Review: Abby L. Goode, Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability
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2023
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The MIT Press
Abstract
In her compelling and astute reconsideration of the development of early American agricultural thought, Abby L. Goode pays special attention to the ways that racist, nativist, eugenic, and expansionist rhetoric influenced the evolution of the concept of sustainability across America's long nineteenth century and beyond. The book begins with a helpful roadmap to demonstrate how the texts explored in Agrotopias challenge accepted views of how Thomas Jefferson's agricultural ideas informed early concepts of sustainability. Chapter 1, “No Rural Bowl of Milk: Unsustainability and the Demographic Agrarian Ideal,” examines Herman Melville's 1852 novel, Pierre, along with some of his lesser-known agricultural essays. Goode argues that in Pierre, Melville highlights the anxieties of certain mid-nineteenth-century labor and agricultural reformers who advocated for the formation of small, demographically diverse farming communities that would embody what they saw as a sustainable agricultural ideal. Pierre, however, disrupts this ideal to present, as Goode writes, “the reproductive subtext of this rhetoric: the idea that sexual disorder and racial intermingling enfeeble population fertility and agricultural productivity”.
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This review is published as Matthew Sivils; Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability. The New England Quarterly 2023; 96 (3): 272–274. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00998. Posted with permission.