Plastics, Environment, Culture, and the Politics of Waste

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).

• 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

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.