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

John Blair Gamber’s Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins begins with the proposition that human culture—even in its messiest, dirtiest forms—is part of the so-called “natural” world. With the stated goals of expanding our ideas about what constitutes “nature” and undermining human exceptionalism, Gamber builds on the work of environmental critics like Carolyn Merchant, Bill McKibben, Dana Phillips, and others to argue that “there is nothing, truly nothing, that is not natural (or that is unnatural)” (2). This book theorizes waste as natural in opposition to discourses of pollution, which, with their overtones of contamination and therefore violated purity, harken to racist ideas about the threat of mixing. Even while he rejects the binaries human/nature and contamination/purity, Gamber establishes a series of paired terms that he attempts to put into productive tension: pollution and toxicity, community and isolation, stasis and liquidity. He develops his argument through readings of contemporary ethnic novels that mobilize both pollution and miscegenation discourses to reclaim waste objects “as a necessary parallel to the reclamation of cast-off individuals and communities” (5). Each chapter is dedicated to a single work or pair of works: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and its sequel Parable of the Talents, Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues, Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, and Gerald Vizenor’s Dead Voices.

The aims of Gamber’s study align with what Lawrence Buell has called the second wave of ecocriticism, which places environmental justice at the center of its analysis. Gamber is further indebted to Buell in his use of the language of toxicity. Defining toxicity as “the degree to which a substance is … capable of causing death or illness if taken into the body,” Gamber distinguishes toxification’s transgressive (though potentially lethal) mixing from the negative, anti-miscegenation application of the verb “pollute” (6). His term “positive pollutions” is meant in part to promote self-awareness within environmental studies that our use of such language in discussing environmental toxins may affect ongoing struggles against racism, misogyny, and homophobia, which Gamber identifies as “cultural toxins” with their own discourses of pollution, purity, and harm.

Gamber sees both cultural and environmental toxins as associated in the American imaginary with urban spaces. Cities, he argues, are often thought of as both environmentally and racially impure. Urban areas are the most racially diverse places in the United States and are home to some of the country’s largest populations of people of color. They are also subject to heightened toxic threats from smog, water pollution, and toxic-waste disposal among other hazards. This is due, in part, to the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) politics practiced by segments of the suburban middle class, which have been successful at relocating toxic disposal sites to urban areas and so-called “cancer alleys” outside their own communities. Gamber and others have rightfully argued that this is a form of environmental racism that makes people of color especially vulnerable to toxic hazards. Here, Gamber draws on Michel de Certeau’s theories of everyday life in the city to suggest how racialized and classed discourses around waste and pollution work to classify whole communities of people as disposable.

It is through this constellation of race, waste, and urban space that Gamber situates his intervention into the field of environmental studies. Both nature writing and ecocriticism, he asserts, have too often constituted a form of literary or academic “white flight.” These traditions’ historically inadequate attention to issues of class and race has been mirrored by ecocritics’ limited engagement with urban ecologies. Rob Nixon has made a similar argument: that American ecocritics’ inattention to transnational environmental literature and politics reflects a disturbing parochialism tinged with lingering colonialist sentiments (a charge Gamber’s US-based study, with its nods to transnational frameworks and US postcolonial studies, addresses only obliquely...