Reviewed by:

• Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability by Abby L. Goode
• Ian Finseth (bio)

The animating impulse of this important, well-executed study is a desire to challenge both "the supposed benevolence of American environmental writing" (2) and a scholarly "tendency to engage with the nation's eugenic and agrarian histories separately" (5). The ideals of self-reliant agricultural life and of a sustainable approach to natural resources, as twinned and potent forms of cultural discourse, turn out, in Goode's account, to be poisoned at the root. From Thomas Jefferson's encomiums to the "cultivators of the earth" all the way to the twenty-first century, they have been poisoned by fear—fear of overpopulation, of miscegenation, of the racial other, of moral pollution, of rampant fertility, of "real Americans" getting squeezed out of their rightful place. There was never some golden age of agrarian sustainability, nor even a belief in such a golden age, but rather images of disorder, degeneration, and corruption that motivated different ways of conceiving of—or fantasizing about—orderly, harmonious, and productive places and futures. These "agrotopias," Goode writes, "exist elsewhere, beyond the threat of demographic or agricultural decline," and they "constitute attempts to revise and reclaim a long-lost agrarian ideal of 'New World' abundance" (3).

The central theoretical premise of Agrotopias is that sustainability rhetoric and the agrarian myth "cannot be disentangled" (16) from the United States' long, violent history of racism, nativism, reproductive control, and eugenics. What results is a highly effective analysis of the ways in which [End Page 174] images of the good life—a healthy relationship of the human to the environmental—are shadowed by and vitiated by a desire for racial homogeneity. Along the way, famously progressive figures, including Walt Whitman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, are subject to sharp, occasionally devastating, critique. Even Michelle Obama's White House garden, in the epilogue, is implicated in the problematic legacy of Jeffersonian agrarianism. Although the book can feel repetitive in places, that repetitiveness actually comes to seem formally appropriate to the endless reinscriptions of the ideological problem Goode investigates. After reading the book, one might well ask whether there is any kind of environmental discourse that is not fatally compromised by the racial and reproductive legacies of the past.

One might also ask, however, why we cannot disentangle these ideological strands from one another. The metaphor of "entanglement" is a compelling one, as it appeals to our scholarly sense that everything is complicated and nothing simple. But it is also, at the end of the day, metaphorical. Is modern American environmental discourse really so corrupted by its own dark history that it's impossible to employ the language of sustainability without invoking or reinforcing that history? Can we preserve what is virtuous about early environmental writing (whether penned by Jefferson or anyone else) without accepting what is undesirable about it? Answering such questions properly goes beyond the scope of a book review, but they are questions that readers of Agrotopias should ponder. And how one answers them will depend, to a significant degree, on the particular texts that one brings under the microscope.

In that respect, Goode has chosen a fascinating combination of literary works to consider, ranging chronologically from J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) through Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915). Also featured are a number of unexpected entrants, including Leonora Sansay's Secret History (1802); Her-man Melville's Pierre (1852); Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899); and Walt Whitman's lesser-known essays and poems spanning the Civil War. In her consistently striking readings of these texts, Goode traces the nuanced yet potent ways in which sustainability rhetoric (and its whole conceptual scaffolding) evolved from the Revolutionary Era through the Progressive Era. Her conclusions—brought together in the epilogue's claim that "agrarianism has long functioned as a kind of population control discourse focused on encouraging the fertility of rural, tacitly white bodies [End Page 175] and discouraging the fertility of racialized, seemingly polluting bodies" (194...

审阅者：

• 《Agrotopias：美国可持续发展文学史》作者：Abby L. Goode
• 伊恩·芬塞斯（简介）

这项重要且执行良好的研究的动力是挑战“美国环境写作中所谓的仁慈”（2）和学术上的“分别研究国家优生和农业历史的倾向”（5）。在古德看来，自力更生的农业生活和可持续利用自然资源的理想，作为文化话语的孪生而有力的形式，结果被从根本上毒害了。从托马斯·杰斐逊对“地球的耕种者”的赞美，一直到二十一世纪，他们都被恐惧所毒害——对人口过剩、异族通婚、种族异类、道德污染、猖獗的生育率、 “真正的美国人”被挤出了他们应有的地位。从来没有什么农业可持续发展的黄金时代，甚至也没有对这样一个黄金时代的信仰，而是无序、堕落和腐败的形象激发了人们以不同的方式构想或幻想有序、和谐和富有成效的地方和期货。古德写道，这些“农业乌托邦”“存在于其他地方，超越了人口或农业衰退的威胁”，它们“构成了修正和恢复长期失落的‘新世界’丰饶农业理想的尝试”(3)。

《农业乌托邦》的核心理论前提是，可持续性言论和农业神话“无法与美国漫长而暴力的种族主义、本土主义、生殖控制和优生学历史分开”(16)。结果是对[结束第 174 页]美好生活的形象（人类与环境的健康关系）如何被种族同质性的渴望所遮蔽和破坏的方式进行了高效的分析。一路走来，著名的进步人物，包括沃尔特·惠特曼和夏洛特·帕金斯·吉尔曼，都受到了尖锐的、有时甚至是毁灭性的批评。甚至在尾声中，米歇尔·奥巴马的白宫花园也与杰斐逊农业主义的问题遗产有关。尽管这本书在某些地方让人感觉重复，但这种重复实际上在形式上似乎适合古德所调查的意识形态问题的无休止的重新表述。读完这本书后，人们很可能会问，是否有任何一种环境话语不会受到过去种族和生殖遗产的致命损害。

然而，人们可能也会问，为什么我们不能将这些意识形态的线索彼此分开。 “纠缠”的比喻是一个引人注目的比喻，因为它迎合了我们的学术意识：一切都很复杂，没有什么简单的。但归根结底，这也是隐喻性的。现代美国的环境话语是否真的被其自身的黑暗历史所腐蚀，以至于不可能在不援引或强化这段历史的情况下使用可持续发展的语言？我们能否保留早期环境写作（无论是杰斐逊还是其他任何人所写）的优点而不接受它的不良之处？正确回答这些问题超出了书评的范围，但却是《Agrotopias 》读者应该思考的问题。人们如何回答这些问题在很大程度上取决于人们在显微镜下观察的特定文本。

在这方面，古德选择了一系列引人入胜的文学作品组合来考虑，按时间顺序排列，从 J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur 的《美国农民的来信》（Letters from a American Farmer，1782 年）到 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 的《Herland》（1915 年）。此外，还有一些意想不到的作品，包括利奥诺拉·桑赛 (Leonora Sansay) 的《秘史》 (1802)；赫尔曼·梅尔维尔的《皮埃尔》（1852）；萨顿·格里格斯 (Sutton Griggs) 的《帝国帝国》 (1899)；以及沃尔特·惠特曼在内战期间鲜为人知的散文和诗歌。古德在对这些文本的持续惊人的解读中，追溯了可持续发展修辞（及其整个概念支架）从革命时代到进步时代演变的微妙而有力的方式。她的结论汇集在结语中，声称“农业主义长期以来一直充当着一种人口控制话语的作用，重点是鼓励农村的、心照不宣的白人身体的生育能力[第175页结束]，并阻止种族化的、看似污染性的身体的生育能力”（ 194...