In this innovative study, Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins, John Blair Gamber examines urbanity and the results of urban living—traffic, garbage, sewage, waste, and pollution—arguing for a new recognition of all forms of human detritus as part of the natural world and thus for a broadening of our understanding of environmental literature.
While much of the discourse surrounding the United States’ idealistic and nostalgic views of itself privileges “clean” living (primarily in rural, small-town, and suburban settings), representations of rurality and urbanity by Chicanas/Chicanos, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, on the other hand, complicate such generalization. Gamber widens our understanding of current ecocritical debates by examining texts by such authors as Octavia Butler, Louise Erdrich, Alejandro Morales, Gerald Vizenor, and Karen Tei Yamashita that draw on the physical signs of human corporeality to refigure cities and urbanity as natural. He demonstrates how ethnic American literature reclaims waste objects and waste spaces—likening pollution to miscegenation—as a method to revalue cast-off and marginalized individuals and communities. Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins explores the conjunction of, and the frictions between, twentieth-century U.S. postcolonial studies, race studies, urban studies, and ecocriticism, and works to refigure this portrayal of urban spaces.
ISBN-13: 9780803230460
Media Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Nebraska
Publication Date: 10-01-2012
Pages: 248
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Series: Postwestern Horizons
John Blair Gamber is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the coeditor of Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 "Failing Economies and Tortured Ecologies"
Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents 25
2 Toxic Metropolis
Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues 57
3 Ridding the World of Waste
Louise Erdrich's The Antelope Wife 91
4 "An Eerie Liquid Elasticity"
Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange 120
5 "Outcasts and Dreamers in the Cities"
Gerald Vizenor's Dead Voices 155
Epilogue 183
Notes 187
Works Cited 213
Index 231
