Research on environmental justice issues frequently
emphasizes the uneven distribution of risk factors: differential exposures to
“slow violence” (Nixon), risk-induced “transcorporeality” (Alaimo), & what
I’ve called “fatal contiguities.” Is there a nineteenth-century genealogy for
these concepts of environmental risk, & are there precedents for thinking
about (or not thinking about) how
risk factors intersect with racialization?
I’m planning to consider literary naturalism as a precursor,
of sorts, to contemporary representations of risk-laden bodies and class- and
race-based environmental injustice. Naturalism seems productive in this regard
for a few reasons:
1.by treating humans as types and (at times) as animals
moved by hereditary and environmental forces (often in urban settings),
naturalism refuses any strict separation between the social and the natural.
2.by emphasizing environmental determinism, naturalism
foregrounds how geography and unevenly distributed materials affect and produce
human embodiment and consciousness.
3.naturalist fiction (by which, for now, I just mean works that 1 or more critics have argued are "naturalist") frequently highlights scenes in which
persons intermingle with their environments: characters dissolving into climate
(London, “To Build a Fire”), inhaling gas (Sister
Carrie), disappearing into the urban darkness (Maggie), walking into the sea (Awakening),
lying face-up beneath scintillant red chemicals (“The Monster”), covered in a
film of smog and soot (Life in the Iron
Mills), blending into wallpaper patterns (“Yellow Wall-Paper), or
undergoing the slow “dissolution” induced by leprosy (London, “Sheriff of
Kona”). These scenes have been read in terms of atavism and social critique,
but they also function as moments of naturalist transcorporealization. That is,
they tell us a lot about how the production of space leads to the production
(and in many instances the undoing) of bodies and selves.
4.naturalist literature by writers like Norris, Crane, &
London treats racial difference in problematic and sometimes contradictory
ways. While these writers were restricted by social discourses that pitted the
white working class against racialized and immigrant laborers,
twentieth-century authors like Richard Wright and Helena Viramontes have
appropriated and revised aspects of naturalist style to interrogate intersections
between race, class, and environment. So I will either look at more recent uses
of naturalist devices or interrogate how classic naturalist fiction represents “white”
and other races.
Hi Hsuan -- This sounds like a fascinating project and I'm looking forward to learning more about it. I've always thought that Ruthie Gilmore's definition of racism from _The Golden Gulag_ is rife for import into eco-critical conversations, particularly because of the many connections between environmental risk and her focus on life chances. She defines racism as: "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death." Just thought this might be another secondary source to add to your bibliography on risk and racialization.
ReplyDeleteOn another note, there's also a really fascinating meditation on race, environment, and class in Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha. I think you'll also find some elements of transcorporealization in the text (ie: the grayness of the tenement maps onto the people who live in the building, including Maud's baby, who is described as being gray after she is born in the apartment). The text echoes many of the techniques of the late 19th/early 20th c. naturalists, and is also a sly revision of the naturalism of Wright's _Native Son_.
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