“Junk You Can't Abandon”: Hoarding and Waste in Andrew Lam and Karen Tei Yamashita
Abstract
In the last decades a concern with waste has started to “surface” not just in the economic and social sciences, but also in the humanities, where it has lately clustered around Waste Studies and Waste Theory. This critical approach allows us to grapple with the consequences of our globalized economy of waste for both the planet and human beings. Although Waste Theory can be applied to virtually any literary tradition, I would argue that Asian American literature, which has been read along the lines of the waste/no-waste dialectics since Sau-ling Wong developed her Necessity/Extravagance thesis in 1993, proves particularly amenable to this methodology. In order to illustrate the multiple ways in which Waste Theory can productively interbreed with Wong’s dichotomy, I will explore the dynamics of hoarding and waste in Andrew Lam’s Perfume Dreams and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Sansei and Sensibility.
Downloads
References
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Anderson, S. M. (2021). Race, Class, Gender Remixed: Reimagining Pride and Prejudice in Communities of Colour. In C. A. Wilson & M. H. Frawley (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen (pp. 481–489). Routledge.
Bauman, Z. (2004). Wasted Lives. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Blumberg-Kason, S. (2020, May 30). Review of Sansei and Sensibility (2020) by Karen Tei Yamashita. Asian Review of Books, Retrieved 15 September, 2021 from https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/sansei-and-sensibility-by-karen-tei-yamashita/.
Boym, S. (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books: New York.
Buell, L. (1998). Toxic Discourse. Critical Inquiry, 24(3), 639–665.
Culler, J. (1985). Junk and Rubbish: A Semiotic Approach. Diacritics, 15(3), 2–12.
Deitering, C. (1996). The Postnatural Novel: Toxic Consciousness in Fiction of the 1980s. In C. Glotfelty & Fromm (Eds.), The Ecocriticism Reader (pp. 196–203). Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Dini, R. (2016). Consumerism, Waste and Re-use in Twentieth-Century Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Discard Studies. Retrieved 19 July, 2021 from https://discardstudies.com/2017/03/02/anintroduction-to-hoarding
Djanikian, A. (2020, September 2). Homage as Provocation: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Sansei and Sensibility. The Rumpus. Retrieved 18 November, 2021 from https://therumpus.net/2020/09/sansei-and-sensibility-by-karen-tei-yamashita/.
Italie, H. (2021, September 10). Karen Tei Yamashita to receive honorary National Book Award. Associated Press News. Retrieved 18 November, 2021 from https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-arts-and-entertainment-philanthropy-plays-fiction9a8bf667aa32d72dcb34d12eed6e9508
Ladino, J. K. (2012). Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Lam, A. (2005). Perfume Dreams. Berkeley: Heyday.
Lepselter, S. (2011). The disorder of things: Hoarding narratives in popular media. Anthropological Quarterly, 84(4), 919–947.
Morrison, S. S. (2015). The Literature of Waste. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Phillips, D. & Sullivan, H. (2012). Material Ecocriticism. ISLE, 19(3): 445–447.
Simal-González, B. (2019). ‘The waste of the empire’: Neocolonialism and environmental justice in Merlinda Bobis’s "The Long Siesta as a Language Primer". Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 55, 1–14.
Staes, T. (2021). Seriously, Jane. American Book Review, 42(4): 4–5. Retrieved 20 September, 2021 from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/797481.
Strasser, S. (1999). Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Holt.
Thompson, M. (1979, 2017). Rubbish Theory; The Creation and Destruction of Value. London: Pluto Press.
Wallace, M. (2016). Risk Criticism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Westenfeld, A. (2020). Karen Tei Yamashita Wants to Know What Happened to the Servants in Jane Austen's Novels. [interview]. Esquire 2020, Retrieved 20 September, 2021 from https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a32711261/karen-tei-yamashita-sansei-andsensibility-jane-austen-interview/.
Wong, S. C. (1993). Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Yamashita, K. T. (2020). Sansei and Sensibility. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press.
Yamashita, K. T. (2021). Sansei and Sensibility Lecture. (Presentation given March 27, 2021, to the Jane Austen Society of North America). Retrieved 2 November, 2021 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpGz_Q50lec
You, K. (2020). Review of Sansei and Sensibility (2020) by Karen Tei Yamashita. The Los Angeles Review, Retrieved 19 July, 2021 from https://losangelesreview.org/review-sansei-sensibilitykaren-tei-yamashita/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The works published in this journal are subject to the following terms:
1. The Publications Services at the University of Murcia (the publisher) retains the property rights (copyright) of published works, and encourages and enables the reuse of the same under the license specified in item 2.
2. The works are published in the electronic edition of the magazine under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike 4.0.
3.Conditions of self-archiving. Authors are encouraged to disseminate pre-print (draft papers prior to being assessed) and/or post-print versions (those reviewed and accepted for publication) of their papers before publication, because it encourages distribution earlier and thus leads to a possible increase in citations and circulation among the academic community.
RoMEO color: green
