https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0817-6898
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ABSTRACT
This essay considers the changing relationship between asbestos and populism, as both terms travel across different semantic contexts. It argues that this dynamic relationship can help to outline a populist ecology, through which resource actors such as asbestos play a more significant role than either populist leaders or their people anticipate. Drawing on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as a site for examining the implications of this asbestos-inflected populist ecology, the essay suggests new ways of linking the recent populism of Donald Trump to an older, more articulate populism, exemplified by Pierre Trudeau.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Stephenson, “Arsebestos,” 7.
2 See, for instance, “the wave of asbestos litigation” in Grisham, The Runaway Jury, 16; “the asbestos wave” in Grisham, The Summons, 385; the “crazy class actions” on asbestos in Grisham, The Appeal, 118; and the “sharks” who “bankrupted … the entire American asbestos industry” in Grisham, The King of Torts, 320.
3 Moffitt, Populism, 5.
4 Ibid., 7.
5 For a discussion of the linguistic complexity of this move, see James Underhill’s Creating Worldviews, especially his discussion of “the people” in the context of Czechoslovak communist rhetoric (100–6).
6 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 262.
7 See Jeb Barnes, Dust-up.
8 Ibid., 7.
9 Ibid., 93.
10 Ibid., 107.
11 Laclau, “Populism,” 38.
12 Hayles, “Illusion,” 686.
13 Ibid., 696.
14 u/deleted, “[Infinite Jest] Anyone else noticing parallels between Trump and President John Gentle?” Reddit, February 28, 2016. https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/484ib0/infinite_jest_anyone_else_noticing_parallels/. See also cducey2013, “Trump the Political Jester, David Foster Wallace the Cultural Prophet,” Writing Folly Blog, February 18, 2017. https://writingfolly.wordpress.com/2017/02/18/trump-the-political-jester-david-foster-wallace-the-cultural-prophet/.
15 For an engaging account of Wallace’s interest in things, see Jansen, “Porousness,” 56.
16 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 1058.
17 Ibid., 1059.
18 Boggio, Compensating, 47.
19 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 722.
20 Van Horssen, Asbestos, 171.
21 Ibid., 171.
22 Trudeau, Strike, 329.
23 Ibid., 349.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 67.
26 Ibid., 66.
27 Ibid., 65.
28 Ibid., 67.
29 Van Horssen, Asbestos, 170.
30 Ibid., 171.
31 Trump and Bohner, Comeback, 83-4.
32 MSNBC, “Trump’s Longtime Love Affair.”
33 (@realDonaldTrump), “.@dubephnx If we didn’t remove incredibly powerful fire retardant asbestos & replace it with junk that doesn’t work, the World Trade Center would never have burned down.” October 17, 2012, 12:47 pm.
34 Rosenblum and Muirhead, A Lot of People, 164.
35 Raab, “After 15 Years,” 36.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Arthur Rose
Arthur Rose is a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in English at the University of Bristol in the UK. He is the author of Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee (Bloomsbury, 2017), and the co-editor of Theories of History (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Reading Breath in Literature (Palgrave, 2019). He is currently working on a cultural history of asbestos.