Funds:
Ministry of Science and Innovation
AEI (Agencia Estatal de Investigación)
In exploring the relationship between literature and contemporary globalization, our earlier project (LYG) had several aims: first, to examine the theoretical premises underlying the transnational turn in American Studies; secondly, to engage in a revision the American ethnic paradigm, transformed by the increasing mobility of individuals and communities; our third research task focused on those discourses critical with the new global order, echoing the old and new “discontents” (Stiglitz) created by the neoliberal brand of globalization; our last research interest lay precisely in interrogating the (rather asymmetrical) reciprocity involved in the process of contemporary globalization.
The insights gained from this first research project not only made us conversant with transnational approaches, we also realized the need to expand the field of study in order to incorporate literary and cultural production emanating from the whole North American region rather than just the US, even if our primary focus continues to be texts using the English language. More crucially, in exploring the impact of globalization on our field of study, we discovered that many of our research interests and findings converged upon an apparently “residual” concept: WASTE.
The last decades of the 20th century witnessed a “shift from a culture defined by its production to a culture defined by its waste” (Deitering). While garbage and toxicity became pervasive, the “slow violence” (Nixon) of the environmental degradation mandated by the global capitalist paradigm of growth remained strangely slippery, difficult to grasp and reflect in artistic representations. This is the reason why, in the course of our research, we will analyze texts that try to overcome the “formidable imaginative difficulties” that Nixon talks about, in an attempt to neutralize those “distancing mechanisms” that keep slow violence from adopting an effective narrative form. However, instead of addressing only the degradation of the environment, this project also intends to focus on human communities that have become residual or waste(d).
In order to do so, we will resort to waste studies and, more specifically, to “Waste Theory”. The potential of this critical approach lies in the fact that it allows scholars to grapple with the (dire) consequences that our globalized economy of waste has for both human beings and the entire planet. “Waste Theory” is largely indebted to philosophical theorizations of modernity, globalization and community (Giorgio Agamben, Zygmunt Bauman, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Luc Nancy) and to ecocritical schools of environmental justice (Joni Adamson; Joan Martínez Alier; Rob Nixon), toxic discourse and waste studies (Lawrence Buell, Cynthia Deitering, Susan Morrison, Rachele Dini, Dana Phillips, Heather Sullivan, Molly Wallace).
In this line of research, our attention will be devoted to authors who revert the obfuscating mechanisms of complacent discourses and try to open readers’ eyes by hinting both at the close relationship between environmental and economic exploitation, and at our complicity in the present state of affairs. However, instead of resorting to agitprop or sentimental conventions to prey on our guilty conscience, these authors deploy less common representational strategies such as the allegorical mode. In such a context, the critical scalpel of Waste Theory, underscoring as it does the links between ecoimperialism and the commodification of human beings, effectively frames the degradation of human beings and the environment as the end-result of the current global paradigm.
This focus area aims to explore contemporary North American fiction with a double aim. On the one hand, novels which problematize the question of the (ir)relevance of ethnicity –specifically Jewishness, interpreted in a diasporic, secular way—in the contemporary environment of a dissolution of borders, incessant global travel and close contact with other American and European communities.
UDC
