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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [58], Line —— -2.7 —— Norm PgEn [58], robert t. hayashi Beyond Walden Pond Asian American Literature and the Limits of Ecocriticism In the late Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali’s long poem “In Search of Evanescence” he writes: “India always exists / off the turnpikes / of America ” (41). The poem is a multilayered personal narrative that recounts the author’s travels in America and the twisted strands of memory and personal loss that are both a part of the American landscape and shaped by it. In fact, the entire collection of which “In Search of Evanescence” is a part, A Nostalgist’s Map of America, recounts the author’s journeys across America as he retranscribes the history of its places through the lens of his Indian past and his newer American cultural identity. One of the poem’s unique qualities is Ali’s use of the oeuvre of Emily Dickinson as a kind of touchstone. He incorporates, alludes to, and reshapes lines of her poems in a fashion similar to a DJ sampling his favorite classic cuts in a remix. Although this work offers much to our understanding of American places and the literary canon’s presentation of them, I doubt that many ecocritical scholars or, more important, teachers of literature and the environment would consider Ali’s brilliant work for inclusion in their scholarship or syllabus. The absence of Asian American authors from the field of ecocriticism is part of the field’s more general inability to address seriously issues of race and class, as has been pointed out by other scholars.1 Despite the fresh perspective ecocritical inquiry has offered, its reliance on canonical authors— Willa Cather, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, and of course Henry David Thoreau—continues to limit its discoveries and its relevance. Moreover , the field’s historical dependence upon “nature” as the de facto definition of environment has further limited the incorporation of other voices. This tendency is part of a larger failure to investigate the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities in relation to America’s environmental history, as noted, for instance, by Carolyn Merchant in her recent presidential address to the American Society for Environmental History. 58 Beyond Walden Pond 59 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [59], Line —— 0.0p —— Norm PgEn [59], Merchant notes: “We especially need more research on the roles of African Americans in the southern and western U.S. environment and in early urbanization and more research on Asian and Hispanic perceptions of nature ” (381). In fact, whether in the arena of public policy or intellectual inquiry , most conversations about the environment have failed to consider the experiences of the working class and nonwhites. As Edwardo Lao Rhodes notes in Environmental Justice in America, “Just as people of color until recently have not had a major presence in any part of the environmental movement, explicit reference to race, ethnicity, class, or to issues concerning the poor simply has not appeared in modern natural resources and environmental agendas” (31). The environmental justice movement does represent a paradigmatic shift, a more expansive vision of environmental issues and relevant constituencies and one wedded to issues of social justice. It has helped uncover the unequal distribution of environmental dangers and benefits, especially as it relates to public health. However, environmental justice is most oriented toward the mediation of current environmental risks and injustices and to the prevention of future ones. This orientation can reinforce an ahistorical perspective by looking at race and environment from a limited framework that maintains primary focus on recent environmental degradation and on protection from environmental hazards. As Julie Sze notes in a recent essay, “The current singular emphasis on public policy and on remediation of environmental harms necessarily narrows environmental justice as an analytic frame because it truncates theory and action/practice” (166). For example, how can one discuss current groundwater pollution in an all-black rural community in Tennessee without first exploring the process by which slavery and Jim Crow laws arranged the economic and political system that supported American apartheid...

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