffer from the effects of radiation exposure after the nuclear accident. Furthermore, they stand to gain economically from participating in the pastoral spectacle that attracts filmmakers, photographers, tourists, and writers through earning small salaries or tips. Yet they are also portrayed as gaining pleasure from living on their ancestors’ land and having escaped what they do not perceive as a livable alternative. Is there hope, then, in these narratives of a compromised-yet-resilient life in contaminated environments? At the very least, they contain a lesson for the viewer about the power of looking unsuspiciously but not naively at the beauty, solidarity, community, and joy that can emerge in hazardous environments.
Ecological Spinsters and Hope without Future
In this section, I turn toward a fictionalized version of the Babushkas to think further about the ambiguous affective and political traction these figures carry. Drawing on Sarah Ensor’s concept of the “ecological spinster,” I propose a second reading of the Babushkas’ narrative that temporarily sidelines suspicion in favor of a more generative reading.41 The text that serves as the second case study here, the German-language novella Baba Dunja’s letzte Liebe by Russian-born Alina Bronsky, makes use of fiction’s capacity to overdraw aspects of the strange situation in which the Chornobyl resettlers find themselves. Again, read suspiciously, its dark humor and lighthearted treatment of a serious subject might be criticized for erasing the dire socioeconomic situation that forced the Babushkas to return to a potentially hazardous environment. Looked at from another angle, though, its plot serves to highlight another aspect of compromised-resilience narratives that the figure of the Babushkas embodies—their radical nonfuturity.
Baba Dunja, the first-person narrator, is an elderly woman who has returned to her fictional hometown of Tchernowo in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone after her daughter moved to Germany. Again we encounter the trope of the betrayed pastoral, but in a much more lighthearted and ironic way. The novel starts, for example, with Baba Dunja getting up to kill the neighbor’s rooster because he crows in the middle of the night. As she reaches for the animal, the rooster falls from the fence, dead. Baba Dunja and her neighbor go on to cook the rooster and happily enjoy a delicious (if radioactive) broth. Aspects of a lighthearted magic realism, such as Baba Dunja speaking to the ghost of her deceased husband, further stress the novel’s reliance on tropes of older Eastern European women and their simple ways of life as somehow having fallen out of time, leaning more toward the realm of fairy tales than to life in the twenty-first century.
The narrative turning point is a man and his young child turning up in the village. At first, Baba Dunja assumes that the child must be very sick and that the father has decided to move to the zone to give her some final days of rest, far from the agitations of the city. It turns out, however, that the child is perfectly healthy. The man is exposing the child to radiation to take revenge on his ex for leaving him. Baba Dunja is enraged: “You brought a healthy child here?” she asks, before shouting that “she should be taken away IMMEDIATELY. . . . She is healthy!” The man responds by asking her, “Who is even healthy anyways?”42 Baba Dunja and the stranger get into a physical fight over this, and a one-hundred-year-old neighbor kills the stranger with a shovel to save her. Heroically, Baba Dunja takes the blame for the crime, is brought to prison (where she adapts marvelously), and is pardoned not long after due to the efforts of a young lawyer. In the end Baba Dunja returns to her small house in Tchernowo: “I open the door,” the novel ends, “and I am back home.”43
The most interesting feature of the novel, however, is its character constellation. The text positions the stranger’s child against the figure of the Babushka. It seems, then, that Buell in his famous tropes of “Toxic Discourse” has forgotten one recurring image and the dangers of breached purity it implies: that of the innocent child and its endangered future.44 As various critics, and especially queer theorists, have pointed out, children embody a specific type of reproductive futurity that is continuously mobilized in environmental discourses. Rebecca Sheldon, in The Child to Come, proposes that children take up a double role in contemporary cultural imaginaries: on the one hand, children “vouchsafe the future of the species,” promising the continuation of human life and calling for its protection, thus embodying hope for a better future; on the other hand, their relation to procreation and perceived purity beckons “specters of mutation, pollution, proliferation, and dehiscence.”45 In making clear that the zone is not a place for children, the character Baba Dunja is, perhaps inadvertently, defining it as a place without a human future. Yet the overall lighthearted mood of the narrative and the representation of home and community trumping the threat of contamination suggest that this lack of a future need not preclude positive affect and hopeful outlooks.
What are the stories, then, that can be told of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, where no survivable, healthy future is possible for humans, at least not within a humanly thinkable timescale? It is the story of what Ensor calls the “ecological spinster”—a woman beyond her reproductive age who has, so the norms would suggest, no investment in the future. The ecological spinster is old, asexual, uncoupled, usually childless, and therefore in some sense abstracted from time.46 Read suspiciously—that is, keeping in mind what the narrative hides—one could say that the stories of the Babushkas can only be told as resilience narratives because they have nothing to hope for. They are without future, and therefore their compromised, temporally limited resilience can be celebrated.
Or, as addressed by recent interventions in queer ecocriticism, it might anyway be time to say goodbye to the idea that a happy ending, a happy family looking into a prosperous future, is the ultimate goal of resilience stories. Spinsterliness, read as a positive embodiment of nonfuturity—which allows the future to come but does not prioritize it over the present or the past—proposes a “model of care that allows distance, indirection, and aloofness to persist.”47 Positioned obliquely to a transitive future embodied by children, the Babushkas can draw attention to what can be hoped for beyond a future inscribed in reproduction—because a sole focus on reproduction and the future it entails draws our gaze from other, present modes of caring and hoping. New relations of care toward humans, nonhumans, and community can emerge when the goal is not betterment and progress into the future but simply persistence and the limited enjoyment that living off the land provides.
The Babushkas, the novel suggests, tend not to the future, from which they remain dispelled, but to the present, and their hopeful gaze is directed not toward a nontoxic future but toward a present that must be enough. As Ensor puts it, the ecological spinster opens “a window into futurity . . . freed from the promise of ever arriving in recognizable form.”48 In environmental discourses that continuously evoke the future but simultaneously withhold it (by providing mostly apocalyptic visions evoking despair rather than hope), ridding ourselves of its burden might become a starting point for less “suspicious” hopeful practices that do not encourage complacency.
Hope as a Vigorous Form of Critique
Intervening in debates about “post-critique,” Christopher Castiglia proposes that hope itself can be thought of as a “vigorous form of critique” that refuses the suspicious disposition of what he calls not critique but “critiquiness.”49 He argues that the moral high ground and “rational” superiority from which this “critiquiness” is performed serves to disavow any idealism, and thus hope, in critique. He even notes a “certain embarrassment” present when academics call for hope, as from the perspective of “critiquiness,” hope may appear “naïve, risibly optimistic, or insufficiently rigorous, willfully blind to the conditions that make a socially engaged criticism necessary, in short, a- or even anti-political.”50 Yet hope can be a place from which particularly strong forms of critique can emerge when they couple an “explicit and shameless idealism” with the tools of critique to think through the preconditions that make hope necessary in the first place.51 While the presence of hope points toward dire situations, injustice, and threats, its positive disposition allows for imaginations of new worlds, new social orders, and new material relations to emerge.
The Western narratives about the Babushkas cited above invite, by the very nature of the subject that they portray and the somewhat detached position the authors and artists are often required to take due to the limited accessibility of the zone, a suspicious reading. And if Castiglia is right, there is pleasure in reading suspiciously, or with a critiquey disposition, because it marks the reader or viewer as enlightened in the face of the uncritical and therefore deceptive use of hopeful stories. The documentary and photo book already have the critical gaze built in, because it is engrained in the very subject they approach—and this tension makes them good stories to tell in the first place. Yet, as I hope my readings have shown, reading only suspiciously can fail to do justice to the portrayal of lived experience in an inadequate present—a present that can become, often surprisingly, a source of hope, joy, community, and beauty. A softer, and maybe more uncomfortable, affective disposition is required to leave behind the detachment and distance from which suspicion emerges. Such readings afford, in addition to a deconstruction of economic, social, and environmental injustice, a reconstruction of ethical and aesthetic categories to strive for—a shameless idealism that starts from hope without being false or naive.
I have proposed something of a critical somersault that aims to make hazardous hope work as a concept, but I also need to stress the following: this essay was conceived and first drafted before the full Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Since then, Russian forces have entered the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone and left again, stirring up radioactive materials in the process, mining some of the area, destroying equipment much needed for the safekeeping of nuclear materials, and committing violence against the civil population.52 The ongoing and devastating aggression of Russia thwarted my plans of traveling to Ukraine and visiting the CEZ, creating for myself a critical position of detachment and distance from which writing this piece was a difficult and limited exercise. The invasion also makes clear that spectacles of thriving nuclear nature and pastoral bliss in the CEZ cannot, in the long run, obscure the fundamental precarity under which they are produced. The self-settlers, like many suffering from the aftermath of the Chornobyl disaster, were always sidelined by the changing socioeconomic and political regimes under which they lived.53 Now the compound disaster of warfare and imperial violence is rendering life in this sacrifice zone even more strenuous. No theorizing, and no documentary or novel, will remedy this fact.
Conclusion
Both ecocriticism and the environmental humanities were born out of a shameless idealism and the hope that a better future for humans and nonhumans is possible and worth working toward, in research as well as in teaching and activism. In that, they might be thought of as sitting obliquely in relation to critiquiness, the performance of critique for critique’s sake. The concept of hazardous hope makes its idealism explicit by performing a critical double move. While positioning hopeful narratives as looking toward a better future, it simultaneously requires a deconstruction of the categories and affective dispositions on which these narratives are built—such as a heteronormative future based solely on procreation or myths of individual corporeal purity. Leaving “critiquiness” behind, hazardous hope emerges in the presence of hazards and works toward lessening their destructive and unequal impact.
In doing so, it affords, or perhaps even requires, three critical repositionings that are already underway in environmental humanities scholarship. First, it underlines the value of the expansion of the affective registers of environmental storytelling toward the comforting, the hopeful, the lighthearted, and the humorous.54 These sensibilities can undermine critiquey readings and demand a valorization of affects commonly deemed naive or false in the face of environmental crises. Second, it also entails a hesitant embrace of a “strategic purism.” Lawrence Buell suggests that the recurring topoi of toxic narratives, like the betrayed Eden, can be understood as operating in this manner. While recognizing pastoral idylls and images of pure and thriving nature as culturally constructed and deeply flawed, narratives of the betrayed pastoral can at the same time “reinforce the deromanticization of nature” and “urge its expansion as an operative category.”55 Making conscious use of images of thriving but threatened nature and reminding readers and viewers of what has been and will be lost can become a useful tool for hopeful environmental politics—because it takes its inspiration, not naively, from the wish for a better, less contaminated life for all. At the same time, it necessarily portrays the borders between pure and impure, untouched and contaminated, as always already breached.56 And finally, hazardous hope allows for a metareflection on what types of criticism are practiced and which critical stances scholars allow themselves to inhabit. Postcritique calls for ethical and aesthetic judgment to be recognized as valid contributions to scholarship. It also acknowledges that some problems, such as that of hazardous hope in contaminated environments, may have, as Ensor put it, surprisingly formalist answers.57 Paying attention to literary and visual forms, as well as the forms that our criticism takes, may provide new and fruitful perspectives.
The narratives emerging from encounters with the Babushkas of Chornobyl formally and thematically problematize whether and how beauty, joy, and community can emerge from a seemingly hopeless and dire situation. At the same time, they also call into question some of the foundational concepts around which environmental rhetoric is commonly organized. In doing so, they demand the critical somersault that is hazardous hope; they recognize the injustices and hazards on which they are based but refuse to despair in the face of them. Instead of allowing a simple way out—because no alternative is available in a radioactively contaminated land and under dire economic circumstances—they ask us to look, just briefly and not unreflexively, at the value of living unsuspiciously.
Acknowledgments
I am thankful to Ayushi Dhawan and Simone Müller, guest editors of this special section and organizers of the “Hazardous Hope” workshop at the Rachel Carson Center in May 2019, for their generous feedback. I also thank the editors of Environmental Humanities and the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
Notes
While “Chernobyl” (based on a transliteration of the Russian term) is the most common spelling in English, I use the Ukrainian “Chornobyl” wherever I am not citing another source.
Figures I have found range from seven thousand to ten thousand people living and working in and around the zone around the year 2020. See Zaika and Aliieva, “Avariia na Chornobylskii AES”; Kingsley, “Life Goes On at Chernobyl.”
The representation of radioactively contaminated nature has been fruitfully discussed elsewhere; see, for instance, Krupar, Hot Spotter’s Report; Cram, “Wild and Scenic Wasteland.”
Whereas a conventional resilience narrative may involve the noncritical celebration of successful adaption in the face of adversity, such “compromised-resilience narratives” do not allow for such unambiguous success stories, nor do they attest to a planned and “principled resistance” to state-mandated imperatives of resilient adaption in the face of disaster (O’Brien, “Resilience Stories,” 59). For a similar problematization of the term resilience, see also Nicole Shukin’s work on the “refuseniks” who returned to the Fukushima zone to care for their livestock. Shukin proposes that these individuals, by refusing the state-mandated narratives of resilience through displacement, practice “the art of dying” and open up possibilities of a “post-capitalist animality” within the contaminated environment (Shukin, “Biocapital of Living”).
See, for example, Mauch, “Slow Hope”; Kirksey, “Hope”; Tängh Wrangel, “Hope in a Time of Catastrophe?”; Kirksey, Emergent Ecologies.
See also Wenzel, “Evicted from the Future.”
Christopher Castiglia suggests that the disposition of the critic is “less self-conscious than methodology and more sustained than mood” (Castiglia, “Hope for Critique?,” 11).
See, for example, Davis, “Babushkas”; Baker, “Experiential Investigation.”
See also Brown, Dispatches from Dystopia.
Norma Fields, quoted in Marran, Ecology without Culture, 93.
Bronsky, Baba Dunjas letzte Liebe, 67–68. Translations from German are my own.
Sheldon, Child to Come, 177. These “specters of mutation” are only strengthened within the nuclear realm by the fact that children are, for various reasons, more susceptible to radiation damage. This leads, for example, to increased levels of thyroid cancer in children around sites of exposure. See, for instance, Jacobs, Nuclear Bodies.
Castiglia, “Hope for Critique?,” 212. The term critiquiness is inspired by US comedian Stephen Colbert’s coinage of “truthiness,” referring to how truth has become a matter of personal conviction rather than of facts in US politics in the last few decades. “Truthiness” describes the “sound of truthfulness without reference to logic or fact.” Similarly, “critiquiness” performs the “sound of critique without the ethical positioning, the explicit statement of ideals, and the imaginative presentation of alternatives based on those ideals that critique at its best involves” (Castiglia, Practices of Hope, 13).
Kunytskyi, “Chornobylska Zona Vidchuzhennia”; International Atomic Energy Agency, Nuclear Safety, Security, and Safeguards, 14–17.
Seymour, Bad Environmentalism; see also Skiveren, in this special section.
