Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins: Waste and Contamination in Contemporary U.S. Ethnic Literatures

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Go against nature, It’s part of nature, too. LOVE AND ROCKETS, “No New Tale to Tell” I love trash! OSCAR THE GROUCH Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins begins with the simple assumption that people are natural. I’m not the first person to suggest such a thing, as the Love and Rockets quote I use here as an epigraph indicates; but I hope this book will push some people’s ideas about what is and is not, what can or cannot be considered “natural” in some new directions. Plants and trees are natural, of course. The flowers and the birds are natural. Apes and dolphins. Maggots. Viruses. People. Cities are natural. And traffic. And garbage. So are sewage and toxic waste. Human beings (Homo sapiens) are a biological species of the earth. We have evolved within a matrix (or rather, within infinite matrices) of forces, coevolved with innumerable (or at least innumerated) species, and continue to exist within biological, geological, physical, and ecological systems. Like other species, we are socialized. Like many other species, we construct dwellings for ourselves. Like some other species, we use tools. We are born, we breathe, we eat, we expel, we die. We’re animals. We’re natural . Moreover, as I hope to demonstrate, the impulse to distinguish humans from other life on the planet is dangerous to all life. As Cary Wolfe demonstrates, “Debates in the humanities and social sciences between well-intentioned critics of racism, (hetero)sexism, classism, and all other -isms that are the stock-in-trade of cultural studies almost always 2 Introduction remain locked within an unexamined framework of speciesism” (1). Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins works to rearticulate this unexamined framework within comparative ethnic literary studies in particular. Since Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature, a number of critics and theorists have described the end, destruction, or elimination of nature as a nonhuman collectivity or a human construct.1 Merchant points to the 1600s in Europe as the period during which “Western culture became increasingly mechanized” and “the female earth and virgin earth spirit were subdued by the machine” (2). She seeks to identify “the developments that resulted in the death of nature as a living being and the accelerating exploitation of both human and natural resources in the name of culture and progress” during the scientific revolution (xxi–xxii). For Merchant, the death of nature marks a break in especially European conceptions of the other-than-human as a living, indispensable, feminine force. In separating these vitalities from the “real world” of science and mechanisms, European societies came to devalue the other-than-human and the feminine, marking both as things to be conquered (or that had already been conquered).2 By contrast, Bill McKibbin’s The End of Nature confronts humanity’s growth into a global force on everything on the planet. In his updated introduction to this critically important text, he writes, “We are no longer able to think of ourselves as a species tossed about by larger forces—now we are those larger forces. Hurricanes and thunderstorms and tornadoes become not acts of God but acts of man. That is what I meant by the ‘end of nature’” (xviii).3 Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins is not meant to signal the death of nature but rather its expansion. Each of the novels it studies challenges the distinction of the natural from the human by illustrating the permeable and permeated and the interrelated and interconnected realities of all species and ecologies. This text attempts to show that there is nothing, truly nothing, that is not natural (or that is unnatural). Some will argue that in expanding nature to encompass everything, I am in fact emptying it of significance, and there may be some merit to such an argument. However, because the word-concept nature continues to circulate so freely and abundantly, it behooves us to understand what we think we mean when we wield the term and in what ways our concepts of the natural fail upon further review. Wolfe points out that many popu- Introduction 3 lar as well as scholarly venues “have made standard fare out of one study after another convincingly demonstrating that the traditionally distinctive marks of the human (first it was possession of a soul, then ‘reason,’ then tool use, then tool making, then language, then the production of linguistic novelty, and...