{"title":"Hijacking the Imagination:","authors":"","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvswx77q.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvswx77q.5","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":166843,"journal":{"name":"The Disposition of Nature","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130924554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-03DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823286782.003.0004
J. Wenzel
This chapter traces relationships between material processes and cultural logics of enclosure. Waste land—land not under cultivation, producing no revenue for the state—was the raw material of colonial capitalism. Waste also names the by-products of such transformations: lives and lands laid waste. These processes entail ways of seeing and knowing; aesthetic regimes help to naturalize property regimes. The literary personification of nature (as in the pathetic fallacy) is bound up with the objectification of humans: aesthetic renderings of landscape can reinforce a dehumanizing, anti-commons common sense. These resource logics understand nature as separate from humans, disposed for their use, and subject to their control. The chapter considers the role of European imperialism in consolidating ideas about nature and natural resources, situating new materialist accounts of non-human agency within a broader historical context. Mahasweta Devi’s “Dhowli” anchors an examination of a worldwide history of waste, which begins (for John Locke) when “all the world was America.” Devi’s story bears the traces of successive waves of conquest and enclosure in India and offers an Anthropocene allegory avant la lettre—which the chapter juxtaposes with East India Company officials’ observations of the effects of deforestation, a foundation for modern climate science.
{"title":"From Waste Lands to Wasted Lives: Enclosure as Aesthetic Regime and Property Regime","authors":"J. Wenzel","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823286782.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823286782.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter traces relationships between material processes and cultural logics of enclosure. Waste land—land not under cultivation, producing no revenue for the state—was the raw material of colonial capitalism. Waste also names the by-products of such transformations: lives and lands laid waste. These processes entail ways of seeing and knowing; aesthetic regimes help to naturalize property regimes. The literary personification of nature (as in the pathetic fallacy) is bound up with the objectification of humans: aesthetic renderings of landscape can reinforce a dehumanizing, anti-commons common sense. These resource logics understand nature as separate from humans, disposed for their use, and subject to their control. The chapter considers the role of European imperialism in consolidating ideas about nature and natural resources, situating new materialist accounts of non-human agency within a broader historical context. Mahasweta Devi’s “Dhowli” anchors an examination of a worldwide history of waste, which begins (for John Locke) when “all the world was America.” Devi’s story bears the traces of successive waves of conquest and enclosure in India and offers an Anthropocene allegory avant la lettre—which the chapter juxtaposes with East India Company officials’ observations of the effects of deforestation, a foundation for modern climate science.","PeriodicalId":166843,"journal":{"name":"The Disposition of Nature","volume":"126 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128189716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Far Is Bhopal?","authors":"","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvswx77q.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvswx77q.7","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":166843,"journal":{"name":"The Disposition of Nature","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114992305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-03DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823286782.003.0005
J. Wenzel
This chapter proposes the multinational corporation as an axis for literary comparison. Charting Dow Chemical’s history of harm, it links Indra Sinha’s Bhopal novel Animal’s People to Agent Orange and the silicosis epidemic resulting from Union Carbide’s excavation of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel in West Virginia. To avoid liability for Bhopal, Union Carbide and Dow invoked the legal doctrine of forum non conveniens (inconvenient forum): a comparative doctrine, concerned with language, location, and the difficulty of interpreting across geographical divides, that resonates with the concerns of comparative literature. Animal’s People’s multilingualism and intertextual allusions derive from its ambivalence about the possibility of environmental justice and planetary solidarity. Aware of its global circulation, Animal’s People is caught between the conventionality of a bourgeois marriage plot and a revolutionary, eco-apocalyptic sublime. This formal tension is the novel’s solution to the challenge of imagining justice for Bhopal without ignoring the historical fact of justice still undone. The chapter demonstrates the pitfalls of bourgeois sympathy and radical solidarity as responses to the calculations of risk logic and its contradictions among toxic, financial, and media exposure. Globalization works through localization, a corollary of neoliberalism’s socializing risk and privatizing profit.
{"title":"How Far Is Bhopal? Inconvenient Forums and Corporate Comparison","authors":"J. Wenzel","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823286782.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823286782.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter proposes the multinational corporation as an axis for literary comparison. Charting Dow Chemical’s history of harm, it links Indra Sinha’s Bhopal novel Animal’s People to Agent Orange and the silicosis epidemic resulting from Union Carbide’s excavation of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel in West Virginia. To avoid liability for Bhopal, Union Carbide and Dow invoked the legal doctrine of forum non conveniens (inconvenient forum): a comparative doctrine, concerned with language, location, and the difficulty of interpreting across geographical divides, that resonates with the concerns of comparative literature. Animal’s People’s multilingualism and intertextual allusions derive from its ambivalence about the possibility of environmental justice and planetary solidarity. Aware of its global circulation, Animal’s People is caught between the conventionality of a bourgeois marriage plot and a revolutionary, eco-apocalyptic sublime. This formal tension is the novel’s solution to the challenge of imagining justice for Bhopal without ignoring the historical fact of justice still undone. The chapter demonstrates the pitfalls of bourgeois sympathy and radical solidarity as responses to the calculations of risk logic and its contradictions among toxic, financial, and media exposure. Globalization works through localization, a corollary of neoliberalism’s socializing risk and privatizing profit.","PeriodicalId":166843,"journal":{"name":"The Disposition of Nature","volume":"74 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116328475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-03DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823286782.003.0003
J. Wenzel
This chapter examines texts about the Niger Delta in several genres (Ogaga Ifowodo’s poem The Oil Lamp; fiction by Uwem Akpan, Helon Habila, and Ben Okri; the photo-essay anthology Curse of the Black Gold; Sandy Cioffi’s film Sweet Crude). Juxtaposing political ecology’s analysis of natural resource conflicts with Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities, the chapter argues that the relationships among petroleum extraction, literary production, and national imagining in Nigeria are better described as un-imagining, a corollary of underdevelopment as a transitive process of unmaking. Postcolonial citizenship entails a struggle over key questions: What is the state for? To whom do natural resources belong? Oil hijacks the imagination, promising wealth without work, progress without the passage of time. This dynamic manifests as petro-magic-realism, a literary variant of the resource curse hypothesis that blames the ills of resource extraction on the substance rather than social relations. The execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995 galvanized world attention on the Nigerian petro-state; the subsequent explosion of violence in the Niger Delta can be read as a perverse realization of some of his demands for ethnic autonomy and resource control.
{"title":"Hijacking the Imagination: How to Tell the Story of the Niger Delta","authors":"J. Wenzel","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823286782.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823286782.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines texts about the Niger Delta in several genres (Ogaga Ifowodo’s poem The Oil Lamp; fiction by Uwem Akpan, Helon Habila, and Ben Okri; the photo-essay anthology Curse of the Black Gold; Sandy Cioffi’s film Sweet Crude). Juxtaposing political ecology’s analysis of natural resource conflicts with Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities, the chapter argues that the relationships among petroleum extraction, literary production, and national imagining in Nigeria are better described as un-imagining, a corollary of underdevelopment as a transitive process of unmaking. Postcolonial citizenship entails a struggle over key questions: What is the state for? To whom do natural resources belong? Oil hijacks the imagination, promising wealth without work, progress without the passage of time. This dynamic manifests as petro-magic-realism, a literary variant of the resource curse hypothesis that blames the ills of resource extraction on the substance rather than social relations. The execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995 galvanized world attention on the Nigerian petro-state; the subsequent explosion of violence in the Niger Delta can be read as a perverse realization of some of his demands for ethnic autonomy and resource control.","PeriodicalId":166843,"journal":{"name":"The Disposition of Nature","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132351501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-03DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823286782.003.0001
J. Wenzel
The introduction situates world literature and the Anthropocene as instances of broader dynamics of world-imagining and a recent shift toward the global as a scale of analysis. It offers an expanded narrative of globalization, by looking back to moments of capitalist expansion that precede neoliberalism and by recognizing the environment (particularly in colonial peripheries) as globalization’s material condition of possibility as well as its product. Describing the book’s interdisciplinary approach to cultural imagining and environmental crisis, the introduction shows how understandings of nature are mediated by literary tropes and narrative forms and genres in way that precede and exceed representation in any particular text; cultural logics shape what counts as nature or crisis. Therefore, a facility with the literary is broadly relevant to environmental thought and action, and the purview of ecocriticism ranges far beyond texts explicitly “about” the environment. The introduction argues for legibility (not visibility) as the goal of analysis: under what conditions can environmental injustice be read, understood, and apprehended? A reading of Robert Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy” and Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Poison” demonstrates the limitations of eco-apocalypse as a mode of imagining futurity, which tends to ignore histories of imperialism and inequality that shape the present.
{"title":"Reading for the Planet","authors":"J. Wenzel","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823286782.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823286782.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"The introduction situates world literature and the Anthropocene as instances of broader dynamics of world-imagining and a recent shift toward the global as a scale of analysis. It offers an expanded narrative of globalization, by looking back to moments of capitalist expansion that precede neoliberalism and by recognizing the environment (particularly in colonial peripheries) as globalization’s material condition of possibility as well as its product. Describing the book’s interdisciplinary approach to cultural imagining and environmental crisis, the introduction shows how understandings of nature are mediated by literary tropes and narrative forms and genres in way that precede and exceed representation in any particular text; cultural logics shape what counts as nature or crisis. Therefore, a facility with the literary is broadly relevant to environmental thought and action, and the purview of ecocriticism ranges far beyond texts explicitly “about” the environment. The introduction argues for legibility (not visibility) as the goal of analysis: under what conditions can environmental injustice be read, understood, and apprehended? A reading of Robert Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy” and Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Poison” demonstrates the limitations of eco-apocalypse as a mode of imagining futurity, which tends to ignore histories of imperialism and inequality that shape the present.","PeriodicalId":166843,"journal":{"name":"The Disposition of Nature","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114689447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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