October 12, 2015 - 14:30
Alison "setting the scene" in the London Room in Thomas
[Amaka on for next Tuesday; reminder to Akane to post description of
your selection, what difference the environment made in our discussion]
I. 11:25- 11:50: coursekeeping
* check in re: Friday's jointly-written paper-proposals
put it up as a collaborative post (with both your names)
ATTEND TO WEB-FOCUSED TITLING --AND NAMING YOURSELVES
(see /oneworld/changing-our-story-2015
cf. concrete topics --"the reason to be an all-girls school,"
with "possible topic," "paper proposal," etc...)
* going forward: expectation that you'll spend 1-2 hours/week on this project,
checking in with one another weekly, and aiming for a presentation
to our joined classes during the last week of the semester
* for Tuesday, keep reading All Over Creation, Parts IV-V (pp. 169-309)
* By 5 p.m. Mon, 10/26: eighth short posting, quoting three passages from
All Over Creation that interest you, and that speak to the relationship
between identity and environment
II. 11:50-12:10: for today, we asked you to
read the first 1/3 of Ruth Ozeki's novel (to p. 168):
go 'round and share initial reactions:
what was your reading experience like?
what engaged/enraged/amused/intrigued/puzzled you?
to discuss: "how to read a novel"--> how do you do that?
cf. our laborious, step-by-step analyses of
"Playing in Industrial Ruins" and "Ravens @ Play,"
looking for the thesis, identifying how the essays
were structured to support those claims, etc.
how do novels work? how were you taught to read novels?
Ozeki in an interview: "Agenda-driven
fiction is antithetical to inquiry.
Agenda-driven fiction has its mind already made up....
Writing is how I think, how I interrogate the world, and
the novel is my medium...It's a thought experiment....
The novel is not, and should not be, a Trojan horse....
However, I have tons of opinions...We ought to be terrified!...
I have a lot of remorse about the myriad ways that I am
contributing to the [environmental] problem. All my novels...
have been written from remorse...The good news...is that
I'll never run out of things to feel remorseful about. The
bad news...is that I am not willing or able to eradicate
all the many causes of my environmental remorse..."
III. 12:10-12:30: Look now @ one passage that
demonstrates the intersection of identity and environment
(as we are asking you to do for your posting):
does it lay out a problem? make an argument?
from Lloyd's newsletter, p. 67:
"there is an idea in circulation that...'aggressive' non-native plants are harmful, invasive, and
will displace 'native' species. How ironic to hear these theories profounded by people of European
ancestry in America!...Our plants are as immigrant as we are!...anti-exoticism is Anti-Life...I do not
intend to promote Third Reich eugenics in our family garden......[they] are being promoted by
Agribusiness and Chemical Corporations as another means of peddling their weed killers."
anticipating Yumi's conversation with her mother, p. 118:
"'What are these?' Momoko looked at the large, mutant squashes and shook her head.
'I don't know.' Then she started to giggle...She..pointed to Ocean and Phoenix....
'Like them. All mixed up'....'What did she say?' Cass asked....'She said squashes were promiscuous.'" ***
IV. 12:30-12:45: write a mid-semester evaluation of this course, to hand in:
what's working? what needs working on?
what's playing well? what needs playing with?
both in our class dynamics generally, and your own particular role in them?
----
*** additional notes, from a critic who wrote about Ozeki's insistent equation of mixed race and hybrid plants:
Melissa Poulsen. Hybrid Veggies and Mixed Kids: Ecocriticism and Race in Ruth Ozeki’s Pastoral Heartlands.
Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies 2 (2011) 22-29:
twenty-first century, literary and environmental studies must recognize and engage with the interdependence of spaces traditionally opposed: the natural and the human built, the country and the city, exurbia and the urban….more complex imagining of the environment….Written with and against the pastoral tradition, Ozeki’s novels merge country and city…use modified food to interrupt the possibility of a dichotomous country and city…. And attend to the deep-seated connections between the language of race and the language of biology… through the lens of …toxic discourse…Ozeki questions the silences in the pastoral imagery…
As Lawrence Buell points out…”what we loosely call ‘nature’ has often long since become ‘organic machine’” as the “physical environment is being increasingly refashioned by capital, technology, and geopolitics.” Such blending of nature and technology is key to the counterpastoral developed in All Over Creation…. heartland farm life is a complicated capitalist engagement…. the toxic reality of their seeming pastoral spaces are revealed…
All Over Creation highlights the presences of racial others and simultaneously exposes how they are written out of the pastoral…. the pastoral as an idyllic space only for those of a certain color…. the most radical and largely unfamiliar move of the text is its unification of toxic discourse and racialization through the question of bioethics, and an entanglement of plant genetic modification and human multiracial identity…. The parallel between biodiversity and cultural diversity emerges in arguments laid out through the Fuller’s seed company.… Momoko’s seeds…embody the migrations and drifts of people in the United States; her “heroic efforts to preserve the rich diversity” of plants is paralleled to the preservation of the cultural diversity brought through migration. Such dedication to diversity stands in contrast to the farmer of the pastoral heartland, the “large-scale potato farmer, a monoculturalist” made “nervous [by] all that diversity”…. Lloyd attempts to interrupt the imagined pastoral heartland through a questioning of the plant and racial nativism it projects…
Through the sexualized, fertile imagery of crossbred human-plants All Over Creation tracks the lives of multiracial characters and interracial relationships while developing a bioethical argument against genetically modified organisms…. An uncomfortable moral ambiguity begins to emerge as the imagery of plants and humans, and cultural and bio-diversity, merge….genetically-modified potatoes might be read as a form of hybridity….Momoko’s garden requires careful fertilization…to preserve the integrity of the various endangered plants….to preserve the diversity, Momoko has to avoid further diversity…. the uneasy ambiguity Ozeki produces through the simple but insistent equation of mixed race and hybrid plants serves as a reminder of the potential of such slippages…. setting her interracial families in the United States’ Midwest, she pushes readers towards new ways of conceptualizing the crucial but often disconnected meanings of emplacement….