Plastics, Environment, Culture, and the Politics of Waste

## The first comprehensive study of plastics, from the moment they were invented to the present day * Expands the existing research on the materiality of plastic, considering it as both a disposable and durable product * An essential read in times of environmental and health crises, when humanity must find new ways of existing and transform, among other things, our culture * Packed with insight from 24 contributors across 17 chapters Plastics, Environment, Culture and the Politics of Waste examines plastic as a distinct cultural, political, and environmental phenomenon. It outlines the intricate relationship with plastic that humanity has been building over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, drawing on examples from history, the arts, and literature, as well as examining the place of plastics in the current health, environmental, and energy crises. The aim of this book is to reveal the complex nature of plastics, from their rapid incorporation into our advancing ways of life, to the reenvisioning of plastics’ role in human life and how, through abundant production, consumption, and disposal of plastics, humanity has initiated a toxic invasion of natural environments and human and nonhuman bodies. Bringing together various perspectives from the humanities, this edited collection contributes to the ongoing research on plastics and petrocultures and emphasizes the crucial significance of addressing the plastic crisis through culture. Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Foreword Introduction: The Petroproduct: On Plastics, Capitalism, and Oil Part I Plastic Lives 1 Plastics: What Are They Good For? 2 How Hula Hoops Changed Hygiene: From Damp-Cloth Utopianism to Chemical Cleaning 3 The Anti-Plastic City: Local Governments, Plastic Waste, and the Undoing of the Weak Recycling Waste Regime in the United States Part II Plastic Proliferation 4 From Plasticity to the Aesthesis of Queer Toxicity 5 Microplastics in Arctic Sea Ice: A Petromodern Archive Fever 6 Jugoplastika: Plastics and Postsocialist Realism 7 Failed Infrastructures, My Little Ponies, and Wadden Plastics: The Eco-Intimacies of the MSC Zoe Container Disaster Part III Plastics in Art 8 The Pioneers of Plasticraft: When Artists Found Plastics in the United States 9 Plastic Intimacy: Chinese Art Making as Recycling Practice 10 Plastic Poetics: Challenging the Epistemologies of Plastic Waste in the Artwork of Maria Roelofsen 11 The Performance of Plasticity: Method Acting, Prosthetics, and the Virtuosity of Embodied Transformation Part IV Plastics in Literature 12 Polymeric Thinking: Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography 13 Plastic City: Temporality, Materiality, and Waste in Vanessa Berry’s Mirror Sydney 14 Better Learning through Plastic?: The Moby-Duck Saga and Pedagogy Part V Plastics and the Future 15 Disposable: The Dirty Word in Medical Plastics 16 Eco-Fascism and Alienation: Plastics in a Post-COVID World 17 Plastic in the Time of Impasse Index