ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines literary and visual manifestations of natural resources and the manner in which national and cultural boundaries are forcibly mapped onto them. It highlights the manner in which it can shape public opinion about humans' place in the world and our complicated relationship to it. The book discusses takes as its starting point John Steinbeck's Depression-era writing. It presents an ecocritical, postcolonial reading of Bich Minh Nguyen's memoir, Stealing Buddha's Dinner. The book explores the voice of technologically poisoned female bodies across genres and asks how bodies speak. It focuses on stories of ill and chemically charged bodies that indicate not only the permeable nature of the human form but also the inverse relationship between visibility and harm that has been increasingly expressed since the mid-twentieth century.
