Narratives of Disposability: Race and Ecology in Contemporary Media

Abstract

Whether we are concerned with storing radioactive waste, protecting refugee populations around the globe, or mitigating Rust Belt underemployment, our current problems are almost invariably framed around the idea of “disposability.” My dissertation brings together critical race and ecocritical theories to ask whether this proliferating discourse reflects a new form either of ethical crisis or of narrating ethical crisis or of both, and then considers the consequences of such a framework. By putting these often-antagonistic fields in relation, moreover, I show how logics of disposability have become foundational to our very methods of critique. Following the exponential spread of this term in the postwar period, many of our foremost theorists are now making historical claims about our age of disposability. Most of those who use the term explicitly, such as Henry Giroux, Rob Nixon, Wendy Brown, Lisa Cacho, and Zygmunt Bauman, conceive it as an effect of globalization and neoliberalism. However, Giorgio Agamben theorizes “bare life” as our modern political nomos since the Nazi death camps, while Achille Mbembe observes the rise of “necropolitics” in certain post-colonial contexts. Still others, like Orlando Patterson, Paul Gilroy, Saidiya Hartman, and Alexander Weheliye, trace social death at least to transatlantic slavery. While they offer different origin stories, all agree that we currently live in an age of disposability. Conversely, my formalist reading of narrative as (what might be called the direct “outside,” “underside,” or “residue”) disposability leads me to conceive both as transhistorical phenomena, even if the latter manifests in ways that are particularly pernicious today. Moreover, just as this term names our foremost ethico-political crises, the ambiguous agency implicit to notions of disposability points to our contemporary crisis in defining the "Ethical" itself. That is, if disposability imputes a sense of material agency— that objects have a “disposition”— the concept also conjures images of dead and useless matter— that objects are “at our disposal.” Without clear sites of responsibility or injury, normative certainty collapses. Are we, then, witnessing a new ethical problem or rather encountering a new problem with defining the Ethical? This ambiguous agency also haunts key debates in ecocritical and critical race theory. For example, the normative thrust behind most ecocriticism focuses on our problematic consumption and disposal practices. Yet, many also worry that traditional environmentalism makes the same assumptions about value and agency these practices reproduce. After all, this Human/Nature dichotomy has been responsible for our ecological crises in the first place. Given the intransigence of objects and our own dependences on them, linear narratives about environmental degradation appear to be overly anthropocentric. So too, much critical race theory unveils how racial logics render certain populations more disposable. However, theorists in Black Studies have grappled with the paradoxes of racial disposability. That is, if populations are marked for disposal then they are simultaneously created as a marked population— a mark which opens up radical potential and demands celebration. Disposability is thus not only about devaluation, but also the production of meaning. And yet, despite these generalizations about the ambivalent binary structure of disposability, each of my chapters distinguishes a different way of narrating this phenomenon. Indeed, I am centrally concerned with the homogenizing effects of “disposability” as it has been used as a catch-all phrase for ethico-political crisis. I thus explore how narrative carries a whole arsenal of forms and functions— from differential inclusions to outright exclusions— which bring about disposability in various ways. Tracing the nature of these structural differences and how they manifest within specific historical contexts, I offer a way to understand the staggering range of disposability crises that trouble us today. My objects of study all belong to pop/pulp cultural genres— science fiction, romance, magical realism, Southern gothic, DIY arthouse, and detective series— that span an array of media forms. I describe my methodology as dumpster-diving— an adventure into archives of the forgotten and unloved, a process of collecting and comparing disparate objects. This approach attempts to sidestep dichotomies between “deep” and “surface” readings, or “paranoid” and “reparative” readings. Instead, I practice a hermeneutic of attunement and I attempt to describe the stories these objects tell for themselves.