Ecocriticism in the Unregulated Zone

Cheryl Lousley

This paper uses Larissa Lai’s 2002 novel Salt Fish Girl and the Unregulated Zone it describes as a companion for thinking through what science studies has to offer ecocriticism and environmental politics. In the speculative fantasies of Salt Fish Girl, the Unregulated Zone lies outside the secured boundaries of the corporate strongholds that have replaced nation-states in the mid-twenty-first century Pacific Northwest. Populated by sweatshops, unidentified viruses, barter networks of the unemployed, human clones, and genetically modified organisms mutating in a changing climate, the Unregulated Zone riffs on the popular tradition of environmental dystopia and the neo-liberal erosion of welfare-state protections. But Salt Fish Girl is also a novel of hope. Structurally, the Unregulated Zone is a place without recourse to a transcendent authority—not to the laws of a state, not to a corporate contract, not even to predictable laws of nature—and this is what makes it a contested space of both nightmares and political possibility. Like the science studies approach that partially inspires it, the novel presents the Unregulated Zone as a political opening—a place from which we might reconfigure ecological relations. Although many environmental critics pull back in horror from such premises, I turn to science studies, particularly the work of Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, to find a more robust mode of environmental criticism and politics that can take them into account. Beyond the “nature-endorsing” or realist and “nature-skeptic” or social constructionist positions within social theory lies a more nuanced path that grapples with dynamic assemblages of human and nonhuman actors (Soper 23).