Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins: Waste and Contamination in Contemporary U.S. Ethnic Literatures by John Blair Gamber (review)

Ecocriticism—a field that emerged from the Western Literature Association and studies of primarily US nature writing—has been undergoing a sea change arising from its engagement with fields such as postcolonialism, critical race studies, urban studies, and environmental justice. Inspired by groundbreaking works such as Lawrence Buell’s Writing for an Endangered World (2002) and The Environmental Justice Reader (2002) edited by Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, scholars including Stacy Alaimo, Elizabeth Ammons, Julie Sze, Lance Newman, Jeffrey Myers, Scott Slovic, Ian Frederick Finseth, Paul Outka, Sarah Jaquette Ray, Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Rob Nixon, and Mel Y. Chen have expanded the field to address the environmental underpinnings and implications of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and transnational flows.

John Blair Gamber’s Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins: Waste and Contamination in Contemporary U.S. Ethnic Literatures contributes to this scholarship by providing a counterintuitive “positive” reading of pollution in a diverse sampling of contemporary novels. Gamber considers topics such as pollution, toxicity, and nature in novels whose urban settings and racialized characters have frequently been overlooked by ecocritics: Octavia E. Butler’s Earthseed novels (1993, 1998), Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues (1991), Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife (1998), Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997), and Gerald Vizenor’s Dead Voices (1992). Whereas environmental justice activists tend to highlight statistical evidence of pollution and uneven distributions of vulnerability, Gamber argues that these novels dramatize the positive and productive tactics that characters and communities bring to bear on various forms of environmental and cultural toxicity. When faced with garbage, disease, and other expressions of structural violence, characters in these novels resort to fluid practices of movement, exchange, hybridization, reclamation, and (borrowing from Vizenor) “urban survivance” (116).

Gamber’s theoretical framework draws on Michel de Certeau’s account of spatial practices and the recurring metaphor of liquidity. Citing Certeau’s distinction between static conceptions of place and fluid, quotidian spatial tactics, Gamber emphasizes the porosity of physical and conceptual boundaries. Writing against essentialist representations of nature, ethnicity, gender, and species, Gamber envisions relations of liquidity wherein “[a]ll bodies, cultures, and processes are not only permeable, but permeated, affected by the other bodies, cultures, and processes that flow or seep on, over, by, and through them” (10). The book’s methodology bears out its theoretical interest in adaptability and flow: Gamber’s readings traverse an impressive range of concepts, topics, and microhistories, including the demography of Oakland, Mexico City’s sanitation infrastructure, the provenance of several nonnative species, Ojibwa legends, and compost theology. Throughout, he maintains that discourses of purity and “cultural toxicity” (8), which attempt to purge or subordinate groups deemed unclean, contribute to ecological devastation by disavowing the interconnectedness of communities and environments.

The nuanced close readings featured in Gamber’s chapters do not subsume the novels to a rigid argument so much as they attend to the flow of each novel’s ideas about ethnicity, toxicity, ecology, and urban space. Chapter One frames Butler’s Parable of the Talents (1998) as a corrective to critics who read its predecessor—Parable of the Sower (1993)—in pastoral terms: in the sequel, Lauren’s idyllic community turns out to be inseparable from the cities and national politics that she sought to flee in Parable of the Sower. Drawing on histories of suburbanization, Gamber argues that the novels expose Lauren’s attempt to form a multiethnic ecological commune as an eerie reiteration of “white flight” that denies the possibilities and positive impurities inherent in urban life (26). Chapter Two reads The Rag Doll Plagues as a litany of positive pollutions wherein hope and futurity take the unconventional form of cyborg bodies, infection, mixed-race offspring, and salvaged waste. Chapter Three considers how The Antelope Wife undercuts conventional stereotypes of the ecological Indian by focusing on Native American...