Affiliation: Tufts University
Keywords: Capitalocene - Material Eco-Feminism - Environmental Humanities
J. Brandon Pelcher is a lecturer of German literature and culture at Tufts University. His research has focused on critical theory and the historical avant-garde, particularly Dadaism. His first book, Dada’s Subject and Structure reads Dadaist techniques as performative subversions of ideological subject formation, thereby prefiguring structuralist theory and pre-performing post-structuralist criticism.
His current research project, Commodity-Ecology, focuses on the role of embodied commodity consumption and use in the cultural formation of the concept Nature. Combining aspects of material eco-feminism and eco-socialist thought, this research critically examines representations of commodity consumption in literature, art, and film in order to show how commodity capitalism attempts to organize commodities, consumers, and the non– or not-yet-commodified world into a commodity-ecology that promises nature but can only ever deliver further consumption. This dynamic reveals a human encounter with their natural environment to be inextricably bound to commodity consumption; a bodily experience of the environment with, through, and as a network of material commodities. The commodities within, on, and around the now post-human body silently co-author our cultural conceptualization of a now post-nature environment as a consumable Nature. This research will reframe not only concepts of nature, but reorient further environmental concepts from catastrophe and environmental justice to conservation and waste. Initial research from this project has been published in Monatshefte, Seminar, and Gegenwartsliteratur.