An Invitation to Wonder

Opening to wonder can be a revolutionary act. Now, wait: read on for a moment.

In graduate school, I studied the queer ecology of clouds in British lyrical/poetic writing of the nineteenth century, and a primary guiding ethic of my work was wonder. “Wonder,” as you’ll find throughout this marvelous Legacy issue, can hold many (and sometimes conflicting) definitions. For example, “wonder” can be a synonym for “awe”—or its opposite.

Working in nineteenth-century studies, I found wonder to be an exciting antidote for a popular ethic of the time: the Romantic sublime. This sublime also can be defined in many ways, but as introduced by Edmund Burke (1757) and G.W.F. Hegel (1835), one experiences the sublime in vast settings—massive mountains, stormy seas, or other “wilderness” areas depicted as “unmastered” by humans. This sublime inspires power-based sensations, like pain, terror, deprivation, and isolation. This sublime, like Black geographer Katherine McKittrick describes geography in Keywords in Radical Geography (2019), is “twinned with exploration and conquest and European masculinist ways of knowing.” Think of films on mountain climbing, where we see a lone white man in a threatening natural scene. This is that Romantic sublime.

Wonder, however, offers a different path. While the sublime focuses on the individual mastering the big and scary, wonder focuses on small, often local collectives coming together to marvel at the everyday and feel reciprocity and playful uncertainty. Think of bending down to the ground to notice a branching pattern of frost. Exceptions abound (as they do to any binary, of course), but we could paraphrase the sublime as I am threatened, and I overcome, and wonder as I am connected, as we relate.

Wonder is an open-armed welcome to mysteries and their many possibilities. Wonder dissolves our singular (human) self into an ecological community—and grants all such community members (be they animal, plant, topographical, meteorological, and more) animate existence. Wonder creates an entangled enchantment, for interpreters, between place and time, interpreter and audience and those being interpreted. Wonder honors our site’s “resources” as colleagues and co-teachers. In wonder, we gather to suspend preconceptions and welcome new connections and insights as if for the first time. We turn away from individualism and its notions of independence, mastery, exceptionalism, and power-over. We embrace not-knowing and community. We turn away from dominance and toward love.

So, this is why wonder—choosing it, inspiring it, celebrating it—is revolutionary. Many of us, particularly in the United States, find ourselves witness (and sometimes accessory) to acts and leaders who strive to uphold divisions, create physical and metaphorical walls, declare their exceptionalism, and inspire fear and isolation in a quest for more power over all species. These actions echo the Romantic sublime. But wonder persists. Wonder survives.

You might have noticed that this issue was first planned for early 2024. Following the high number of submissions for our Women and Femmes in Interpretation issue (which was to precede this Wonder issue), the editors adjusted course to make Women and Femmes a double-issue sequence and postpone Wonder to early 2025. I’m so glad we did. I need the wisdom of these authors now.

In this period of escalating catastrophe, I feel the “ethical urgency of wonder” that environmental scholar Glenn Willmott describes in Reading for Wonder (2018). In wonder, we turn away from power-over individualism and opt instead for relationship. We don’t have to know all the answers to know that there are mysteries under every stone with whom we can marvel together. Wonder invites us, as we’ll read in many articles in this issue, to acknowledge our position as just one species within a wise multispecies network, and to recognize our ethical responsibilities to all in this network—a crucial re-orientation in our period of escalating environmental and social catastrophe.

As Cherokee Nation scholar Daniel Heath Justice writes in Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018), wonder serves to “remind us that other worlds exist; other realities abide alongside and within our own.” I turn to wonder to remind myself, as Justice and other scholars note, that alternatives exist to dominant colonialist frameworks that present themselves as inevitable.

“We can’t possibly live otherwise until we first imagine otherwise,” Justice writes, and in this issue, Legacy’s editors are delighted to offer the dynamic, inspired writing of interpreters who, in their invocations of wonder, show us how to imagine otherwise.