In the early decades of the postwar period, the planetary metaphor of 鈥渟paceship Earth鈥 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鈥擱obert Duncan, June Jordan, Joanne Kyger, Lorine Niedecker, and Charles Olson鈥攚ho 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.
鈥淎 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.鈥濃擬argaret Ronda, author, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature鈥檚 End
鈥淭imely, 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 鈥榮paceship Earth鈥 that arose and fused state-led ecological management with American business and capital interests.鈥濃擩oshua Schuster, Western University
