Overview

In the early decades of the postwar period, the planetary metaphor of “spaceship Earth” was everywhere in the West. It exerted its power on sites as various as Caribbean research stations, the shipping lanes of the U.S.-occupied Pacific, Palestinian refugee camps, and the internal colonies of segregated nations. At its heart was a new ideology and infrastructure of managing, administering, and rationalizing nature through which Western powers sought to maintain their grip on a decolonizing planet. Poetry from Spaceship Earth retrieves a diverse array of postwar American poets—Robert Duncan, June Jordan, Joanne Kyger, Lorine Niedecker, and Charles Olson—who contested and cultivated alternatives to this emergent mode of environmentalism. By placing the major innovations of postwar poetry into conversation with environmental politics, Cold War science and technology studies, and postcolonial and Black studies, Samia Rahimtoola develops an original theoretical and historical account of the racial and colonial logics that underpin the supposedly neutral project of managing nature.  

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9781685970635

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Reviews

""Timely, well-researched, and thoughtful, Rahimtoola looks at the subtle, ambivalent, counter-cultural works of poets who found a deep sense of post-war affection for nature but refused, for various reasons detailed, the managerial vision of 'spaceship Earth' that arose and fused state-led ecological management with American business and capital interests.""--Joshua Schuster, Western University ""A vitally important piece of ecocritical scholarship and a significant contribution to studies of American poetics . . . Poetry from Spaceship Earth offers an important new decolonial critique of technocratic environmentalism, emerging both from postcolonial criticism and discourses of environmental justice and from the thinking of an array of poets whose work negotiates and imagines beyond technocratic modes of environmental management.""--Margaret Ronda, author, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End

“A vitally important piece of ecocritical scholarship and a significant contribution to studies of American poetics . . . Poetry from Spaceship Earth offers an important new decolonial critique of these modes of technocratic environmentalism, emerging both from postcolonial criticism and discourses of environmental justice and from the thinking of an array of poets whose work negotiates and imagines beyond technocratic modes of environmental management.”—Margaret Ronda, author, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End “Timely, well-researched, and thoughtful, Rahimtoola looks at the subtle, ambivalent, counter-cultural works of poets who found a deep sense of postwar affection for nature but refused, for various reasons detailed, the managerial vision of ‘spaceship Earth’ that arose and fused state-led ecological management with American business and capital interests.”—Joshua Schuster, Western University

Author Information

Samia Rahimtoola is assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College. She is author of the creative work Revelation Desert Flow, and her writing has appeared in Paideuma, Post45, and ISLE, among others. She lives in Brunswick, Maine.

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