“The waste of the empire”: Neocolonialism and environmental justice in Merlinda Bobis’s “The Long Siesta as a Language Primer”

ABSTRACT

This article interrogates the politics of “waste” in both the environmental and the socio-economic senses of the word, with a special attention to the outsourcing of toxicity and the “wastification” of disposable, residual bodies. Both toxic discourse, as explored by Lawrence Buell and Cynthia Deitering, and environmental justice, in particular Rob Nixon’s elucidation of the representational challenges posed by slow violence, contribute to a specific approach, Waste Theory, used here to analyse “The Long Siesta as a Language Primer”, a 1999 short story by Filipino/Australian writer Merlinda Bobis, in which she grapples with the dirty politics of waste. This narrative constitutes a neocolonial allegory particularly amenable to Waste Theory, in that it allows critics to tease out the ways in which toxic environments act in conjunction and collusion with the toxic configurations of power that transform human beings into literal or figurative waste.

KEYWORDS:

• Merlinda Bobis
• Waste Theory
• toxic discourse
• slow violence
• neocolonialism
• allegory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The 1990s witnessed both the birth of ecocriticism and a heightened awareness of the postnatural world exposed by the environmental crisis, as described by Bill McKibben ([1989] 2006). This is far from being a coincidence; as Dana Phillips (1999) argues, it was precisely the ecological crisis that triggered the emergence of environmental criticism.

2. Deitering specifies that it was “during the Reagan-Bush decade” that Americans started to realize their collusion in the creation of such “postindustrial ecosystems” of toxicity (Deitering [1992] 1996, 197; cf. Nixon 2011, 34–35).

3. It may seem far-fetched to think that such outsourcing measures were deliberate policies, but, in actual fact, the president of the World Bank did suggest such externalization of risks in a 1991 memo: “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable. [… S]houldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?” (quoted in Nixon 2011, 1–2).

4. Jameson’s defence of his use of the phrase “third world” (1986, 67) made more sense in a context where the First and Second worlds vaguely corresponded to the capitalist and communist blocs. Throughout this article, however, I prefer to use “global north” and “global south”.

5. A pitfall that Jameson is aware of when he notes that defending such a “radical difference” may be misused to foster orientalist-like constructs (1986, 77).

6. Jameson himself describes the conventional understanding of allegory as “an elaborate set of figures and personifications to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalences” (1986, 73).

7. In their discussion of the contemporary north–south divide, Rafael X. Reuveny and William R. Thompson (2007) predict “that the South will be hit harder by global warming problems than the North. The natural catastrophes encouraged by global warming (for instance, floods, storms, water shortages, excessive heat, desertification, rising sea levels) will do more damage in areas less prepared to adjust to repeated shocks of nature” (560). As the Hurricane Katrina disaster amply demonstrated, even within a rich country such as the US, poor communities often bear the brunt of the phenomena associated with climate change.

8. In “Can the Indigent Speak”, Korte (2011) takes up Gayatri Spivak’s famous quandary and adapts it to her exploration of the global impact of Swarup’s and Adiga’s novels, discussing whether these texts engage in “slum tourism”. Her use of this eloquent phrase was inspired by Evan Selinger and Kevin Outterson’s (2009) study of the ethics of slum tourism in Slumdog Millionaire (2009). Feidhlim Hanrahan (2015) uses a similar term, “poverty tour”, in her analysis of Slumdog Millionaire and The Solemn Lantern Maker.

9. The ecofeminist echoes of this “rape of the land” should not go unnoticed, since both the Filipino forest and the Filipino girl are (ab)used within an eco-imperialist framework.

Additional information

Funding

The publication of this article has been made possible by the generous funding that the research project “Literature and Globalization” (ref. FFI2015-66767-P, AEI/FEDER, UE) received from the Spanish Research Agency (Agencia Estatal de Investigación), Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.

Notes on contributors

Begoña Simal-González

Begoña Simal-González teaches at the University of A Coruña, where she coordinates the research group Cultures and Literatures of the United States. She has written extensively on contemporary literature in English, particularly on American authors and writers of the Asian diasporas. Her most recent research has focused on environmental and transnational studies.