10th SAAS CONFERENCE

“The Backyard of the U.S. Mansion: Critical readings of poverty and wealth in the United States”

Alcalá de Henares (Madrid).  April 14-16, 2011

 

5) LULUs: Not in the US backyard

Panel Chair: Carmen Flys Junquera
Institution: Franklin Institute, Universidad de Alcalá
E-mail: carmen.flys@uah.es; imelda.martin@unileon.es

Rachel Carson, with the publication of Silent Spring in 1964, started the flight of the American middle class to the suburbs in an attempt to escape the effects of health hazards due to contamination. The American public became conscious of the risk involved in living in certain areas, an awareness augmented significantly by the Love Canal scandal in 1978. Since the 1980s, the term NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) has been used to describe local opposition to the development of an area with either infrastructures such as railways, highways, mobile phone masts and industrial parks or LULUs (Locally Undesirable Lands Uses) such as prisons, halfway houses, power plants, incinerators, landfills and waste sites. In 1982, the publication of “Toxic Wastes and Race” made it clear that racial and ethnic minorities were particularly affected by the location of LULUs in their “backyards” and a new wave of racial nimbyism arose in an effort to protect their neighborhoods. With the accelerated pace of the globalizing process and the signing of the NAFTA agreement in 1994 and the subsequent CAFTA agreements in the last decade, the US has displaced many of its LULUs to Mexico, Central and South America as well as to other underdeveloped countries in Asia. Thus the undesirable US backyards are now sited in other continents where American eyes are not offended by their consequences.

Environmental justice ecocriticism, particularly since the publication of The Environmental Justice Reader in 2002, has become a strong force, working together with local activist groups, in tracing and denouncing the location and effects of these multiple LULUs, from lower class to racial neighborhoods in the US, to the border and other current sites abroad. Many American writers have portrayed these issues in their works in an effort to not only make American readers “see” the effects, although they might take place thousands of miles away, but also to realize that eventually, the consequences of exporting undesirable land uses will come home and once again contaminate the backyard of their mansions. This panel welcomes presentations of a variety of literary, film or cultural LULUs that the US is hiding and exporting either to marginal areas or across the border and how writers perceive the effects for the privileged owners of the “mansion”.

Suggested topics could include, but are not limited to, the analyses of literary or cultural  (film, art, music) texts that:

- portray the globalizing process and its multiple ramifications, including its backlash in the US.

- illustrate how the dislocation of US LULUs across the borders have affected the local peoples.

- present the globalizing process as accelerating climate change and increased migrations.

- depict how the globalizing process is widening the gap between rich and poor, north and south.

- consider how environmental issues are intimately linked to issues of poverty, migrations and
  injustice.

 

 

10th INTERNATIONAL SAAS CONFERENCE
Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, 14-16 April 2011

THE BACKYARD OF THE U.S.A. MANSION: Critical Readings of Poverty and Wealth in the United States

Name:

Academic Affiliation:

E-mail:

Title of Proposal:

Panel:

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Abstract (400-600 words):

Please, complete this form and send it, in electronic format (via e-mail), to the Chair of your selected panel. Deadline for sending proposals is October 29, 2010.