Let me tell you a story about black birds. In 2002, an oil tanker misleadingly called Prestige sank just a few miles off the Galician coast after a series of fatally wrongheaded technical and political decisions. The massive oil spill and environmental catastrophe that ensued mobilized activists and volunteers from all over Spain like never before.1 The initial response of horror and stupefaction quickly turned to indignation and defiance. Cleanup teams worked for months to salvage and restore whatever they could from underneath the marea negra (black tide) smothering the coasts of Galicia and Asturias, while thousands of infuriated citizens joined environmental and social activists behind the rallying cry of nunca máis (“never again”). Never again would we be able to look in the other direction; the iconic image of seabirds coated in black, sticky tar had been seared into our minds forever. Ecological awareness was here to stay, not only on the streets but also in the academic circles in which I was just beginning to move.
Soon after the Prestige disaster, one of the pioneers of ecocriticism in Spain, Carmen Flys, approached me to ask if I knew of any Asian American texts that would be amenable to an ecocritical reading. At the time, only a few examples came to mind: the first novels of Karen Tei Yamashita and Ruth Ozeki, and a handful of Asian American poets. In fact, a quick perusal of the existing research on Asian American literature revealed that nobody up to then had consistently applied an ecocritical methodology to the ever-growing field of Asian American literature. I was so intrigued by the possibility of combining ecocriticism with my interest in Asian American studies that, in 2007, I started work on a research project entitled “Human Ecology,” which was to prove the seed for this book.2 As Lawrence Buell argues, every literary text, consciously or unconsciously, encodes a certain type of environmentality (2001, 18–27, 25). There was no reason to believe that Asian American writings were an exception to the rule; however, nobody had thought to explore their “environmental unconscious” and the ecocritical potential of Asian American writings. My aim, then, was to try to fill that void, re-engaging Asian American literature with the new navigational tools of ecocriticism.
The fact that, for decades, environmental ecocritics had deftly avoided studying the fraught relationship between “nature” and “race” only made my task more complicated. Initially, I was uneasy about having to handle two concepts of such theoretical complexity and doing so in a conjoined manner. I would need to find a way to acknowledge the extralinguistic relevance of being racialized as an Asian American while circumventing the essentialist pitfalls that haunt the very construct of “race.” I would then have to repeat that intellectual pirouette with the equally problematic concept of “nature.” Finally, I would need to juggle both conceptual balls at the same time and try to apply those critical tools to till the seemingly arid soil of Asian American literature. Fortunately, however, environmental criticism proved an excellent plow and the Asian American texts turned out to be far more fertile than expected.
1 Ecocriticism: Surveying the Field
The relatively new field of ecocriticism3 has been variously described as “the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (Buell 2005, 430) and a “branch of green studies” that examines “the relationship between human and non-human life as represented in literary texts and which theorizes about the place of literature in the struggle against environmental destruction” (Coupe 2000, 302). More recently, Louise Westling has claimed that ecocriticism seeks both to engage with contemporary literature dealing with the environment and to offer a cogent reappraisal of old literary traditions (such as the pastoral) “in light of present environmental concerns” (2014, 2). What these different definitions have in common is that they incorporate an explicit ethical and political agenda: to prevent environmental deterioration through a theoretically informed analysis of literature and culture. Nevertheless, as we will see in more detail in the last chapter, excessive emphasis on theory has also been regarded with suspicion since the beginning of ecocriticism.
Although the “green wave” of environmental activism did not acquire social visibility and prominence until 1970, with the institution of Earth Day, it can be argued that environmental concerns had already become part of the social and political agenda by the 1960s, at around the same time as other counter-cultural movements were coming into view.4 In 1962, an “eco-book” now considered a classic of toxic discourse, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, became a bestseller and a major influence for a whole generation. In the 1960s and early 1970s, we also find examples of what may be considered proto-ecocriticism or ecocriticism avant la lettre, including Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964), Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973), and Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival (1974).
It was not until the 1990s, however, that ecocriticism became a distinct field of study within literary theory and criticism, with the creation of academic associations such as ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) in 1992, and its associated journal, ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment), which was first launched in 1993.5 Two seminal books of ecocriticism also appeared in the mid-1990s: Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination (1995) and Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm’s anthology, The Ecocriticism Reader (1996). Although some critics continued to refer to ecocriticism “as a newly-emerging field” in the late 1990s (Love 1999; Phillips 1999; Reed 1999/2002), in the first decades of the twenty-first century ecocritical theory and practice has gained both respect and visibility.6 At the same time, ecocriticism has had to respond to new challenges, among them the very nature of “nature,” as discussed in the final chapter of this book. By 1989, Bill McKibben had already posited the advent of a postnatural (or, more accurately, “transnatural”) era; a few years later, in 1994, Dana Phillips wondered whether nature was “necessary” at all, while in 2007 Timothy Morton urged critics to dispense with the concept altogether. In a more cautious appraisal, Ursula Heise has recently argued that we need to accept the fact that, in the new era of the Anthropocene, nature must be approached “as already pervasively domesticated” (2016, 158).
Precisely because of the changing and ever-expanding meanings of “nature,” and while still recognizing the widespread use of nature-based ecocriticism as an umbrella word for disparate trends within the critical movement, prominent ecocritics such as Buell (2005) started to use the less common label of “environmental criticism” in the twenty-first century.7 For Buell, this term better reflects the tendency to broaden the notion of “environment” to include not only the more or less unspoiled “nature” and wilderness of canonical nature writing, but also urban settings and degraded natural landscapes, a shift that, as we shall see, has been matched by a slow but inexorable accompanying effort to complement the traditional local perspective with a global, transnational one (Heise 2008a; Westling 2014, 6).
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, therefore, ecocritics started to envision the future of their field as moving beyond the already sanctioned nature writing or “environmental non-fiction” which had been so central in the initial “recuperative” stage of ecocriticism (Rigby 2002, 2015). If an environmental unconscious can be traced in every text, it seemed only reasonable to broaden the scope of study of literary ecocriticism. In 1996, Sven Birkerts pointed out the risk of “programmatic simplicity” of too literal a focus on traditional understandings of nature and argued instead for a “more inclusive idea of ‘environment’” on the part of ecocritics (quoted in Armbruster and Wallace 2001, 3). In The Greening of Literary Scholarship, Steven Rosendale took up both of the objections raised by Birkerts and recognized that the “received nature-writing canon and the relatively small arsenal of critical approaches that hav...