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Queer Child, Decolonial Child: Beasts of the Southern Wild Revisited through an Ecocritical Lens

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19346018.75.4.04

1934-6018

Robinson Murphy,

Geographies of human-animal interactions

the year 2012 saw the release of twenty-nine-year-old director Benh Zeitlin's first feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild. This independent film and its unknown cast enjoyed immediate fanfare, garnering the Caméra d'Or at Cannes, the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and four Oscar nominations. Its success on the award circuit was matched, at least initially, by acclaim from the reviewing establishment. Writing for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called Beasts the “standout of this year's Sundance and among the best films to play at the festival in two decades.” In the same publication, A. O. Scott raved, “This movie is a blast of sheer, improbable joy.” For Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, “Beasts is some kind of miracle.” A rogerebert.com critic similarly gushed, “Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you've never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius” (“A Force of Nature Named Hushpuppy”). Finally, for The Atlantic's Silpa Kovvali, Beasts “forces us to try on a new worldview in the hopes that we permanently expand our own.”A (predictable) backlash soon followed, whereby the immediate praise of the film in popular journalism devolved into a panning by the academic establishment. This backlash was voiced most famously by bell hooks, Christina Sharpe, and Jayna Brown. In particular, these critics argue (incorrectly, in my view) that the film advances a libertarian fantasy.1 Paradoxically, these same critics appeal to the nuclear, normative domestic unit as the kinship model that the film should have imagined in place of the one audiences get onscreen.I would like to note at the outset that my project has the benefit of a decade (and more) of reflection, whereas hooks, Sharpe, and Brown were writing in the immediate aftermath of the film's release and within the context of the short-form blog essay. The respective rhetorical occasions for responding to Beasts are thus quite different. Where I have the luxury of more time and space, hooks, Sharpe, and Brown were writing within a “hot take” form, one that limits exploratory exegesis and perhaps necessitates a pithy “burn.” I do not mean to speak for hooks, Sharpe, and Brown—perhaps they would stand by everything they wrote about the film. I mean only to acknowledge that the alternative genre in which I am working, as well as the belated time, affords me an alternative vantage from which to speak.In contrast to hooks, Sharpe, and Brown, my project's reconsideration of Beasts insists that the film propounds an ecofeminist politics and is queer in part because it refuses domestic normativity as the relational model that should be aspired to in the Bathtub, the small island community in the Louisiana bayou where the Beasts characters live. Making use of recent developments in critical race studies—namely, Jayna Brown's Black Utopias (2021) and Tiffany Lethabo King's The Black Shoals (2019)—as well as a consideration of Beasts as an Afrofuturist text, I additionally argue that the film speeds a decolonial politics.The shared title of Christina Sharpe and Jayna Brown's short blog essays, “Beasts of the Southern Wild—The Romance of Precarity,” is but one marker of how roundly the film has been charged with romanticizing Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) and her kin.2 For bell hooks, Wink (Dwight Henry) is negligent, drunken, and abusive and foists on his daughter Hushpuppy a code of toxic masculinity she has no choice but to adopt for herself.3 One might point, for instance, to a scene toward the start of the film when Wink rings the dinner bell announcing that it is “feed-up time.” Hushpuppy is hereby summoned for her evening chicken meal in much the way the family animals are. This is not a father given to domestic politesse, to family dinners around a quaint suburban table. Wink does not perform normative parenthood, in the ideal nuclear sense. For hooks, he is a mean tyrant, and Hushpuppy will be doomed to replicate the same gender performance that he, a single father, has modeled.Perhaps hooks's reading would be more persuasive had Beasts ended five minutes earlier than it does. As it happens, Wink tellingly dies, and it is in dying that he reveals himself to have undergone a crucial bildung. That is, he learns to move away from masculine individualization, toward a more other-oriented disposition. This movement is crystallized when, the final time Wink appears onscreen, it is Hushpuppy who feeds her father. In a reversal of the film's earlier “feed-up time,” it is not the father who provides sustenance for the child; rather, Wink is the one who must rely on another. If Wink was a macho patriarch earlier in the film—a claim that is perhaps difficult to credit, given the regularity with which he refers to his daughter as “boss lady”—he has now accepted his limitations such that he can remark to Hushpuppy, in a moment bloated with implication, on how good it is. Wink is referring here nominally to the food Hushpuppy feeds him, but the emotional weight of the scene is such that something more is being communicated. Whereas Hushpuppy's acts of caretaking before went unseen by Wink—such as when she blanketed him with a basketball jersey to keep him warm while sleeping—he is now awake to her new role. Wink appears to be endorsing Hushpuppy as the boss lady, for she is the one who has shown him how not to be an isolated monad. If he was once self-sufficient to a fault, wanting to appear as something of a superhero to his daughter, Wink has learned how to accept help, how to be small. (One recalls, too, Wink's earlier concession during a storm: “I'm sorry for a whole bunch of things, Lord.”) Importantly, this is the final scene in which Wink appears—this is the end point of his character arc.4 Equally important, it is Hushpuppy who lights the torch of his funeral send-off, setting his body symbolically aflame and pushing away the repurposed truck bed on which it burns, out into the water.5 So when hooks argues that “it is patriarchal masculinity that rules, that makes the decision” in the film, one is inclined to wonder if she has accounted for the so-called patriarch's death.6In a manner that functions as something of a mantra, a Hushpuppy voice-over in the final scene of Beasts relays, “I'm a little piece of a big, big universe, and that makes things right.” Hushpuppy here acknowledges her non-egoistic, relational place among a universe of human and nonhuman others. Again, this would seem the opposite of the individualization hooks finds in Hushpuppy, as well as the women who educate her: “When they [the women] do speak whether in their role as teacher [or] prostitute they are simply imparting to children a crude message of self-reliance. They teach the children that they can count on no one” (hooks). This is not the message Hushpuppy has learned. The “most important thing,” Hushpuppy's teacher, Miss Bathsheba (Gina Montana), imparts to the community's few remaining children, is that “y'all learn to take care of the things that are smaller and sweeter than you.” Against hooks's charge that the film endorses toxic, individualized masculinity, Hushpuppy learns to embrace an other-oriented disposition that could serve the environment and enable human survival, even in the face of the anthropogenic forces that encroach on the Bathtub.hooks's additional claim that the rest of the film's children are educated into masculine individualization similarly invites further consideration. Before the final credits, and to the accompaniment of triumphant instrumentals, the remaining Bathtub inhabitants are seen marching along a road as water rises over a last sliver of land. One dog, four adults, and four children compose this party. All the children, emblems of futurity, are girls: two Black, two white. For hooks, “the message that only the strong survive has been and remains an age old argument for politics of domination, that determine that some folks will live and others will die, that the strong will necessarily rule over the weak.” The four girls, leaders of the march, hardly signify in the popular imaginary as “strong,” patriarchal oppressors. The immediate contrast between the film's final two scenes—from Wink's “funeral” to this group's determined march—suggests that the one kinship model has been replaced by the other. Given the non-nuclear, queer “family” marching along the shoal at film's end, it is safe to say that Beasts does not uphold normative patriarchal kinship as its aspirational end point.Moreover, anyone who grew up with a single parent will recognize much in Wink's characterization. Hardly a monster, Wink has been conscripted to single parenthood and does just about as well as he can, given his human flaws and the circumstances. He is dying, after all.7 Also, for the many viewers who experienced actual child abuse (far beyond anything presented in Beasts), it is comforting to find a story in which a difficult upbringing does not have to result in spirit death. For Janet Brown Lobel: Despite his shortcomings, Wink is fiercely devoted to his daughter and sees it as his mission to keep her alive. He wants to make her tough; to teach her what she'll need to know to survive when he is gone. Although not the most gentle, attuned or reliable of attachment figures, he glories in her strengths, cheers her on and empowers her. He never annihilates her selfhood, but rather insists that she be a person. Trauma and loss: yes. Soul murder: no. Ultimately we know, and she knows, that when he finally abandons her through death, it is not by choice. (1435)8Conversely, for Brown, the film suggests that “the poor cannot afford to love” (“Romance of Precarity II”). But I would contend that Brown's conception of “love” here hinges on a normatively understood version of domestic love. Queer theory, on the other hand, clarifies that no matter how “nonnormative” one's past (and present and future), survival and love—even if in an unconventional form—remain possible. A difficult beginning does not have to culminate in death, literal or otherwise. For Hushpuppy and her makeshift, ragtag, hodgepodge queer family at film's end, another world is possible, is worth marching toward—even (or especially) if it does not square with bourgeois nicety.For Sharpe, like hooks, “[t]he film ends with Hushpuppy, six years old, motherless, fatherless, kinless, leading a group of black and white children and adults through a causeway after pushing her father's corpse out to sea. She is caretaker, man, boy, girl, woman all within herself; she is part of the community but complete unto herself. Abandoned to precarious life” (Romance of Precarity I”).9 But Hushpuppy can be understood as “kinless” only if “kin” is taken to mark the normative, nuclear family. Actually, Sharpe provides the material for her own critique almost immediately when she refers to the motley composite of Hushpuppy's followers. It is unclear how one would delineate the power structure in this newly formed band. Might this troupe be condemned to precarity, as Sharpe claims? Or might the characters’ determined march, and the triumphant instrumentals that accompany this scene, challenge viewers to imagine something less cynical?With Hushpuppy leading the non-masculine progression at film's end, the future is decidedly ecofeminist. That is, Beasts understands environmental degradation as resulting from the selfsame forces that perpetuate gender inequities. As the film makes clear, the rapacious entitlement that propagates the hyper-consumption of the Earth's resources is gender violence writ large. Combating climate change means combating the logic that subtends rapaciousness; it means combating patriarchy. The root cause of gender violence, environmental extractivism,10 capitalism, and modern racism is white heteropatriarchy. Aligned with ecofeminism, Hushpuppy and her female-led, multiracial, transgenerational, trans-species, altogether nonnormative kinship unit posits a thoroughgoing critique of white heteropatriarchy.Where I read Beasts as a queer text propounding an ecofeminist politics, hooks contends, “Ultimately this film expresses a conservative agenda.”11 But in overvaluing normative domesticity, perhaps it is hooks whose agenda is conservative. Instead of lamenting that Hushpuppy and Wink do not adhere to the smiley pathology of squeaky-clean, bourgeois suburbia, one might rather celebrate Beasts’ embrace of chosen families who refuse straitjacketing within the law-and-order framework of a settler colony. If, as is often argued, the normative domestic unit is the training ground for capitalist subjectivity, why would Hushpuppy and her ilk aspire to its soul-smothering mandates?12It is not the exhausted, ever-failing neoliberal state that is needed, but something new. After all, the United Nations estimates that there will be hundreds of millions of climate migrants by 2050, while some other estimates land north of a billion—that is, well over 10 percent of Earth's entire global human population (Henley). Most of these migrants will be low-income people of color from “developing” countries. How have modern nation-states been faring with refugees of late? And how are they likely to respond when hundreds of millions more come looking to border-cross into zones of comparative environmental safety? In propagating borders-thinking, the nation as an institution always-already posits an ingroup over and against an outgroup. How could one think this model of social-political organizing could accommodate the needs of a world—a world—under climate change? Is it not better to imagine an alternative form of organizing? For Rebecca Mark, Beasts offers “a new imaginary. Nothing is ever going to be the same. Not a damn thing. We must learn to read it as such” (21).13 I agree.Put another way, maybe global climate change is not always-already sociopolitically disastrous. Yuval Noah Harari remarks, “The appearance of essentially global problems, such as melting ice caps, nibbles away at whatever legitimacy remains to the independent nation states. No sovereign state will be able to overcome global warming on its own” (231). In other words, perhaps it is only a global catastrophe that can derail the nation-state. People of color have been appealing to the state, this state—the so-called United States—for a very long time. It continues—quite literally—to snuff them out. Following the summer of 2020, which saw no end to murderous, state-sponsored violence—this was the summer of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Daniel Prude, Jacob Blake, and Christian Cooper—it was clear that the state has never sponsored an infrastructure of care for Black bodies. Indeed, what evidence is there to suggest that the state will ever—or should ever be counted on to—protect Black bodies, to say nothing of psychological dispositions and emotional well-beings and overall rights to flourish?In a spirit similar to Harari, geographer Mike Hulme posits that climate change is “an imaginative resource, which can be made to do work for us” (359). On this topic of imagination, Beasts’ magical realism is “essential to its aesthetic and political coherence and indicative of the ecological debate it stages” (Barnsley 242). The film's fantastical elements emerge early in the film when Hushpuppy strikes her father's chest, because the moment is visually juxtaposed with a cut of the ice caps that encase the aurochs (an extinct species of modern cattle). As Wink falls, so does the ice. As Lobel notes in a fascinating psychoanalytic study of Beasts, Hushpuppy “feels she has destroyed her father and in so doing, has destroyed the world” (1434).14 Hushpuppy needs polar ice like she needs her father, the film suggests; otherwise, grave danger will be upon her. Yet the film insists on the rightness of Wink's death, because in dying he clears the ground for Hushpuppy to augur a novel, not normatively masculine future.15 It is this novel future, as signaled by the queer child, that will save Homo sapiens and the world.Each successive hurricane season will set the record for the amount in billions of dollars wrought in destruction, only to have its record broken the following year. One particularly terrifying feedback that stems from warming, and that will play no small part in intensifying extreme weather, involves increased water vapor in the atmosphere. The chemistry of evaporation is such that a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor (Dessler 103). As experts explain, “[s]ince water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, this causes additional warming” (Dessler and Parson 18–19). In other words, ever-increasing moisture causes ever-increasing warming, which in turn causes ever-increasing precipitation rates for hurricanes, thereby exponentially intensifying extreme weather events such as the one on display in Beasts.In addition to thermal expansion, sea levels rise as a result of melting glaciers, icebergs, and ice sheets. But ice melt generates chaos beyond swallowing island nations and continental coastlines (which are the most populous regions on Earth): “Ice is highly reflective, and the land or water that are exposed when ice melts are darker. Consequently, a reduction in ice increases the amount of solar energy absorbed by the Earth's surface, leading to further warming” (Dessler and Parson 19). This feedback becomes yet more sinister when one considers what new and awful experiment melted permafrost will introduce unto the world. Trapped in frozen soil is methane, which is thirty-four times more potent than carbon dioxide. That is, ice melt—like that featured in Beasts—does not just spell sea-level rise; it additionally means less reflective capacity and therefore more warming. It also means the release of yet more—and more powerful—warming agents into the atmosphere. More locally, what will happen to the fish on which the Bathtub community relies for its sustenance in a warming world, where the ocean acidifies more lethally with each passing year?The timeline for when harm is felt differs markedly. For enslaved Africans and their descendants, insidious violence and murder stemming from white heteropatriarchy have been ongoing for more than half a millennium. The descendants of the European elite are only beginning to feel the heat of the planetary oven. But feel it they will, for what is in store is now clear; the runaway train has officially flown off the rails and begun its descent, like a wing-clipped pterodactyl, toward communal extinction. Every year, California, Australia, and the Amazon will burn worse than the year before. Thousands will die from the ensuing air pollution. Even now, there are more than eight million air pollution–related human deaths across the globe every year. In 2017 the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs predicted that 11.2 billion humans would inhabit the planet by 2100, which is roughly 3.5 billion more humans than today (United Nations). With lots more humans and with the fires burning more every year, there will thus be lots more death. Fire, drought, famine, extreme weather, and rising seas are the Earth's certain, imminent fate.For Brown, the Bathtub inhabitants’ existence “is bleak, grim and grimy” (“Romance of Precarity II”).16 This is true—one would be mistaken to think that the currently unfolding eco catastrophe will be free of grime or bleakness. Beasts confronts the reality that, to use Hushpuppy's language, “the end of the world already happened” for many on this planet. How, the film asks, can one survive the end of the world?Precisely by living like the Bathtub inhabitants. Bina Gogineni and Kyle Nichols write of the need to foster a “supple relationship between built and natural environments,” by which they mean that human-built space should not seal humans hermetically from the outside world but should rather be responsive to it (365). Infrastructure on the East Coast of the United States, for example, must be constructed to accommodate future deluges. In addition to enabling human survivability, a built space responsive to climate change would have the psychic outcome of producing humans whose thoughts turn necessarily to the environment, because their living space commands it. Where housing units in the United States have more traditionally been built as veritable cocoons, Gogineni and Nichols argue for an integrative architecture that would bend human minds to the environment and in this way dissolve the metabolic rift that prevents them from relating with the natural world. After the hurricane, the Bathtub residents commence building such a space above the water, complete with a roof garden, as the ground soil below is no longer cultivatable within the new climate regime. Like so many on this planet, the Bathtub inhabitants already inhabit a postapocalyptic world.17 Rather than willfully retain an out-of-sight, out-of-mind arrogance in the face of environmental reality, the Bathtub inhabitants allow the environment to teach them how to live.Gogineni and Nichols refer, moreover, to “countercolonizing,” a process in which emblems of empire are repurposed to suit anti-imperial prerogatives (362). In Beasts, such countercolonizing materializes, for one, in the “boat” Wink fashions out of the back end of a pickup truck. The bed of the truck, outfitted with a motor, allows Wink to traverse the flooded-out Bathtub; in other words, he cruises over and above the Bathtub in a vessel that was once the preeminent symbol of the fossil fuel economy and that has now become a tool for survival at the end point of said economy; to survive what the fossil fuel economy has wrought, Wink repurposes the fossil fuel economy. The tools for living otherwise are already within reach, the film suggests.Brown argues that the Bathtub inhabitants’ “existence isn't active or sustainable” (“Romance of Precarity II”). On the contrary, the Bathtub inhabitants are first movers in relating to the rising ocean in a novel way. Hushpuppy augurs a value system in tune with what Brown—in a more recent context that would seem to revise her earlier Beasts analysis—has theorized as “utopia,” according to which “[l]ife itself becomes less our possession and more a flow of self-organizing and relational forces” (Black Utopias 112). Brown's utopia seems descriptive of Hushpuppy and the politics for which she is a shorthand (recall Hushpuppy's philosophy, “I'm a little piece of a big, big universe, and that makes things right”). Brown moreover argues “that being categorized as inhuman, or not quite human, is a privileged position from which to undo the assumptions not only of race thinking but of the other systems of domination with which race thinking is linked. . . . We can foster the ways of being alive some of us on the planet already tenaciously practice in the spaces of our exclusion” (Black Utopias 112).Thinking with Brown's provocation, one might entertain as a thought experiment the extent to which Hushpuppy should be understood as “privileged.” Nicholas Mirzoeff remarks, “Hushpuppy sees differently because she refuses the discipline and domination around her.” That is, Hushpuppy's privilege abides in her ability to create a way-of-knowing that could inspire leadership on how best to live in this era of human-induced climate change.Like Brown's observations about utopia, Tiffany Lethabo King's writing on “shoal” illuminates Hushpuppy's cosmology: “The shoal is an alternative space always in formation (expanding or eroding) and not already overwritten or captured by the conceptual constraints of the sea or the land” (8). The material over which the remaining Bathtub community members move in the film's final scene—part land, part water—figures as a shoal. For King, the shoal is moreover a “liminal space between the sea and the land” (4)—“an analytical location that forecloses settlement and permanent landing on its always shifting and dissolving terrains” (12). It is useful to dwell on King's provocation that the shoal can provide a way-of-understanding that refuses familiar modes of delimitation. Thinking with King, one might read the shoal over which Hushpuppy moves in the film's final scene as a space in which to “reassemble the self on new terms” (King 9). This new “self,” the film suggests, is no self at all, at least not in the individualized sense meted out by the Western humanist tradition. Nor is Hushpuppy's reconstituted “self” codified by normative gender, by ordinances regarding one's age, or by a nationalist allegiance within the modern nation-state. Recall that it is Hushpuppy who pulls the trip wire that explodes the wall preserving bourgeois order on the other side of the levee; she does not allow borders to seal environmental reality off from polite society, but rather insists that the Bathtub be visible to the normative, neocolonial order.Linking the violence done to the nonhuman world, on the one hand, with the violence done to Black bodies, on the other, Ta-Nehisi Coates notes that “the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion, a plunder with no known precedent” (150). Coates continues, “It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them [the (white) American Dreamers] sprawling into their subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth” (151). For Coates, human-induced climate change—emblematized by that carbon-emitting automobile—is a brand of slavery that is coextensive with the racialized form. The same deep structure that produces rapacious extractivism and emissions hemorrhaging also engendered the Atlantic slave trade, as well as the systemic racism that would ensue and that continues still. The shared structure underlying both modern slavery and environmental degradation is white heteropatriarchy. To invoke Sharpe, the Bathtub swims in the wake of a racial atrocity whose origins were environmentally inspired (In the Wake).18In his 2011 book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harari relatedly observes, “The Atlantic slave trade did not stem from racist hatred towards Africans” (Harari 370). Modern colonialism (1500–1900, roughly speaking) was driven by the desire to exploit a given colony's natural resources. This not only created new markets for the colonizers but also spread their value system. European powers traveled halfway across the globe to build their outposts in Africa and South Asia, in the Caribbean and North America, and in the Pacific islands all the way down to the Antipodes, because these faraway places offered mineral wealth and other gifts of the environment. Racial hatred would be deployed after the fact to license this environmental rapaciousness, but make no mistake: the history of modern colonialism was first a history of environmental extractivism, as conducted by the empires of Europe. Put another way: modern racial violence has its genesis in environmental bad actors from hundreds of years ago.19For Sharpe, Beasts “needs black bodies because how else could incipient sexual and other violence, the violence of extreme poverty, flooding, the violence of a six-year-old girl child living alone in her own ramshackle house with no mother or father, be inspiring and not tragic?” (“Romance of Precarity I”). Hushpuppy and her kin are driven to environmental precarity, forced to face extinction due to the anthropogenic consequences that have been foisted upon them. However, does the film not need Black bodies, to use Sharpe's language, precisely because it is those bodies that feel the devastation of climate change first? Might an alternate casting not have risked being dishonest, a sort of whitewashing of sociopolitical history?The people who eviscerated the Bathtub's homes and livelihoods are the same do-gooder “saviors” who purport to right the wrong of their carbon-hemorrhaging lifestyle by forcing Hushpuppy and her community—against their will—into a so-called rescue shelter. As has been well documented, those who suffer first exposure to the catastrophes stemming from climate change are those who had little or no part in bringing about that change in the first place. Beasts highlights this.20 The solution that bourgeois society divines for the troubles they themselves caused is to generate yet more trouble by presumptuously “saving” the Bathtub.21 Because what comes after the rescue shelter? One recalls Hushpuppy's look of abject distaste when she is made to don the blue dress provided by her veritable captors. This scene marks what is perhaps the film's most acute critique of white saviorism and, by extension, white heteropatriarchy. The normative order purports to reintegrate the Bathtub into its fold, physically restraining and then forcibly evacuating its inhabitants to less environmentally precarious climes, but Hushpuppy and her community reject the coercive measures that would see them absorbed into bourgeois normativity. Is it wiser, after all, (1) to live cocooned within a suburban subdivision, as that Des Moines–bound bus at the rescue shelter portends, or (2) to attempt a way of living otherwise that does not retain an out-of-sight, out-of-mind arrogance in the face of environmental reality?The members of the Bathtub tellingly escape the rescue shelter that, in accordance with the axioms of film, functions as more than just a rescue shelter. Indeed, this space is a microcosm for the neocolonial state that polices people of color, forcing them into a way-of-being that is legible within a normative rubric. Kimberly Chantal Welch notes of this scene, “[T]he project of the relief center is to discipline (or if unable to, then subdue) refugees into democratic, capitalist subjects” (8). When the Bathtub inhabitants successfully break out, the viewer is thus invited to imagine an escape from more than just a rescue shelter.Beasts releases its characters from the constraints of bourgeois suburbia, the normative, nuclear myth off of which the exclusionary American dream thrives and which Jordan Peele so scathingly critiques in his films Get Out (2017) and Us (2019). To resist global climate change is to resist the American way of life that makes its citizens’ per capita emissions footprint among the most egregious on the planet. Bill McKibben observes that the US is “the largest carbon emitter since the start of the Industrial Revolution” (“A Very Grim Forecast”), responsible for roughly a third of the atmosphere's total carbon dioxide (“How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet”). Hushpuppy's characterization as an anti-patriarchal ecofeminist castigates the normative US lifestyle whose enduring colonial stranglehold continues to produce such calamitous global ruin.An ecocritical lens illuminates crucial dimensions of Benh Zeitlin's 2012 independent film. The insights afforded align with those arising from analysis that frames Beasts as an Afrofuturist text. Commonly featuring subversive elements meant to excoriate modern Western thinking, Afrofuturist art generates tools for building a more egalitarian, liberated future. The future-building characteristic of Afrofuturism often draws on African ancestral customs. In other words, an intersection of old and new in Afrofuturism posits a cosmology in which precolonial Black pasts are paradoxically the starting points for future worlds. Given this, where some critics see a romanticizing of primitivism, I would argue that Beasts, as an Afrofuturist text, conceives of time as nonlinear. Afrofuturism's backward glance insists on Black subjectivities prior to colonialism, which are to be reclaimed and carried forward into the future. Recovering and reactivating what is valuable from the precolonial past as part of initiatives to shape a new world is not regressive; rather, such a gesture is decolonial. Revisiting Beasts of the Southern Wild in relation to conceptual frameworks that have become increasingly pertinent to twenty-first-century art, culture, and material reality creates opportunities for new insights. One can see that by flouting the protocols shaped by white heteropatriarchy, Beasts instigates an urgent discussion of race, gender, class, age, the nonhuman, and the need for a shared, intersectional relationality with ecological precarity. This is a decolonial vision, transmuted in the story of Hushpuppy, the queer child par excellence.This article benefited from its presentation at the LACKiv conference at the University of Vermont and especially from Cynthia Ann Baron's feedback.