Coda: Weedflowers, Gold Mountains, and Murky Globes

Abstract

In this brief concluding chapter I summarize the ecocritical journey which has taken us from Eaton’s pioneering work to Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, published a century later, without forgetting the master narratives of the Japanese American “internment” experience and Asian Americans’ claiming of America. Finally, I insist on the need to revisit older concepts or discourses both in the field of ecocriticism, like the pastoral or the sublime, and in Asian American literary criticism itself. In particular, I argue for the ongoing validity of the waste/no-waste dialectics that underpins Sau-ling Wong’s Necessity/Extravagance dichotomy, which, read ecocritically, becomes an apt way to approach the dialectics of austerity versus excess, degrowth versus consumerism.