ETYMOLOGY, ECOLOGY, ECOPOETICS

In time for Earth Day this blasted year of 2020: Tyrone Williams has composed a brilliant, filigreed unfurling of a concept he calls ecological racism (the transnational extension/expansion of environmental racism) in “Etymology, Ecology, and Ecopoetics,” for the Spring 2020 issue of Georgia Review, in which my book The Republic of Exit 43 is read alongside Brenda Iijima’s Early Linoleum and the special issue of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment edited by Angela Hume and Samia Rahimtoola on “queering of ecopoetics.” I am honored to be in this company of minds and rages against our dark present and future.

“Scappettone’s book is an over-the-top literary mash-up…. These strips of paper are not just metaphors for the unearthing of metals and minerals long buried under geological strata. They also correspond to the soundbytes, the snippets of information and disinformation, that pass by, over, and through our bodies every day of our digital lives…..Featuring a cast of characters from Greek, Roman, and Italian myth (Virgil, Orfeu, Sirens, and Io), Lewis Carroll (Alice), and a chorus of chemical compounds, industrial tools and machines and corporate CEOs, The Republic reads like a lunatic version of American history—that is, exactly like the consequences of American history: “Is it possible to mobilize the disgust provoked by encounter with what has been cast off, to transform a wasteland from an abject repository of undifferentiated filth into an archive?” ….In bringing together the gendered notion of household and farm management with technology—that “wire husbandry”—Scappettone reminds us that the queered pronoun they perfectly captures the non-binary post-humanist world. As the old binarisms of Enlightenment humanism (man/woman, nature/culture, West/East, etc.) flare up like dying embers, and populism, fundamentalism, and fascism retake the world stage, ecopoetics, the nexus of etymology and ecology, offers us glimpses into our singular dark future.”