Book Review Symposium

Transcription

1 Book Review Symposium Shiloh R. Krupar, Hot Spotter s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ISBN: (cloth); ISBN: (paper) Hot Spotter s Report is a groundbreaking and completely original work. Not since Valerie Kuletz s (1998) The Tainted Desert has a scholar directly handled the politics of nuclear contamination and the cultural politics place in the US West in such an innovative fashion. The book seeks to investigate the biopolitics of green war the ways that war is produced and imagined within biopolitical methods of governing (p.7). The book s keywords spectacle/counterspectacle, waste/nature and human/waste are investigated through particular case studies, and with interdisciplinary lenses. The case studies are: the transformation of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado into the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, a cleanup and management of a former plutonium factory, compensation of nuclear workers for their illnesses related to their labor conditions, and an assessment of these nuclear issues in popular culture. The book is rigorously researched, and comes from a standpoint of sustained critique of military nuclear culture. Within my own fields of American Studies and environmental humanities, Krupar s work relies on Donna Haraway s (1997) critique of nature/purity discourse, and takes it in new and exciting directions. The idea that nature = wilderness, health, virtue and purity has been fully analyzed by environmental historians such as William Cronon (1995) who tied the expansion of the US National Park system 1

2 to distinctly American ideologies (Indian Removal, eugenics, etc.). The ongoing legacy of the purity/pollution dyad haunts contemporary environmental politics, as critiqued by Sarah Jaquette Ray (2013) in The Ecological Other. In these cultural, ideological and historical contexts, Krupar takes a clear theoretical stance. In her view, nature is not pure, and the seeming veneer of wilderness/transformation (especially in the Rocky Mountain case) is ripe for complicated analysis. That said, an acknowledgement of non-pure nature does not signal acceptance for the status quo. Krupar s case studies on the contested clean up of the plutonium factory and the battles for compensation by nuclear workers can also be productively tied to Stacy Alaimo s (2010) notion of feminist transcorporeality, as well as related to the contested illness literatures from science and technology studies and the sociology of science. Alaimo describes transcorporeality as the movement across human bodies and nonhuman nature profoundly alters our sense of human subjectivity, environmental ethics, and the individual s relation to scientific knowledge. Krupar has much to offer this analysis, in her description of what she calls transnatural ethics. First, by putting these terms, transnatural and ethics, together, she is insisting that transnatural is a productive category that can indeed have ethics attached, as opposed to a stance that sees all intermingling of categories as either unalloyed good, or inevitable. She writes: Transnatural ethics does not endorse disease, pollution or damage; it seeks to engage with the impurification in existence, grounding theoretical and aesthetic play in critical reflections on/of embodied experiences and responses, in an effort to amplify the coalitional possibilities of a wide variety of subjects and biological positions (p.231). The case studies are extremely important to study on their own, but what makes Krupar s work truly innovative is her methodology. She uses creative nonfiction, and 2

3 fictional satire, including writing in bureaucratic language, to focus on how toxicity is managed, represented and contested, and how violence gets watered down through such language and mechanisms. These methods (creative nonfiction and fictional satire) have not been seen in serious academic scholarship in environmental studies and the environmental justice literature, for obvious reasons. Military, government and industry interests repeatedly argue that communities struggles are imagined, exaggerated, and unscientific. But for Krupar, these choices make sense, in that she is critiquing the language of bureaucracy that does damage through linguistic obfuscation. That Krupar engages these methods is, on the one hand, a great risk, but one that yields potential reward. Pushing the boundaries of form and representation make sense given the content of the actual topics of the case studies themselves, and the politics of radioactivity more generally where damage is both prevalent and unseen. Her pièce de résistance is her fourth chapter, which examines the content of the previous chapters through popular culture, through drag queen/performance artist Nuclia Waste and James Acords nuclear waste sculpture. In this chapter, she explains the kind of theoretical and cultural work that these popular culture representations do. She calls them counterspectacles, and suggests that they use military remains and other residuals to contest the organization of life in/through war production, to refute the current administration of land or waste, and refuse to be governed as such (p.220). Krupar acknowledges that counterspectacles are risky endeavors, but suggests that despite these risks they are indeed essential. Counterspectacles are tactical and ethical, and indispensable to politics; they insist on aesthetics as a form of ethics meaning, ethics and aesthetics are not opposites and explore what kinds of aesthetics practices encourage a more exuberant politics (p.221). 3

4 This stance is not without precedent. Others such as filmmaker Judith Helfand have used humor to address serious pollution issues see her 2002 documentary Blue Vinyl on Polyvinyl Chloride, which she subtitles A Toxic Comedy. Krupar articulates the necessity of aesthetics and counterspectacle, a position that is relatively marginal. Her advocating this position is theoretically and politically engaged. What is clear now, is that the fear-based language of most environmental activism, or the scientific basis of environmental health research, is not producing any different outcome. In other words, the dominant ways in which nuclear issues and environmental contamination have been researched in policy and academic terms does not change the material conditions in which military pollution remains both hegemonic and invisible. What Krupar is suggesting (and modeling) is what a different grounding in politics and aesthetics might look like. Many will recoil, even if they share her ultimate political stance. She challenges the fundamental terrain through which certain fields approach these topics, in ways that are deeply uncomfortable but perhaps urgently needed. In a post-9/11 era in which permanent war waged by the US has become the norm, we need more and better accounts of what green war looks like. These new discourses of green war are intimately tied to the past half-century of Cold War nuclear militarism. Krupar s work fills important gaps in the existing literature, and creates entirely new modes of inquiry that are essential in these difficult political-geographiccultural times. References Alaimo S (2010) Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. 4

5 Bloomington: Indiana University Press Cronon W (1995) The trouble with wilderness, or, Getting back to the wrong nature. In W Cronon (ed) Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (pp69-90). New York: W.W. Norton Haraway D (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan _Meets_OncoMouse : Feminism and Technoscience. New York Routledge Kuletz V (1998) The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West. New York: Routledge Ray S J (2013) The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press Julie Sze American Studies Program University of California, Davis jsze@ucdavis.edu 5