Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925 by Jada Ach

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925 by Jada Ach Jenna Gersie Jada Ach, Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 2021. 328 pp. Hardcover, $39.95; e-book, $19.95. In Jada Ach’s Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925, the ecomaterials of the West’s arid deserts and oceanscapes are radical, dynamic elements that become entangled with the human bodies that live there. Sand, water, and salt are neither waste materials nor commodities, but actants that resist control by the humans who try to manage both the elements themselves and their own bodies as they are exposed to the elements. “Try as we might, we can never manage our way out of ecological enmeshment” (9), Ach writes, and through her observations of intimate human–element engagements, Ach employs material ecocritical and queer ecology lenses to counter the top-down, hierarchical environmental management of the West’s wasteland spaces. Through her analysis of Progressive Era literature, Ach searches for hope in the porous spaces of environmental management, suggesting that we might learn from these texts how to “manage without mastery” as we approach human–environment relationships in the Anthropocene with compassion, care, and a focus on environmental justice (16). In McTeague: A Story of San Francisco by Frank Norris (1899) and The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin (1903), Ach reads the desert sand as a queer actant with “revolutionary potential” as it works to undermine human attempts at management of desert spaces (76). As porous human bodies are inundated with sand in an intimate becoming, interactions with this lively element reveal human desires and longings as they resist the temporal progression and masculine ideals of administrative management. Similarly reading elements of desire and liveliness in the West’s water resources, Ach suggests that Progressive Era attitudes about water management can inform today’s water policy. In The River by Ednah Aiken (1914), The Virginian by Owen Wister (1902), and Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (1883), Ach shows how water is co-actant with the humans that attempt to [End Page 427] manage it, even as water, in its liveliness, remains beyond complete control. Finally, Ach heads further west, to the Pacific Ocean, where she reads The Sea-Wolf by Jack London (1904) and The American Diary of a Japanese Girl by Yonejirō Noguchi (1902) to explore how ocean salt permeates human bodies in culturally mediated ways, illustrating how both race and gender are managed in the production of imperial and transnational modern bodies. Throughout Sand, Water, Salt, Ach addresses contemporary environmental concerns, from uranium mining on Navajo land and managing radioactive waste to water crises at Standing Rock and in Flint. To address these environmental crises of the Anthropocene, Ach proposes “managing-by-drift,” allowing our engagements with the lively elements to inform and inspire decision-making about management. By drifting into moments of intimacy, activism, and pleasure, “situated managements” of “mutual care and shared governance” (29) can supplement already-established practices and policies as we “shift our attention from an ethics of fixing to one of living-with” (233 emphasis original). Together with the elements we can learn to resist hierarchies of management as we recognize our inseparability from the “strange agents and agencies” with which we are always intermingling in the West’s varied environments (233). Jenna Gersie University of Colorado Boulder Copyright © 2023 Western Literature Association ...