Abstract
This introductory chapter argues for the need to reread the Asian American literary tradition from an ecocritical perspective, a systematic task of reinterpretation that no one has ventured to carry out yet. After providing an overview of the current trends in environmental criticism, I show the benefits of applying an ecocritical lens to both canonical and more recent contributions to Asian American literature. Finally, the last part of the introduction offers a concise summary of each of the chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
According to the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) report issued in 2003, the ecological impact of the Prestige oil spill was even worse than that of the Exxon Valdez disaster: “71,000 short tons of oil were spilled by the Prestige—60 percent more than initially estimated—contrasted with 42,769 short tons spilled by the Exxon Valdez” (https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/the-prestige-one-year-later-proves-worse-than-exxon-valdez). A similar conclusion is reached in Vince’s New Scientist article: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4100-prestige-oil-spill-far-worse-than-thought.
- 2.
As tends to be the case, life interfered with the initial project and delayed its completion. In the meantime, a limited number of valuable ecocritical publications in the field of Asian American studies have appeared, as will be explained later in more detail.
- 3.
For an earlier, shorter version of the following discussion, see Simal (2010).
- 4.
In “Give Earth a Chance,” Adam Rome argues that the emergence of environmentalism owes much to the interaction of three phenomena taking place in the 1960s: “the revitalization of liberalism, the growing discontent of middle-class women, and the explosion of student radicalism and countercultural protest” (2003, 527).
- 5.
The past decade has witnessed the proliferation of ASLE-type organizations around the world, such as the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment (EASLCE, 2007), the Association for Literature, Environment and Culture in Canada (ALECC, 2007), and so on, while branches of ASLE have appeared in countries such as Japan (1994), the UK (1999), Korea (2001), Australia and New Zealand (2005), India (ASLE-India, renamed OSLE in 2006), and Taiwan (2008). See Westling (2014, 241–246) for a full chronology of the discipline.
- 6.
Compare the somewhat bleak panorama drawn by Cheryll Glotfelty (1996) at the beginning of her “Introduction” to The Ecocriticism Reader (especially the disparity she observes between the attention given by the media to the environmental crisis and the total neglect on the part of literary critics; xvi), with the more optimistic, though by no means exultant view of ecofeminism offered two years later by Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (1998), in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: “In the 1990s ecofeminism is finally making itself felt in literary studies” (5). Speaking from a mid-position, in 2005 Lawrence Buell contended that, although the debate around environmental issues, most poignantly our (humans’) relationship to Nature, is as old as the Book of Genesis, ecocriticism was still struggling for visibility and recognition in academic circles (1–2).
- 7.
Buell (2005 12, 21, 82, 90–92). Phillips likewise contends that the term ecocriticism is “just a troublesome as it is helpful” (2003, viii), and that nature continues to be “one of philosophy’s least precise and most contested terms” (32). On the other hand, we cannot forget that, for ecocritics such as Glotfelty, the term “environment” still has pejorative, “anthropocentric and dualistic” connotations, whereas the prefix “eco-” suggests positive images of “interdependent communities, integrated systems” (1996, xx). All in all, I do agree with Buell’s reasons for favoring the term “environmental criticism,” even though ecocriticism continues to be the most widespread label.
- 8.
Recent evidence of such a trend can be found in the special issue that American Literature devoted to environmental criticism in 2012. As the editors of the volume put it in their preface, the contributions to this issue try to steer “away from the place-based, policy-focused, and phenomenological preoccupations of older forms of ecocriticism toward an engagement with murkier aspects of our condition,” such as “the significance of new identities and communities—often involuntary—that arise from environmental crisis; and the complex new forms of affect that accompany the recategorization of the planet” (Allewaert and Ziser 2012, 235).
- 9.
In 2002, The Environmental Justice Reader, edited by Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, definitively launched the question of ecojustice. In their groundbreaking introduction, the editors defined environmental justice as “the right of all people to share equally in the benefits bestowed by a healthy environment,” while the environment would encompass all those “places in which we live, work, play, and worship” (1).
- 10.
As Noël Sturgeon succinctly puts it in Ecofeminist Natures (1997), the ecofeminist “movement … articulates the theory that the ideologies that authorize injustices based on gender, race and class are related to the ideologies that sanction the exploitation and degradation of the environment” (23). Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land (1975) can be considered the foundational text of ecofeminism. Among the key books that advanced ecofeminist scholarship in the 1990s, it is worth mentioning Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1990), Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), and, in the particular field of American literature, Louise Westling’s The Green Breast of the New World (1996).
- 11.
Some ecocritics have recently posited a “third wave” of ecocriticism (see Wald 2016, 13), but most of the concerns they highlight as new, such as the focus on ecofeminist and ethnoracial issues, were already prominent in the second wave described by Buell. However, it is too early to decide whether this second wave, which still emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, may derive into a new phase in the field of ecocriticism in the near future.
- 12.
“Ecocentrism” views our planet as an interconnected community with no boundaries between sentient and non-sentient beings, humans and nonhumans, since we all depend on one another. Buell defines ecocentrism as the belief “that the interest of the ecosphere must override that of the interest of individual species,” in contradistinction with anthropocentrism (2005, 137). A similar, but more recent concept is bio-centered egalitarianism, as theorized by materialist ecocritic Rosi Braidotti (2006). This “trans-species” egalitarianism (41) is a hallmark of much of animal studies, as will be shown later.
- 13.
Westling’s 2014 overview of the present state of the field highlights very similar trends (6–7).
- 14.
It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that, despite the precise contours of the cube metaphor, there are no clear-cut dichotomies, but lines signifying a mesh or continuum, a fluid, crisscrossing space in which the different positions interpenetrate each other.
- 15.
Indeed, the pastoral’s flexible or “commodious” nature may explain why it is often “defined as a mode rather than as a genre”: not only does it “assume more than one form” but it can also “serve more than one master” (Phillips 2003, 17).
- 16.
I thank the anonymous reader for pointing out the importance of both posthumanist theory and the “animal turn” in recent years.
- 17.
For an insightful overview of the history of these tensions, see Heise (2016, 128–140). According to Heise, the two groups’ radically divergent approaches to the human-animal relationship may be accurately described as paradigmatic, in the case of animal rights activism, and syntagmatic, in the case of environmentalist activism (143–144).
- 18.
See classical philosophers’ work (most notably Aristotle’s) on the human-animal divide. For more recent philosophical examinations of animality, see Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal (2002), Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet (2007), and Mathew Calarco’s Zoographies (2008).
- 19.
Interestingly, recent animal studies scholars rarely assert their ecocritical genealogy either, preferring the philosophical tradition outlined in the previous note. Wolfe, for instance, claims that Derrida’s 2002 essay “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” and the homonymous book translated in 2008 constituted “the single most important event in the brief history of animal studies” (2009, 570).
- 20.
Some of the most important contributions to literary animal studies include (in chronological order) Margot Norris’s Beasts of the Modern Imagination (1985), Steve Baker’s The Postmodern Animal (2000) and Picturing the Beast (2001), and Cary Wolfe’s Animal Rites (2003a) and Zoontologies (2003b). For an overview of the essential bibliography in critical animal studies, see Wolfe’s “Human, All Too Human” (2009). More recent publications, not covered in Wolfe’s essay, include Sherryl Vint’s Animal Alterity (2010), Anat Pick’s Creaturely Poetics (2011), Ursula Heise’s Imagining Extinction (2016), Mario Ortiz-Robles’s Literature and Animal Studies (2016), and Michael Lundblad’s Animalities (2017). To this list we need to add the latest contributions to the Palgrave Series “Studies in Animals and Literature,” such as Creatural Fictions, edited by David Herman in 2016, and Beyond the Human-Animal Divide, edited by Dominik Ohrem and Roman Bartosch in 2017. For a discussion of the “creaturely discourse,” see Herman (2016, 3–6).
- 21.
- 22.
Vint also contends that science fiction is a privileged site for the exploration of how alterity is constructed (2010, 1), including rethinking the boundary between the human and animal categories (8). Additionally, science fiction allows us “to put ourselves in the place of the animal other and experience the world from an estranged point of view,” thus fostering “sympathetic imagination” in human readers (15).
- 23.
The fact that there is still no critical consensus concerning the boundaries and priorities of animal studies and posthumanism can be seen if we compare the positions of three recently published books. In Heise’s Imagining Extinction (2016), the critic claims that both advocates of animal rights and “the posthumanist variant in recent philosophy” attempt “to establish animals as members of the human social, political, and legal community” (148). In Animalities (2017), Lundblad argues that posthumanism seems less “engaged in situated and historicized political advocacy and activism” than animality studies and human-animal studies (11). According to Lundblad, the field of human-animal studies encompasses both concern for the welfare of animals and the exploration of inter-species relationships (3); for Nayar (2014), however, these two objects of study correspond to two different disciplines (93).
- 24.
This realization is a hallmark of postcolonial and environmental studies, as seen in the pioneering efforts of Joan Martínez Alier and Ramachandra Guha in the twentieth century, and in more recent and equally influential books by Rob Nixon, Graham Huggan, and Helen Tiffin. As we shall see in Chap. 3, some of the insights gained from the overview of animal studies prove rather helpful in our discussion of environmental justice, given that “discourses of animality have long been used to oppress various human groups” (Lundblad 2017, 8).
- 25.
- 26.
As early as 2009, Julie Sze argued that this was a plausible project, since “ethnic literature can be explored with an ecocritical lens, prioritizing shared themes in ethnic and environmental texts such as loss, mourning, and death, and also renewal in and through the land” (2009, 200). I find this to be valuable advice, even though I do not cover all of the “shared themes” mentioned in her article. See also contributions by Dixon, Dodd, Murphy, and Parra to the PMLA “Forum on Literatures of the Environment” (Arnold et al. 1999).
- 27.
The first attempts to turn the focus onto ethnic traditions other than the Euro-American (such as the MELUS issue guest-edited by Slovic and Adamson in 2009 or Slovic’s anthology Getting Over the Color Green) contain only a few references to Asian American literature. Similarly, while in her 2002 survey of ecocriticism Kate Rigby noted a tendency toward broadening the spectrum of enquiry, she too failed to mention Asian Americans in her list (164).
- 28.
The spatial restrictions of the work derive from the author’s choice to concentrate on just one Western state (Idaho). As to its disciplinary scope, even though the book does include some poems and references to Sone’s Nisei Daughter, it is far more interested in environmental history than in literary analysis. Nevertheless, Hayashi’s Haunted by Waters constitutes a highly readable journey across the landscapes of Idaho: a fishing excursion in which the author discusses the role of race in the environmental history of the Gem State. In his study-cum-travel-diary, Hayashi provides important insights into the limits of agrarianism, the construction of the ethnic/racial other (Shoshone, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) as weeds or vermin, and the (mis)use of the pioneer discourse during the internment years, with special attention paid to the Minidoka camp in south Idaho.
- 29.
A number of book-length publications focusing on “ethnic” American literature have appeared in the last few years. John Gamber’s Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins (2012), Jennifer Ladino’s Reclaiming Nostalgia (2012), Sarah Wald’s The Nature of California (2016), and Molly Wallace’s Risk Criticism (2016) discuss a variety of texts from different ethnoracial backgrounds, including Asian American. Other scholars have chosen to focus on African Americans or continue their exploration of Native American culture: Kimberly Smith’s African American Environmental Thought (2007), Paul Outka’s Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (2008), Ian Finseth’s Shades of Nature: Visions of Place in the Literature of American Slavery (2009), Kimberly Ruffin’s Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions (2010), and Joni Adamson’s American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism (2001), Lindsey Smith’s Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature (2008), or Lee Schweninger’s Listening to the Land (2008). Just as this manuscript was being sent to press, a collection of articles on Yamashita’s work, edited by A. Robert Lee, came out (I thank the editorial reviewers that alerted me to this).
- 30.
Indeed, in his introduction to the 2015 compilation, John Gamber wondered why it had taken “so long” for an ecocritical reading of Asian American literature to appear, given that Asian American texts are “replete with narratives that focus on ecological connections” (1). In contrast to the relative scarcity of book-length publications devoted to Asian American literature, East Asian literatures and cultures have garnered more attention in the field of environmental criticism and have recently been the subject of analyses from an ecocritical perspective in monographic studies such as Thornber’s Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (2012) and Estok and Kim’s East Asian Ecocriticisms (2013).
- 31.
Fitzsimmons, Chae, and Adams’s groundbreaking compilation of articles is organized around three thematic foci: The Environment and Labor, The Environment and Violence, and The Environment and Philosophy. The ten chapters in the volume cover Asian American authors from different periods and ethnicities, thus reflecting the ever-growing diversity of Asian American literature. It is worth noting that only a few of the texts studied in their collection are also discussed in this book: Kingston’s China Men (also the subject of a previous article of mine: Simal 2013) and Houston’s internment memoir, Farewell to Manzanar.
- 32.
This conflation of people with different national origins into a Pan-Asian American community, as Sau-ling Wong (1993) rightly points out, should be “voluntarily adopted and highly context-sensitive in order to work” (6; italics in the original). In other words, the nature of this large Pan-Asian alliance is temporary and its function is strategic, “merely to provide an instrument for political mobilization under chosen circumstances” (6). On the necessary acknowledgment of internal heterogeneity, see also Lowe (1996).
- 33.
Several books published by Asian American writers in the twenty-first century invite an ecocritical reading by explicitly including environmental concerns: David Mas Masumoto’s non-fiction, Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), or Don Lee’s Wrack and Ruin (2008). These last two novels, penned by a South Asian and a Korean American, respectively, highlight the increasing diversity of Asian Americans. However, as both texts have already been analyzed from an ecocritical perspective, I have chosen not to include them in my study. Bhira Backhaus’s novel Under the Lemon Trees (2009) would also have been an excellent addition to my corpus. I thank the anonymous readers for these suggestions.
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Simal-González, B. (2020). Introduction. In: Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35618-7_1
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