Poetry from Spaceship Earth

Empire and Ecology in Post-1945 American Poetry

Samia Rahimtoola

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781685970635
• eBook ISBN:
  9781685970642
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the early decades of the postwar period, the planetary metaphor of "spaceship Earth" was everywhere in the West. It exerted its power on sites as various as Caribbean research stations, the shipping lanes of the U.S.-occupied Pacific, Palestinian refugee camps, and the internal colonies of segregated nations. At its heart was a new ideology and infrastructure of managing, administering, and rationalizing nature through which Western powers sought to maintain their grip on a decolonizing planet.

Poetry from Spaceship Earth retrieves a diverse array of postwar American poets—Robert Duncan, June Jordan, Joanne Kyger, Lorine Niedecker, and Charles Olson—who contested and cultivated alternatives to this emergent mode of environmentalism. By placing the major innovations of postwar poetry into conversation with environmental politics, Cold War science and technology studies, and postcolonial and Black studies, Samia Rahimtoola develops an original theoretical and historical account of the racial and colonial logics that underpin the supposedly neutral project of managing nature.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the book
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction Race, Nature, and Nation on Spaceship Earth
• 1 Organization Men
• 2 Freedom by Design
• 3 Flooded States and Ungovernable Subjects
• 4 Watching the Weather with Joanne Kyger
• Coda Poetry and the Ends of Technocratic Environmentalism
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Contemporary North American Poetry Series