Most scholarly contestations of race since
the 1980s have employed social constructionist arguments to demonstrate that
race is a social, not biological category, forged within a history of economic
and political oppression, not simply found “in nature.” Interrogating racism
has, for the most part, meant shifting attention away from ostensible racial
differences toward the social and political forces that have constructed these
differences. It is useful to notice, for our purposes here, that these
arguments divert attention from material bodies per se, toward the ideologies
and discourses that constitute them.
Environmental justice science,
literature, and activism, however, must to some degree focus on actual bodies,
especially as they are transformed by their encounters with places, substances,
and forces. Departing from the incisive philosophical analyses of the vast
superstructures that support racial oppression, environmental justice activism
needs to be rather literal, demonstrating material connections between specific
bodies in specific places.
Whereas the predominant academic theories
of race have worked to undermine its ontological status via theories of social
construction, environmental justice movements must produce or employ scientific
data that track environmental hazards, placing a new sort of materiality at the
forefront of many of these struggles. The emerging sciences of biomonitoring
and the particular forms of environmental activism that they enable capture the
biochemical interchanges between body and place, but they also recast the
categories of race and class, which have been at the heart of environmental
justice movements.
Environmental justice movements epitomize a trans-corporeal materiality, a conception of the body that is neither essentialist, nor genetically determined, nor firmly bounded, but rather a body in which social power and material/geographic agencies intra-act. If, as Rose argues, “biological citizenship” relocates
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures : Science,
Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2010: p. 61-63.
Lance, I haven't read this book, though it looks like it's invested in some extremely important interventions re: environmentalism and the existence of actual bodies in actual places.
ReplyDeleteBut I'm wondering why one of the foundational assumptions of this project is that discourses on racial construction has "divert[ed] attention from material bodies per se, toward the ideologies and discourses that constitute them."
My experience of working with race in the c19 is that much of the literature I'm most interested in deals rather directly with material bodies, and the ways they do and don't align with various theories of material, visual, genealogical, geographical, or essential racialization. Can you fill me in on your interest in Alaimo's project in a specifically 19th-century context?
I ask, of course, because you seem particularly invested in Alaimo's work here, and I'm curious to hear more.
ReplyDelete