Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability by Abby L. Goode (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability by Abby L. Goode
• Ian Finseth (bio)

Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability
abby l. goode
University of North Carolina Press, 2022
276 pp.

The animating impulse of this important, well-executed study is a desire to challenge both "the supposed benevolence of American environmental writing" (2) and a scholarly "tendency to engage with the nation's eugenic and agrarian histories separately" (5). The ideals of self-reliant agricultural life and of a sustainable approach to natural resources, as twinned and potent forms of cultural discourse, turn out, in Goode's account, to be poisoned at the root. From Thomas Jefferson's encomiums to the "cultivators of the earth" all the way to the twenty-first century, they have been poisoned by fear—fear of overpopulation, of miscegenation, of the racial other, of moral pollution, of rampant fertility, of "real Americans" getting squeezed out of their rightful place. There was never some golden age of agrarian sustainability, nor even a belief in such a golden age, but rather images of disorder, degeneration, and corruption that motivated different ways of conceiving of—or fantasizing about—orderly, harmonious, and productive places and futures. These "agrotopias," Goode writes, "exist elsewhere, beyond the threat of demographic or agricultural decline," and they "constitute attempts to revise and reclaim a long-lost agrarian ideal of 'New World' abundance" (3).

The central theoretical premise of Agrotopias is that sustainability rhetoric and the agrarian myth "cannot be disentangled" (16) from the United States' long, violent history of racism, nativism, reproductive control, and eugenics. What results is a highly effective analysis of the ways in which [End Page 174] images of the good life—a healthy relationship of the human to the environmental—are shadowed by and vitiated by a desire for racial homogeneity. Along the way, famously progressive figures, including Walt Whitman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, are subject to sharp, occasionally devastating, critique. Even Michelle Obama's White House garden, in the epilogue, is implicated in the problematic legacy of Jeffersonian agrarianism. Although the book can feel repetitive in places, that repetitiveness actually comes to seem formally appropriate to the endless reinscriptions of the ideological problem Goode investigates. After reading the book, one might well ask whether there is any kind of environmental discourse that is not fatally compromised by the racial and reproductive legacies of the past.

One might also ask, however, why we cannot disentangle these ideological strands from one another. The metaphor of "entanglement" is a compelling one, as it appeals to our scholarly sense that everything is complicated and nothing simple. But it is also, at the end of the day, metaphorical. Is modern American environmental discourse really so corrupted by its own dark history that it's impossible to employ the language of sustainability without invoking or reinforcing that history? Can we preserve what is virtuous about early environmental writing (whether penned by Jefferson or anyone else) without accepting what is undesirable about it? Answering such questions properly goes beyond the scope of a book review, but they are questions that readers of Agrotopias should ponder. And how one answers them will depend, to a significant degree, on the particular texts that one brings under the microscope.

In that respect, Goode has chosen a fascinating combination of literary works to consider, ranging chronologically from J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) through Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915). Also featured are a number of unexpected entrants, including Leonora Sansay's Secret History (1802); Her-man Melville's Pierre (1852); Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899); and Walt Whitman's lesser-known essays and poems spanning the Civil War. In her consistently striking readings of these texts, Goode traces the nuanced yet potent ways in which sustainability rhetoric (and its whole conceptual scaffolding) evolved from the Revolutionary Era through the Progressive Era. Her conclusions—brought together in the epilogue's claim that "agrarianism has long functioned as a kind of population control discourse focused on encouraging the fertility of rural, tacitly white bodies [End Page 175] and discouraging the fertility of racialized, seemingly polluting bodies" (194...