Deadline: December 15, 2022
Contact: Ichigo Mina Kaneko
Email: ikaneko@usc.edu

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

Contamination often refers to the risks and dangers of pollution. From oil spills to leaks at nuclear power plants to the release of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere, the modern industrial era has created numerous crises of safety for humans and the planet. In this sense, contamination is an urgent issue demanding our attention in the consideration of environmental futures. At the same time, the very idea of contamination reveals modern values rooted in the binary of the pure and the impure—discourses that have justified colonial and racial subjugation as well as the instrumentalization of nature. Ideas of contamination by radiation, by way of another example, have spurred both real health concerns as well as unfounded discrimination toward radiation-affected survivors and their lands. And yet, discourses of sanitation are prominent in our environmental thinking, from clean energy to pollution.

In recent years, scholars have critically investigated the concept of contamination and its implication of values. Masami Yuki, for example, has written about the imbrication of contamination with the Japanese government’s nationalistic promotions of nutrition in in the 1950s and the modern values around health imposed onto narratives about the Chisso oil spill in Minamata Bay. With matsutake, Anna Tsing rethinks contamination as a means for transformation through encounter, an opening for collaborative survival. Following these lines of thought, this panel asks: what are the stakes of thinking with contamination? How might literature, art, film, and media redefine, image, or narrate contamination differently to build sustainable futures? How do our encounters with the material world reshape how we think and talk about purity and impurity, the clean and the unclean, the remedial and the poisonous? Topics may include, but are not limited to: clean energy futures, racial discourses of contamination, inter-species encounters, imaging plants and fungi, genres of speculation.

Please submit a 300-word abstract and 100-word bio to Ichigo Mina Kaneko at ikaneko@usc.edu by December 15, 2022.

Posted on October 11, 2022