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Article Excerpt
Population growth has massive environmental consequences. According to Paul Crutzen, we now live in an age in which the earth's destiny appears to be totally determined by human behavior. Although the sciences play a significant role in dealing with the immediate problems of unsustainable growth, I examine in this essay how the field of cultural studies addresses the problem of population expansion and its environmental consequences. I draw on the work of Michel Foucault, who asserts that the expansion of humanity is implicitly anchored in violence. In his concept of biopower, the institutional "optimization" of human life is underpinned by a twofold approach: "the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations." (1) De scribed as "a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize and multiply it," biopower significantly illustrates how progressive politics organizes life itself in order to expand, maintain, and disguise power. (2) Despite biopower's importance for environmental studies in its suggestion that population expansion is already ideologically inscribed as a form of "environmental preservation," environmental criticism pays little attention to biopower.
I attempt to address this theoretical gap in my examination of the Japanese American regionalist writer, Toshio Mori, which explores how his work responds to the expansion of the New Deal state in California. Mori's short stories offer a symbolic solution to the problem that biopower poses when the institutionalization of ethnic difference is used to "optimize" life and facilitate the state's expansion. With respect to the New Deal, cultural analysis has for the most part been interested in recovering leftist politics in what Michael Denning has termed the "cultural front." Although resistance to the New Deal becomes radicalized, little attention is given to the populations that were excluded from the New Deal's statist approach to social reform. (3) My analysis attempts to examine a cultural critique of the state that emerges from within a marginalized Japanese community that functioned more as vehicles of the welfare state, a minority population whose management facilitated the well-being of the larger population.
In focusing on an environmentalist literary critique of the New Deal, I hope to illustrate how the environment provides an invaluable yet overlooked material history of the power structures and racial politics that undergird progressivism. The term ecocriticism was coined by William Rueckert in 1978 to expand the realm of literary analysis to include the subject of ecology. Rueckert's interest in ecology stems from his desire to protect nature from human devastation, stating in his influential essay "Literature and Ecology" that "[t]he problem now, as most ecologists agree, is to find ways of keeping the human community from destroying the natural community, and with it the human community." (4) For Rueckert, ecocriticism's central aim is identical with the administrative aim of biopower--to preserve nature in order to preserve human life. Furthermore, ethnic identity is often seen to be at odds with discussions of ecological crisis. In the introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996), Cheryll Glotfelty asserts, "If your knowledge of the outside world were limited to what you could infer from the major publications of the literary profession, you would quickly discern that race, class, and gender were the hot topic of the late twentieth century, but you would never suspect that the earth's life support systems were under stress." (5) Ecocriticism tends to overlook how concern for the preservation and conservation of natural space has functioned as a biopolitical tool of the state in the twentieth century, specifically through the management of minority ethnic populations.
In California, for example, New Deal progressives applied an ecological rhetoric to the Japanese population itself. In America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (2005), Colleen Lye notes that Japanese farmers in California were doubly represented by governmental and civic organizations as threats to the natural environment and as embodiments of an environment in need of preservation. Progressive conservationists feared that Japanese farmers caused soil erosion through their capacity for "working miracles of reclamation," while the Japanese were also conflated with nature itself, being likened to a plant species subject to "uprooting, clearing, and replanting" in response to the so-called natural disaster of the internment camps. (6) In the rise of federal regulation of the environment and of human populations, raced and gendered identities occupy a vexed position--being associated with nature itself as objects of management, as well as with the subjective domination of nature. It is this capacity to represent the duality of nature within progressive ideology that makes the Japanese American essential to the expansion of the New Deal state. At the heart of this duality is a contradiction between the economic and the politicocultural conceptions of nature within liberal capitalism.
Cultural geographer Neil Smith defines this duality as the difference between the economic externalization of nature for use as a resource and the cultural universalization of nature as an ideal that is both internal and external to the individual. Smith argues that the external and the universal conceptions of nature are in fact joined in a dialectical relationship so that the universal conception enables the perpetual externalization of nature for profit. Japanese Americans inhabit this contradiction, embodying both the economic mastery of nature as productive property owners and the politicocultural conception of universal nature as a limitless internal state of ethnic difference.
The short stories in Mori's two collections, Yokohama, California (1949) and The Chauvinist and Other Stories (1979), are set in California, and many were written during the Depression, when the Japanese as a racialized population were subjected to state discipline in progressive efforts to manage a large migrant labor force and promote California's agricultural development. Mori's stories register the influence of an absent New Deal state in a community that lacks its disciplinary institutions intended to augment education and occupational profession.
Through the figure of the dilettante, or the failed artist, Mori reveals how the Japanese are incomplete subjects because they are forced to inhabit the contradiction between economic and politico-cultural functions of nature. He questions the freedoms that exist in the successful assimilation of Japanese immigrants into California's semirural region as what sociologists Edna Bonacich and John Modell term "middleman minorities," or a racialized class of individual capitalists. Mori's regionalism critiques the discourse of biopower by representing the economic and the politicocultural conceptions of nature as problematically unproductive both for capitalist expansion and nationalist consolidation in a period when land preservation and conservation occurred in tandem with nationalistic cultural depictions of rural America in order to promote the economic recovery program of the New Deal. Mori's stories illustrate how the commodification of agrarian land in California was facilitated by the positive identification of Japanese Americans as a petit bourgeois class that embodied the life-giving ideals of liberal democracy.
The arguments I present here about race and the environment therefore differ from the excellent prior work on environmental justice done by scholars such as Julie Sze, who argues that racialized minorities tend to suffer at a disproportionate level from the environmental impact of unsustainable development. Much more attention must be paid to the positive identification between the environment and ethnic-identity formation that facilitates the state's production of an illusion of sustainable growth. My analysis of Mori as a Nisei, or second-generation Japanese American, regionalist attempts to illuminate how the state used ethnic petit bourgeois capitalism and ethnic citizenship to enforce what I call ecological idealism for the purposes of its own survival.
Biopower and the Preservation of Race's Nature
Mori, as well as a number of other up-and-coming Nisei writers, frequently contributed to a nationally circulating Nisei magazine, Current Life, which was published in San Francisco by the magazine's editor, James Omura. In the April 1941 issue, Armenian American writer William Saroyan predicted that a great writer would one day emerge from the Japanese American literary world. "I look forward with eagerness to the emergence of an outstanding Japanese American writer," Saroyan wrote: "I believe this event cannot be avoided; that sooner or later one of you must write that story." (7) Having recently gained acclaim as a regional Californian author, Saroyan privileges the literary production of ethnic difference as a form of particularity through which the reading public could gain access to a universal natural region.
Saroyan calls upon the Nisei literary world to produce what he terms the "American fable," for
[t]he life of the Japanese in California is rich and full of American fables that need to be told to other Americans. The others cannot tell these fables because at their source these fables belong to those who lived them; they must be written by those who lived them in order to become a part of the whole American life. (8)
Embedded within this formal insistence upon the production of fables is what Neil Smith calls the "poetic" production of nature as a "universal" and timeless space. (9) California, for Saroyan, represents a mythical nature in which life might truly be "lived." Japanese Americans can therefore claim cultural currency by exploiting their access to this geographic region that contains the meaning of life itself, upon the condition that they emphasize the "specialness" of being Japanese. He insists that everything this Japanese American writer writes "will be as valid for me as for him; that, while his work will spring from his own inner life, it will be universal. That in ratio to the specialness of his writing will be its universality." (10) Through ethnic differentiation, the specialness of the Japanese, Saroyan establishes a homology between the perpetuation of life and ethnic assimilation into a naturalized region. Constructing a regional space of difference in literature, identified with a poetically universal space of nature, the great Japanese American writer would give America what it needs.
The development of Japanese American literature as an institutional location where a specific set of ideals are initialized is an example of how biopower functions through a politicocultural discourse of race and nature. The production of Japanese American literature actively creates ethnic difference, which must become visible to restore the "rich and full" national landscape, and only then is the group enabled to assimilate and "become a part of the whole American life." (11) I argue that biopower's institutionalization of the imperative for ethnic life...
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