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English
Edinburgh University Press
19 April 2023
Plastics, Environment, Culture and the Politics of Waste examines plastic as a distinct cultural, political, and environmental phenomenon. It outlines the intricate relationship with plastic that humanity has been building over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, drawing on examples from history, the arts, and literature, as well as examining the place of plastics in the current health, environmental, and energy crises. The aim of this book is to reveal the complex nature of plastics, from their rapid incorporation into our advancing ways of life, to the reenvisioning of plastics' role in human life and how, through abundant production, consumption, and disposal of plastics, humanity has initiated a toxic invasion of natural environments and human and nonhuman bodies. Bringing together various perspectives from the humanities, this edited collection contributes to the ongoing research on plastics and petrocultures and emphasizes the crucial significance of addressing the plastic crisis through culture.
Edited by:  
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 234mm,  Width: 156mm,  Spine: 22mm
Weight:   712g
ISBN:   9781399511735
ISBN 10:   1399511734
Pages:   352
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Foreword: Plastic is Plastic (Cymene Howe) Introduction: The Petroproduct: On Plastics, Capitalism, and Oil (Tatiana Konrad)Part 1: Plastic Lives 1. Plastics, What Are They Good for? (Louise Dennis) 2. How Hula Hoops Changed Hygiene: From Damp Cloth Utopianism to Chemical Cleaning (Angela Cope) 3. The Anti-Plastic City: Local Governments, Plastic Waste, and the Undoing of the Weak Recycling Waste Regime in the United States (Lily Baum Pollans) Part 2: Plastic Proliferation 4. From Plasticity to the Aisthesis of Queer Toxicity (Amanda Boetzkes and Dana Feldman) 5. Microplastics in Arctic Sea Ice: A Petromodern Archive Fever (Chantelle Mitchell and Jaxon Waterhouse) 6. Jugoplastika: Plastics and Postsocialist Realism (Andrija Filipović) 7. Failed Infrastructures, My Little Ponies, and Wadden Plastics: The Eco-Intimacies of the MSC Zoe Container Disaster (Renée Hoogland) Part 3: Plastics in Art 8. The Pioneers of Plasticraft: When Artists Found Plastics in the United States (Danielle O’Steen) 9. Plastic Intimacy: Chinese Art Making as Recycling Practice (Victoria Oana Lupascu) 10. Plastic Poetics: Challenging the Epistemologies of Plastic Waste in the Artwork of Maria Roelofsen (Nathan Beck and Jeff Diamanti) 11. The Performance of Plasticity: Method Acting, Prosthetics, and the Virtuosity of Embodied Transformation (David LaRocca) Part 4: Plastics in Literature 12. Polymeric Thinking: Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography (Lynn Keller) 13. Plastic City: Temporality, Materiality, and Waste in Vanessa Berry’s Mirror Sydney (Emily Potter and Kirsten Seale) 14. Better Learning through Plastic?: The Moby-Duck Saga and Pedagogy (Donna A. Gessell) Part 5: Plastics and the Future 15. Disposable: The Dirty Word in Medical Plastics (Patrick D. Murphy) 16. Eco-Fascism and Alienation: Plastics in a Post-COVID World (Sasha Adkins and Brittany Y. Davis) 17. Plastic in the Time of Impasse (Mark Simpson) Contributors

Tatiana Konrad is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, Austria, as well as the Principal Investigator of the “Air and Environmental Health in the (Post-)COVID-19 World” project and the editor of the “Environment, Health, and Well-being” book series at Michigan State University Press. She is the author of Docu-Fictions of War: U.S. Interventionism in Film and Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), the editor of Cold War II: Hollywood’s Renewed Obsession with Russia (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) and Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change: Accelerating Ride to Global Crisis (West Virginia University Press, 2020), and a co-editor of Cultures of War in Graphic Novels: Violence, Trauma, and Memory (Rutgers University Press, 2018).

Reviews for Plastics, Environment, Culture and the Politics of Waste

A collection as theoretically and conceptually powerful and colourful as its namesake can often be. But unlike the real thing, this plastic isn’t a threat to the environment. It’s an example of the intellectual and political work which desperately needs to be done if we are to stave off an environmental futures even grimmer than our eco-present. Required reading for anyone and everyone interested in environmental studies. -- Imre Szeman, Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability


  • Joint winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023 (UK)

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