Project MUSE®: Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2014) through current issueLatest Articles: Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental HumanitiesTWOProject MUSE®Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities2996-4849Latest articles in Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Sensing Atmospheric Injustice: Eco-art and the Fight for Clean Air in the Rust Belt
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988436
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Once known as the Smoky City during its steel-production heyday, Pittsburgh is now promoted as one of America's Most Livable Cities, a tech-driven, green space for families and young professionals.1 However, this image contrasts sharply with the reality faced by its working-class residents. Pittsburgh and nearby steel towns like Braddock, Irwin, Clairton, or McKeesport consistently rank among the top ten most polluted US regions. Numerous manufacturing facilities and industrial polluters still operate, emitting toxic and risky levels of gas emissions and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into the atmosphere. In 2019 one local resident memorably described the foul odors affecting their industrial neighborhood as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallSensing Atmospheric Injustice: Eco-art and the Fight for Clean Air in the Rust Belt2026-04-23text/htmlen-USSensing Atmospheric Injustice: Eco-art and the Fight for Clean Air in the Rust Belt2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®957822026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Resistance Does Not Go to Waste
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988437
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Waste and resistance are deeply intertwined. This is what decades of study on environmental conflicts have shown. The environmental justice movement is a testament to this deep connection. Indeed, it was born when marginalized communities realized that they were being selected as ideal dumping grounds for all kinds of waste—and they began to resist. In the canonical timeline of the environmental justice movement, everything began in the 1980s with the opening of a toxic landfill in Warren County, a predominantly African American community in North Carolina. As is often remembered, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, where he had gone to support the strike of local sanitation workers. Communities do
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallResistance Does Not Go to Waste2026-04-23text/htmlen-USResistance Does Not Go to Waste2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®157682026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Wasteful Entanglements—Garbage, Discarded Governmentalities, and the Ecosystem: An Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988438
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This double special issue results from several individual, collective, and institutional experiences with material waste, corrupted governments, and ambushed ecosystems. Usually, the terms "waste" and "garbage" are considered as physical entities. However, if the sociocultural patterns of accumulating and disposing of waste are meticulously investigated, then it would be found that the disposal procedures are webbed and meshed with the politics of race, caste, class, gender, vote banks, and various other interrelated factors.1 For instance, in my locality in Paikpara (in northern Kolkata), garbage is dumped openly on the public roads by adjacent households, shops, localities, and municipality cleaners. Whenever I
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallWasteful Entanglements—Garbage, Discarded Governmentalities, and the Ecosystem: An Introduction2026-04-23text/htmlen-USWasteful Entanglements—Garbage, Discarded Governmentalities, and the Ecosystem: An Introduction2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®155282026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23What Is Waste? Place-Thought, Infrastructures of Pollution, and Wasteways of Colonialism at Deer Island
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988439
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There is a peninsula north of Boston, Massachusetts—Deer Island—that has twelve giant eggs on it. I saw them on a tour in the winter of 2024; at 130 feet tall and 90 feet wide, they made me feel like a little bug. If you're on a flight landing at nearby Logan Airport, they are hard to miss as you descend. What look like oversized chicken eggs are a dozen anaerobic digesters, a concluding step of waste processing at the Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant (DIWTP), managed by the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority. On my tour of the facilities in March 2024, I learned that each digester holds three million gallons of sludge, a technical term to describe processed wastewater that comes from forty-three of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallWhat Is Waste? Place-Thought, Infrastructures of Pollution, and Wasteways of Colonialism at Deer Island2026-04-23text/htmlen-USWhat Is Waste? Place-Thought, Infrastructures of Pollution, and Wasteways of Colonialism at Deer Island2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®482912026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Living Garbage and the "Wasteland" of the Edenic Andaman Islands: "Dumped" Communities and Disrupted Island Ecospace in Pankaj Sekhsaria's The Last Wave
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988440
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"After garbage ends up in a dump it becomes anonymous, but for those who know how to read it, it is no less revealing. … Like archaeology, it tells stories that would otherwise be forgotten."1Argumentatively, the simple questions "What is garbage?" and "How does it affect our planetary lives?" often lead to complex answers. Garbage is more than just a heap of waste dumped in faraway places. Perhaps, the definition of garbage should begin with how it intercepts various kinds of spatiality. As environmentally hazardous entities, garbage affects the ecospaces of the dumped area; as aesthetically unpleasing stuff, garbage invades imaginings of a place. The obnoxious presence of a garbage dump yard often questions
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallLiving Garbage and the "Wasteland" of the Edenic Andaman Islands: "Dumped" Communities and Disrupted Island Ecospace in Pankaj Sekhsaria's The Last Wave2026-04-23text/htmlen-USLiving Garbage and the "Wasteland" of the Edenic Andaman Islands: "Dumped" Communities and Disrupted Island Ecospace in Pankaj Sekhsaria's The Last Wave2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®825312026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Diving into the Sea: Submerged Perspectives and Trans-Scale Wastewaters in Public Toilet
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988441
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Hong Kong's highly visible skylines immediately mark the city as a techno-orientalist metropolis and a symbol of the global neourban world, as depicted in films such as Blade Runner (1982) and Infernal Affairs (無間道, 2002).1 However, Fruit Chan's independent film Public Toilet (人民公廁, 2002)2 depicts several moments of the camera looking up at the city skyline and rooftop from the round frame of a mobile toilet. This serves as a recurring metaphor for this movie, from an ecocriticism perspective, altering our perception of urban environments as being disconnected from other ecosystems, such as underground water. More specifically, the film's description of toilet waste flowing to the ocean hints at the interplaying
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallDiving into the Sea: Submerged Perspectives and Trans-Scale Wastewaters in Public Toilet2026-04-23text/htmlen-USDiving into the Sea: Submerged Perspectives and Trans-Scale Wastewaters in Public Toilet2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®741442026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Garbocracy and Ecoentanglements in Amitav Ghosh's The Living Mountain
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988442
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"Can we live together?"1 "We inhabit as citizens a land that is not the one, we could subsist on, hence the increased feeling of homelessness, a feeling that is transforming the former ecological questions, into a new set of more tragic political struggles. People everywhere are again in need of land, a situation that I call, for this reason, the new 'wicked universality.'"2The abovementioned perspectives by Latour serve as the entry point of this article, which argues, through Amitav Ghosh's fable The Living Mountain (2022), how the garbage and garbageous thinking of human society has depleted the environmental and ecological balance of the world and how the ethics and systems of knowledge production around us
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallGarbocracy and Ecoentanglements in Amitav Ghosh's The Living Mountain2026-04-23text/htmlen-USGarbocracy and Ecoentanglements in Amitav Ghosh's The Living Mountain2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®985382026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Negotiating the Dump: Luis Alberto Urrea's Sublime Use of Waste
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988443
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Art can transform waste in ways that physical recycling cannot. While recycling transforms waste into a new object with more use value than its previous incarnation, it is limited by the physical realm. Art, particularly literature, transfigures waste into an aesthetic object, transcending the physical and transforming waste into an abstract or spiritual realm. This article examines the literary treatment of waste in three texts by Luis Alberto Urrea. The fiction and nonfiction texts consider life in and around Mexico's landfills on the US-Mexico border. Urrea describes citizens who live literally in the landfill, scavenging its mounds of trash for items to sell, use, or consume. As he writes about these
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallNegotiating the Dump: Luis Alberto Urrea's Sublime Use of Waste2026-04-23text/htmlen-USNegotiating the Dump: Luis Alberto Urrea's Sublime Use of Waste2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®694802026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Cooking as "Garbage Work": Perspectives of Resistance through Food in Short Stories from Indian Women Authors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988444
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Food as part of material culture is wrought with religious restrictions, dependent on economic flow, socially mediated, and experienced as a highly politicized material of human production and consumption. This is why Barthes writes, "One could say that an entire 'world' (social environment) is present in and signified by food."1 Think of the spice trade and the production of sugar, coffee, and chocolate, which led to some of the most significant human displacements in the history of the world. The post–World War era of technological advancement saw the introduction of numerous kitchen tools and technologies that enabled women to join the workforce outside the domestic sphere, by reducing the amount of time spent
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallCooking as "Garbage Work": Perspectives of Resistance through Food in Short Stories from Indian Women Authors2026-04-23text/htmlen-USCooking as "Garbage Work": Perspectives of Resistance through Food in Short Stories from Indian Women Authors2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®1055962026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Dalit Identity and Manual Scavenging: A Site of Politics of Trash
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988445
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The term manual scavenging encompasses the harrowing practice of manually cleaning, carrying, disposing of, or otherwise handling human excreta in insanitary latrines or open drains or pits. Defined by the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993, a manual scavenger is an individual engaged in or employed for the arduous task of carrying human excreta manually. The distressing findings of the Census of India in 2011 unearth the enduring presence of this deplorable practice in the country, revealing its inhumane nature as it persists despite concerted efforts to eradicate it.1 The Socio-Economic and Caste Census 2011 paints a grim picture, indicating that approximately
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallDalit Identity and Manual Scavenging: A Site of Politics of Trash2026-04-23text/htmlen-USDalit Identity and Manual Scavenging: A Site of Politics of Trash2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®843942026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23"That Perfect Negative of the City in Its Seething Foul Incoherence": The Fresh Kills Landfill and the Conspiracy of Waste
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988446
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Current media discussions around our relation to waste seem to focus on the microscopic yet toxic elements that easily cross into our bodies' innermost corners—the microplastics in our organs, the PFAS in our bloodstream, the BPA passing through our skin. Waste thus appears as paradoxically material yet invisible to the naked eye—a hidden force that threatens the individual, as well as its agency and intimacy.This barely visible yet profoundly threatening toxic waste resembles the highly aestheticized, all-engulfing waste at the center of much of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo's writing. Pynchon and DeLillo are far from being the only contemporary Western novelists who are interested in waste—Eugen Marten's 2008
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmall"That Perfect Negative of the City in Its Seething Foul Incoherence": The Fresh Kills Landfill and the Conspiracy of Waste2026-04-23text/htmlen-US"That Perfect Negative of the City in Its Seething Foul Incoherence": The Fresh Kills Landfill and the Conspiracy of Waste2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®677982026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23"All in the Gutter": Aesthetic Waste in the Literature of Oscar Wilde
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988447
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Consumerist waste undoubtedly shows up in the mass production of copious, unsustainable material garbage. Dana C. Mount writes that "a key feature of modernity has been the consumer culture that generates previously unknown quantities of refuse. Waste, of course, is a key concept in capitalism and, paired with the idea of surplus, has come to define and determine the function of the market, which structures so much else."1 Literature can reconfigure and reorient such key concepts like waste, asking one to think about the meaning of waste from alternate perspectives—something particularly needed in a contemporary era of mass-scale practices of overconsumption and waste production. Toward that end, this article
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmall"All in the Gutter": Aesthetic Waste in the Literature of Oscar Wilde2026-04-23text/htmlen-US"All in the Gutter": Aesthetic Waste in the Literature of Oscar Wilde2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®610962026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Waste in the Ecosystem and the Ecosystem Wasted: An Ecocritical Exploration of Imran Khan's Besati o Basati
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988448
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Imran Khan is a Bangladeshi Bangla-language fiction writer whose second novel, Besati o Basati, is particularly interesting for its manifest environmental concerns, nature-centric philosophy, urban ecological issues, and discourses on human-nonhuman interaction. It presents the dramatic transformation of some of Dhaka's semirural landscapes into an urban mess, causing tremendous havoc on the ecosystem and ushering in an environmental degradation. Both humans and nonhumans bear the brunt of the environmental pollution, which is created and aggravated by mindless activities, of which faulty or politicized waste disposal is among the most concerning. The concept of waste (as garbage, trash, rubbish, junk, discard, or
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallWaste in the Ecosystem and the Ecosystem Wasted: An Ecocritical Exploration of Imran Khan's Besati o Basati2026-04-23text/htmlen-USWaste in the Ecosystem and the Ecosystem Wasted: An Ecocritical Exploration of Imran Khan's Besati o Basati2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®752322026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Scavenging, Harvesting, and Contested Territories: The Fiction of Hugo Martínez-Serros
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988449
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Set on Chicago's South Side during the first half of the twentieth century, Hugo Martínez-Serros's The Last Laugh and Other Stories illuminates a generative role for garbage and disused space in relation to unorthodox configurations of modern pastoralism. This dimension of his work is most fully realized within a set of stories tracking episodes in the shared life of the Rivera family, which offers readers a serial history of Latin American placemaking within and against US settler-colonial logics. The bulk of my attention in what follows will be on the two earliest stories in the family's chronology, "Distillation" and "Killdeer," though brief attention will be paid to a later pair at the conclusion of my article.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallScavenging, Harvesting, and Contested Territories: The Fiction of Hugo Martínez-Serros2026-04-23text/htmlen-USScavenging, Harvesting, and Contested Territories: The Fiction of Hugo Martínez-Serros2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®761172026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Wastelanding in the Arctic: Pollution and Garbage in Contemporary Arctic Environmental Literary Discourse
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988450
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In Elemental Ecocriticism Cohen and Duckert ask, "Are you afraid of the elements? You should be. Exposure kills."1 In the Arctic, I will show, this no longer just refers to the cold elements that proved fatal for explorers seeking to conquer this space. Instead, toxins, garbage, waste, and other contaminated materials have accumulated in the planet's northernmost icescapes. Previously, the Arctic region—in centuries of discourse in novels, travel writing, expedition reports, and other writings by European explorers and authors—has been marked as a sublime wasteland (in the sense of a barren, vast, desertlike landscape) where explorers, researchers, geographers, adventurers, and travelers tested themselves against
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallWastelanding in the Arctic: Pollution and Garbage in Contemporary Arctic Environmental Literary Discourse2026-04-23text/htmlen-USWastelanding in the Arctic: Pollution and Garbage in Contemporary Arctic Environmental Literary Discourse2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®809472026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23All the Garbage of the World, Unite: Kim Hyesoon's Poetry of Sublime Waste
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988451
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The poetry of Kim Hyesoon is suffused with the material excess of contemporary life. Her obsession with materiality is evident not only thematically, in the compulsive buildup of objects and entities in her works, but also linguistically, in the way in which she creates new amalgamates of objects, which are then layered throughout her texts. Attempting to read her poetry through the techniques of personification and symbolism leads to an impasse, as every object she focuses on is capable of being personified or transformed into a symbol with multiple, often distinct meanings. Through such overdetermination, the particular hyperbolic power of her poetry emerges, in which meaning is made from accretion, rather than
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallAll the Garbage of the World, Unite: Kim Hyesoon's Poetry of Sublime Waste2026-04-23text/htmlen-USAll the Garbage of the World, Unite: Kim Hyesoon's Poetry of Sublime Waste2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®599822026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Insurgent Ecologies: Between Environmental Struggles and Post-Capitalist Transformations ed. by Undisciplined Environments Collective (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988452
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As stated in the book, "Insurgency is the place of becoming, of the encounter that marks possibility and action, and above all, the territorial practices of dissident peoples."3 Insurgent Ecologies dares to put "the radical" back to the core of political ecology. Indeed, the book is a rich collection of contributions that come together under the theme of insurgency, providing the reader with substantial elements of current social struggles and alternative imaginaries for just socioecological futures. It suggests insurgent ecological politics as a framework of thought and action. Such an approach is not only about defending land and life but also about reimagining and reclaiming ways of being beyond capitalist
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallInsurgent Ecologies: Between Environmental Struggles and Post-Capitalist Transformations ed. by Undisciplined Environments Collective (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USInsurgent Ecologies: Between Environmental Struggles and Post-Capitalist Transformations ed. by Undisciplined Environments Collective (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®478982026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Against the Vortex: Zardoz and the Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today by Anthony Galluzzo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988453
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Anthony Galluzzo's Against the Vortex is a concise, informative book stretching from fine-grained film criticism to an eco-psychoanalytical account of the neofeudal dynamics of our current age. In a dense and rather short publication, the New York–based writer and academic ushers the reader into an interstitial analysis in the disciplines of political ecology, film studies, and psychoanalysis. With a close orientation to the plot of the cult classic Zardoz, a B-side sci-fi film from 1974, Galluzzo eloquently narrates his own story, where eternal life is dystopian and humanity must accept limits, including their own death, to enter an ecological epoch. Frankly, these are big claims, but it is precisely those
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/673/image/coversmallAgainst the Vortex: Zardoz and the Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today by Anthony Galluzzo (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USAgainst the Vortex: Zardoz and the Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today by Anthony Galluzzo (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®239632026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23