UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies (E-Journal - York University)
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The Biopolitics of Mixing: Thai Multiracialities and Haunted Ascendancies
No full textThe Biopolitics of Mixing: Thai Multiracialities and Haunted Ascendancies.By JINTHANA HARITAWORN. Ashgate, 2012. $99.95Reviewed by Aedan HoarThe Biopolitics of Mixing builds upon Thai histories that were collected during Haritaworn’s qualitative research on experiences of Thai multiraciality in Britain and Germany. The narrative reaches back over a decade and maps out the connections and conclusions of Haritaworn’s journey with race and the question: “What are you?” or “Where do you come from?” By giving voice to the themes that emerged from Haritaworn’s research and interviews, this book maps a social environment that is created through the politics of mixed-raciality and its effect on our interpretations of mixed-race bodies.The book explores the celebratory nature of post-race politics which seeks to erase the history of colonization, replacing memories of oppression with a vision of a new age in which empire was simply a necessary stepping stone towards a future beyond race. Haritaworn makes the important argument that narratives of mixed-race and “tolerance” are used to drive campaigns of humanitarian militarism against “intolerant” cultures. In the process, this book exposes unsettling historical connections between the celebration of mixed-raciality as resulting in stronger genetics, and the racist, white-supremacist culture that was the driving force behind eugenics. Haritaworn’s research confronts the hegemonic narratives that effect the way that ability, gender, and race are represented in transnational politics of the body.Through weaving in histories from their interviews, Haritaworn traces connections in theory and geopolitics that let the reader critically examine the driving forces behind what makes mixed-raced people characterized as beautiful or inferior, celebrated or marginalized. The book draws on an extensive bibliography and historical examples of how mixed-raciality and multiculturalism have been used by racist cultures to re-invent state histories as progressive, inclusive, and liberating. Demonstrating the ways that mixed-race bodies are used to support hegemonic racist and heterosexual norms, this book is an eye-opening exploration of the ways that multiculturalism and “inclusivity” are being used to promote the current geopolitical power structures in neoliberalism.The Biopolitics of Mixing is wonderfully written and extremely reflexive in tone making it an essential resource for any reader who wants to critically examine the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. This book spends a great deal of time establishing Haritaworn’s positionality, mapping out the logic behind the research in a very accessible way. One thing that adds a great deal to the book is the use of footnotes, which seem to predict questions that the reader might have, adding yet another layer to the depth of the analysis. Haritaworn achieves an in-depth exploration of the construction of mechanisms used to place individual bodies within categories of race, gender, or sexuality. The Biopolitics of Mixing reveals how systemic racism is normalized in everyday interactions in multicultural society. The book takes readers on a journey where the assumptions we (and the author) take for granted about the intersectionalities of race, gender, poverty, ability, and sexuality are challenged in an effort to give voice to “that which had been left out” of Haritaworn’s original research model. In this way the reader is informed by Haritaworn’s personal journey that walks the book’s conclusions back through connections that were made over more than a decade of research. The Biopolitics of Mixing makes room for important discussions that challenge readers to reflect upon our own conceptualizations of the body and our relationship to geopolitical narratives. This book is a must read for students interested in Thai-histories, multi-raciality and multiculturalism, social-justice research, biopolitics or intersectional analysis.~AEDAN HOAR is a Masters Candidate in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. His work examines colonization, land use planning, and social transformation through a biopolitical lens
Masthead
No full textUnderCurrents is a collectively and student-run journal based out of the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. UnderCurrents explores the relations among environment, culture, and society, and publishes one thematic issue per year. All back issues are available, free of charge, on the UnderCurrents website. We are committed to publishing a variety of scholarly, creative, and activist work that critically engages with conceptions of the environment.orders & correspondenceUnderCurrentsc/o Faculty of Environmental Studies277 Health Nursing and Environmental Studies Building4700 Keele Street, York UniversityToronto, ON M3J [email protected]://www.yorku.ca/currentsreviewersMichael Classens, Amanda Di Battista, Natali Downer, Oded Haas, Tania Hernández Cervantes, Aedan Hoar, Sonja Killoran-McKibbin, Dana Kandalaft, Sarah Lindsay, Andrew Mark, Michaela McMahon, Elana Santana, Madison Van Westlayout and designMichael Classens, Amanda Di Battista, Oded Haas, Tania Hernández Cervantes, Jonathan Kitchen, Madison Van WestdistributionMichael Classens, Madison Van Westgraduate assistantsAedan Hoar, Crystal Lamont, Madison Van WestprinterIncredible Printing30 St Regis Crescent NorthNorth York, ON M3J 1Z2T: 416-630-5200funding support Faculty of Environmental Studies & PhD Environmental Studies Student Associationspecial thanks toFrances Chan, Dana Craig, Ling He, Jonathan Kitchen, Dr. Catriona Sandilands, and Dr. Peter Timmermansingle hard copies$10back issues availablesee http://www.yorku.ca/currents for digital archive of all volumesUnderCurrents © 2014. All rights reserved. The copyright in and to the individual texts and artwork in UnderCurrents is owned by the contributors as credited.Back cover image (above) by Kayla Flinn
Climate Change - Who’s Carrying the Burden?
No full textClimate Change - Who’s Carrying the Burden?Edited by ANDERS SANDBERG and TOR SANDBERG. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2010. $35.00Reviewed by Miranda BakshChilly Climates - Who’s Carrying the Burden? is a collection of eighteen intriguing narratives on current global environmental issues, written by activists, scholars, and professionals from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Ranging from the Green Party’s Elizabeth May to York University professor Anders Sandberg, the array of perspectives presented enables the reader to analyse environmental issues from various angles. This allows the audience to use these perspectives to help sculpt and broaden their own personal opinion. Global environmental dilemmas are highlighted, which not only broadens the reader’s understanding of climate change concerns but both sparks their curiosity and allows them to question the issues further.The stories of those who most acutely suffer the effects of climate change are represented in the pages of this text through investigations of numerous environmental events that have occurred—particularly those that have taken place in marginalized communities — around the world. Contributors to this text highlight the stories of those who suffer the effects of climate change most profoundly, ensuring that the prolonged stresses with which they contend are uncovered and understood. Exemplary contributions include Sonja Killoran-McKibbin’s description of an efficient citizen-based conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia; Tanya Gulliver’s insights on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and Tor Sandberg’s interview with renowned environmentalist, Vandana Shiva, who discusses current issues in India related to the increased use of fossil fuels.Other important concepts for students in environmental studies introduced in this text include environmental refugees, presented by Aaron Saad; reproductive justice, explored though Noel Sturgeon’s ecocritique of the animated film Happy Feet; and the survival of Inuit populations, as explored by Jelena Vesic. Each contribution to this volume not only makes the reader aware of the appalling situations that people face around the world as a result of climate change, but also motivates the reader to think about climate change issues more critically, interrogating how they might be implicated in unjust practices. By providing examples of past environmental events as well as new approaches to tackling environmental concerns, the writing in this text encourages readers to look for solutions and to educate others about climate change and environmental justice issues. This book offers an alternative to the conventional belief that climate change is an issue we will only face in the distant future. Instead, the papers in this text argue that climate change is an existing problem and that its consequences are irreversible. The urgency, seriousness, and international implications of climate change are made clear in this text as the authors collectively argue that we need to shift our thinking to include both solution centred approaches and preventative measures to deal with the dire consequences of the planet’s changing climate. In addition, previous failures in addressing environmental concerns are illustrated, such as the unsuccessful United Nations conference in Copenhagen (COP15). Accordingly, the reader is exposed to the inadequate process by which global environmental issues are frequently dealt with, and the unwillingness of the parties who are primarily responsible to take meaningful action. This collection of critical writing not only informs and enlightens the reader, but is also inspirational. Chilly Climates - Who’s Carrying the Burden? makes evident that climate change is truly a global phenomenon, and that we are entering a time of global inequity. Each contribution to this compilation presents a unique approach to climate change research where readers are encouraged to appreciate the diversity of each bias, as they are derived from personal experiences of the authors. This book is recommended for students, educators, and citizens who wish to explore alternative perspectives on climate change, which do not lose sight of its victims.~MIRANDA BAKSH is an undergraduate student at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. She is focusing her studies in the Environmental Management stream of her program, and also has a broad range of interests in French Studies, Dance, and Biology
The End of the Beginning: Environmental Apocalypse on the Cusp in Scott Fotheringham’s The Rest is Silence and Nicolas Dickner’s Apocalypse for Beginners; InVoice; Road’s End; & The Outside
No full textScott Fotheringham’s novel The Rest is Silence and Nicolas Dickner’s novel Apocalypse for Beginners both mix coming-of-age narratives with environmental destruction through apocalyptic events. Similarly, concerns about global environmental destruction populate the bildungsroman in fiction from nuclear-era texts such as John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids to ongoing narratives such as Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam series. However, both Fotheringham’s The Rest is Silence and Dickner’s Apocalypse for Beginners integrate coming-of-age narratives with apocalyptic threats to the characters’ environments that climax at the edge of a point-of-no-return and then subside without having completely eradicated the living environment beyond recognition. The two novels represent a rethinking of how apocalyptic threat effects the world: these texts reject the idea of immediate doom represented by, for example, fiction focused on nuclear destruction, and the notion “’[t]hat there’s no problem that can’t be fixed with a good old end of the world’” (Dickner 89).....inVoiceimountainssoured with bitterroot stumps at half mastiibarren logs float in biers, await their final rites —plywood and profitiiithe wind tuneless without branches to pluckthe outsidea swing forwardout the windowand into somethingbreaking bough into somethingfinding medicinein pain and poiso
Just Before The Wolf Came.
No full textJust before the wolf came. Dorion, Ontario. Spring 2012. Darren Patrick
City Farmer: Adventures in Urban Food Growing
No full textCity Farmer: Adventures in Urban Food Growing.By LORRAINE JOHNSON. D. & M. Publishers Inc., 2010. $19.95Reviewed by Michael ClassensWhile the title of Lorraine Johnson’s most recent book may seem like a disjointed juxtaposition, an ill-conceived utopian fantasy, or both, it is only fleetingly so. Despite the considerable and colliding pathologies of the contemporary food system—adequately summarized in the book— |Johnson forcefully argues that small-scale ‘city farmers’ are the vanguard of an emerging transformation of the contemporary food system. True, in the aggregate, city farming remains more prefigurative than productive, however Johnson’s choice to see the socio-political and ecological benefits of small scale food production is itself an affirmative political maneuver. She’s acutely aware of the formidability of re-inscribing the contemporary food system with more just and sustainable attributes, but also understands that starting in the here-and-now is perhaps the only rational choice in the face of such a challenge. Given that ours is an increasingly urbanized world, the ‘here’ is more often than not an apartment balcony, a neighbourhood park, a building rooftop, a front yard, or a back alley. These are the interstitial—and not inconsequentially, un-commodified—spaces of the urban condition. Johnson’s trick is to reveal the potential in these sometimes derelict, often unassuming spaces, while she concomitantly urges us to re-imagine our own relationship to them. We are all urban farmers, she assures us, and the city is our fertile, however discontiguous, field. Part ‘how to’ manual, part philosophical tract, and part urban adventure travel log, City Farmer reads like a contemporary reorientation guide to our cities-as-farms. And like many good mash-up genres, the strength of this book is in its breadth. Johnson takes us on an extensive urban-ag tour and introduces us to urbanites-cum-farmers tilling everything from yards, balcony containers, and community garden plots, to the less conventional back alley parking spaces, underground bunkers, and even floating barges. Along the way, she punctuates these real-world stops with conceptual and instructional vignettes providing everything from step-by-step briefs on how to start a community garden and how to build a compost bin, to lists of plants that thrive in low-light conditions and instructions detailing how to make wine and jelly from foraged urban edibles. While not the explicit focus of the book, issues of urban policy provide an inevitable backdrop to Johnson’s exploration. Of course policy in the neoliberal city cleaves toward that which best facilitates the circulation and accumulation of capital, tending to favour the spectacle of high-rise condo developments and gentrification over designations of land use for non-commercial, nano-scale farming. Through the realm of urban policy, then, local production of food is brought into conversation with the global forces of commercial real estate development and transnational circuits of capital. While Johnson only sparsely addresses this confrontation head on, the tension flows throughout the book. Her critique of neoliberal urbanism is rarely more incisive on this front than in her treatment of the contradictory posture urban policymakers tend to take in response to urban foraging, guerrilla gardening in neglected urban spaces, and back-yard chicken raising. These are the frontiers of urban food production, propelled in effect (though not necessarily in spirit) by self-reliant individuals. But if self-reliance really is what drives neoliberal policy, then why aren’t governments enabling urban food production? If neoliberal efficiency is predicated on deregulation and less government, then why are city governments so heavily regulating the front and back yards of taxpayers?This is not to suggest that Johnson pursues these lines of argument to their often reactionary ends. She comes nowhere close to defending the frighteningly de rigueur sentiment of contemporary conservatism. On the contrary, she positions the ongoing regulatory resistance to forms of extra-legal urban agriculture as a way to expose the disconnect between the rhetoric and actual practice of neoliberalism. Every time a permit to grow food on a neglected parcel of land is denied, private ownership, individualism, and speculative land investment are reified as the operatics of urban governance. Here Johnson steers us toward a corollary—that urban agriculture can indeed confront the many tendencies of neoliberal capitalism. Transforming the contemporary food system and fundamentally altering the ways our cities are organized is, as Johnson readily admits, hefty weight for a radish, tomato plant, or box of home-grown lettuce to carry. Yet her careful documentation of the dozens of projects, policy initiatives, organizations, and individuals tirelessly working at the intersection of social transformation and urban food growing, somehow stunts the audacity of the symbolic weight she bestows upon the spoils of urban agriculture. If Paul Robbins is right, and manicured lawns (along with their considerable political economy) have played a crucial role in inscribing the modern (sub)urban cultural subject, Johnson reveals the possibility of something altogether different. It’s not just a material transformation of the neglected, marginal, or simply ignored urban sites with the potential to act as micro-farms that Johnson is calling for. Instead she asks that we think about the kinds of social and cultural change farming cities would demand of us, and dares us to consider what kind of subjects we’d become if, those among us that are able to, got our hands a little dirty.Work CitedRobbins, Paul. Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. Print~MICHAEL CLASSENS is a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. His work deals mostly with the political ecology of food and agriculture, and figuring out why his Swiss chard keeps dying
The Imaginations of Humanitarian Assistance: A Machete to Counter the Crazy Forest of Varying Trajectories
Full text linkThe United Nations cited the 2010 monsoon floods in Pakistan as the largest humanitarian crisis in living memory. The environmental catastrophe effected twenty million people and highlighted the complicated relationship between nature and society. The lives of extremely vulnerable groups such as subsistence farmers and unskilled labourers were severely disrupted by this catastrophe, forcing national and international observers to confront the uneven distribution of harm based on social factors in the wake of environmental disaster. In this visual essay, I explore the slow raging violence of floodwaters, which I witnessed as a humanitarian worker, and narrate a point of departure from social interventions after environmental collapse. The accompanying counter narratives draw the viewer’s attention to the politics of representation. They reveal the dominant discourses of domination of the Third World subaltern as enacted by humanitarian agencies. By juxtaposing photos and text, I invite the viewer to engage in a generative encounter that takes note of the tensions between disrupted communities and systems of international assistance.....THE DE-POLITIZATION OF HUMANITARIAN AID PRACTIC
“The Poem is the World”: Re-Thinking Environmental Crisis Through William Carlos Williams’ Paterson; Return; & Leaving
Full text linkIn his 2002 book Greening the Lyre: Environmental Poetics and Ethics, David Gilcrest argues that our attitudes toward the natural environment will only change as a result of “environmental crisis” (22). Although this prediction is apt, as evidenced by the rise of resistance to environmentalism over the past two decades, it implies that such environmental crisis must physically devastate the Earth before action will be taken.1 Such a model of apocalyptic environmental activism, however, has proven to be ineffective. Many contemporary readers are turned off by this brand of environmentalism because it predicts disaster without the hope of preventing it. As such, I would like to think about how Gilcrest’s claim can be examined through the poetry of William Carlos Williams, one of the best-known American poets of the twentieth century. In this paper I will argue that ecopoetics in William Carlos Williams’ long poem Paterson allows crisis to occur in a text, creating both a material and potentially allegorical poetic experience for the historically situated contemporary reader. I will consider how language becomes material in the text and argue that the physicality of the words, which appear to be formally and structurally impacted by the natural disasters described in the text, may function as allegory for present-day environmental concerns. I will argue that Paterson’s power as both a material and allegorical text may resonate in ecopolitically meaningful ways.....Leaving. Elana Santana
Witnessing the Wasteland: Sight, Sound and Response in Edith Sitwell’s “Three Poems of the Atomic Age.”; Meeting in the Meadow; & The Twins
No full textThe place where the scientific meets the poetic underwent a transformation when atomic bombs were used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. Primed to images of apocalypse and destruction by the 1922 publication of T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land," poets found themselves in a position where life imitated art. Like their fellow citizens, poets were witness to a scientific revolution—one that began with Rutherford splitting the atom and ended with a more efficient and competent slaughter than anything previously experienced. Lehmann comments that “the war, in the end, found its voices in the work of many poets and novelists; but the peace, the victory, the defeat, the bewilderment in defeat and the heart-breaking disappointment in victory, the apocalyptic manifestation of atomic power—the poets seemed too long to have been too dazed to think of them” (30). His one exception is Edith Sitwell who confronted the atom bomb in her “Three Poems of the Atomic Age” (Collected Poems 368-378): for Sitwell built a narrative about the bombing—not so much a narrative of events, but of understanding, as she confronted the moral consequences of this new capacity for destruction. Sitwell’s “Three Poems” include “Dirge of the New Sunrise,” which describes the moment the atomic bomb was dropped upon Hiroshima; “The Canticle of the Rose,” which uses the symbolism of a rose growing out of the atomic wasteland as a metaphor for Jesus Christ; and “The Shadow of Cain,” which Sitwell describes as being “about the fission of the world into warring particles, destroying and self-destructive” (Collected Poems xlii).....THE TWINS. Elana Santana