After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century by Devin Griffiths and Deanna Kreisel (review)

Reviewed by: After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century by Devin Griffiths and Deanna Kreisel Paul D. Driskill (bio) After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century edited by Devin Griffiths and Deanna Kreisel; pp. 280. Cambridge UP, 2022. $22.56 paper. After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century, edited and introduced by Devin Griffiths and Deanna Kreisel, "explore[s] the profound and continuing influence of Darwin's theories well beyond the biological sciences" (1). The sixteen essays collected in After Darwin cover a tremendous range of topics and demonstrate that the interdisciplinary field of "Darwin studies" is thriving. Each author balances a productive overview of Darwin's importance in their field with their own original arguments and insights. Given the number of articles in this collection, I've done my best to introduce each of the articles by drawing out some of their key ideas and quotations. Interested readers should first turn to Griffiths and Kreisel's introduction as it summarizes each chapter and sets the stakes for the book. Interestingly, two of the earliest articles in the collection actually encourage a shift away from Darwin. Jesse Oak Taylor and Allen MacDuffie ask their readers to reconsider Alfred Russel Wallace, who, despite co-discovering natural selection, doesn't receive the same critical attention as Darwin. Taylor notes that Wallace recognizes "extinction as an inevitable counterpoint to empire" (28). Even as Darwin decentres humankind, Taylor argues that it is "misleading to suggest that humans are merely a species like any other when humans and our domesticates compose 97 percent of the Earth's animals" as measured by biomass (30). In "Darwin and the Anthropocene," MacDuffie observes that the Anthropocene "is a concept that is itself in crisis, or should be, insofar as it spreads blame in ways that obscure the actual histories of how 'we' got 'ourselves' into this mess" (57). Like Taylor, MacDuffie introduces Wallace to provide a counterpoint to Darwin; reading Wallace, MacDuffie argues that the responsibility for catastrophic climate change and extinction "belongs not to 'humanity' writ large, but to the small subset of mostly white Europeans rapaciously and ruthlessly pursuing profits" (65). Wallace recognized the danger of this colonial behaviour in [End Page 169] a way that Darwin didn't. Consider, for instance, Darwin's cavalier attitude about extinction displayed in his observation, quoted in Alexis Harley's essay, that "there is no more wonder in extinction of species than of individual" (173). And, as Caroline Havonec points out, "as we watch ice sheets crumble, fires rage, and animals die out," Darwin's "gentle Victorian moderation now looks outmoded" (43). While Taylor and MacDuffie use Wallace to provide a counterpoint to Darwin, other authors reconsider Darwin within the contexts of ableism, racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment. Referencing feminist scholars such as Elizabeth Grosz and S. Pearl Brilmyer, Travis Chi Wing Lau, for example, draws on Darwin's anti-essentialist, pluripotent, "wholly arbitrary" definition of species (77) to argue that Darwin offers "a far more capacious understanding of life that undermines the otherwise deterministic claims [he] makes about 'idiots' as hereditary failures" (76). Darwin's "discussion of life is open to the possibilities of polymorphous lifeforms whose bodily capacities cannot be reducible to reproductive 'fitness'" (78). Lau even "reclaim[s] Darwin as a disabled scientist" (82) who, because of illness, could only work in what Lau calls "crip time" (81; emphasis in original). Alexis Harley begins her chapter by connecting Darwin's anxieties about writing to natural selection, suggesting that one cause of Darwin's protracted authorship stemmed from his desire "to be read, understood, and propagated by his reader—to be selected" (165). Whether we consider the pace of his writing as the by-product of illness or his anxiety about being understood and selected, Darwin's writing mirrors key evolutionary processes. In "Darwinian Analogies in Thinking about Art and Culture," Haun Saussy explores a similar idea when he wonders whether Origin "can account for its own emergence" (199) given that "the book bears similarities to the evolutionary processes it describes" (200). Considering climate change and extinction within the context of disability studies...

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