Pollution
Jill Gatlin
New England Conservatory of Music
Jill Gatlin teaches literature and environmental studies courses at New England Conservatory. She is completing a manuscript titled Reading Toxicity: Hierarchical Hazard, Audience Disturbance, and Narrative Form in American Literature. Recently published articles include “Toxic Sublimity and the Crisis of Human Perception: Rethinking Aesthetic, Documentary, and Political Appeals in Contemporary Wasteland Photography” (ISLE), “Disturbing Aesthetics: Industrial Pollution, Moral Discourse, and Narrative Form in Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Life in the Iron Mills’” (Nineteenth-Century Literature), and “‘Los campos extraños de esta ciudad’/‘The strange fields of this city’: Urban Bioregionalist Identity and Environmental Justice in Lorna Dee Cervantes’s ‘Freeway 280’” (The Bioregional Imagination).
Abstract
This paper proposes the keyword pollution as central to understanding C19 EH and its popular, activist, literary, and scholarly relevance to C21 EH and climate concerns. Literary, professional, and popular texts evidence that... [ view full abstract ]
This paper proposes the keyword pollution as central to understanding C19 EH and its popular, activist, literary, and scholarly relevance to C21 EH and climate concerns. Literary, professional, and popular texts evidence that as early as the 1840s, substances deemed moral and biological contaminants included not only organic matter, as U.S. historians have noted, but also coal smoke. Correspondingly, industrial workers and residents disproportionately exposed to smoke and other toxic pollutants were deemed urban or national contaminants, in need of erasure or reform. C19 coal smoke signified not only hierarchical hazard and moral decay but also nationalist industrial grandeur and economic opportunity, discourses that infuse C21 conversations about fossil fuel consumption, pollution, and global climate change. While activists declare uneven climate change consequences a moral issue, economically privileged carbon consumers continue to characterize communities bearing the burdens of toxicity and climate change as polluted and polluting. Outlining C19 pollution discourse and its C21 iterations, this paper focuses on intersections of race, class, and pollution; frameworks of hazard, harm, and visibility; and temporal narratives of progress and decay that shape discussions of pollution and climate change resilience or adaptation. Providing a literary historical perspective on pollution, this paper also queries EH methods and archives: how has American Studies’ influence on U.S. EH privileged linear temporal narratives and visual epistemologies? How has EH neglected non-realist genres? How has the concept of “movements”—literary, activist (settlement work, environmental justice), and scholarly (“turns”)—enabled, expanded, or limited the scope of EH?
Authors
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Jill Gatlin
(New England Conservatory of Music)
Topic Area
C19 Environmental Humanities
Session
S2 » Seminar 2: C19 Environmental Humanities (10:15 - Thursday, 22nd March, Boardroom East)
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