Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 “The Waste of the Empire” : Neocolonialism and Environmental Justice in Merlinda Bobis’s “The Long Siesta as a Language Primer”
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'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.'

 (Publication abstract)

 

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Journal of Postcolonial Writing Special Focus : Eco-fictions : Emergent Discourses and Nature and the Environment in Postcolonial Literature vol. 55 no. 2 2019 16840897 2019 periodical issue

    'Instead of looking at the past by viewing the remains of ancient settlements or by inspecting inscriptions left in caves by early humans, future generations will gather information about current times by the imprint that neo-liberal capitalism is leaving on everything. Plastic bottles, chewing gum, electronic components and even medical waste will provide them with a portrait of the Anthropocene, the age shaped by the climate changes we have caused and now inhabit.' (María Alonso Alonso & María Jesús Cabarcos Traseira, Editorial introduction)

    2019
    pg. 209-222
Last amended 20 Jun 2019 13:11:39
209-222 “The Waste of the Empire” : Neocolonialism and Environmental Justice in Merlinda Bobis’s “The Long Siesta as a Language Primer”small AustLit logo Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X