By John Blair Gamber

In this leading edge learn, Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins, John Blair Gamber examines urbanity and the result of city living—traffic, rubbish, sewage, waste, and pollution—arguing for a brand new reputation of all sorts of human detritus as a part of the flora and fauna and hence for a broadening of our knowing of environmental literature.

While a lot of the discourse surrounding the USA’ idealistic and sentimental perspectives of itself privileges “clean” residing (primarily in rural, small-town, and suburban settings), representations of rurality and urbanity through Chicanas/Chicanos, African american citizens, Asian americans, and local american citizens, however, complicate such generalization. Gamber widens our realizing of present ecocritical debates by way of reading texts by way of such authors as Octavia Butler, Louise Erdrich, Alejandro Morales, Gerald Vizenor, and Karen Tei Yamashita that draw at the actual indicators of human corporeality to refigure towns and urbanity as normal. He demonstrates how ethnic American literature reclaims waste gadgets and waste spaces—likening toxins to miscegenation—as a mode to revalue cast-off and marginalized contributors and groups. Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins explores the conjunction of, and the frictions among, twentieth-century U.S. postcolonial reviews, race reviews, city experiences, and ecocriticism, and works to refigure this portrayal of city spaces.

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