Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisele M. Baxter, and Tara Lee, Eds. Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature

Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisele M. Baxter, and Tara Lee, eds. Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2014. 480 pp. Frack, Gene-splice, Hinder, Immolate ... We all have dystopias to write. With an introduction and twenty-five separate essays, Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase covers impressive ground. The book comes to terms with a genre that appears to be, if anything, broadly conceived: while the sheer length of the project suggests that it might have benefited from editorial discretion, the ethos of dystopia lends itself to varied applications and interpretations. Indeed, the rewards of engaging the text as a whole are great, especially as some of the strongest work is found in its latter half. The collection, when read in sequence, does not allow one to settle in to a particular geography, national-economic space, or version of dystopia; instead, the arrangement of the chapters jumps, for instance, from alter-histories of women in the Mexican Revolution, to the deeply troubled Montreal of the mid-nineties, to Douglas Coupland's slacker realism. The effect produced is one of cycling defamiliarization, a shuffling of imagined destinies and short-circuited hopes that comprise a dauntingly heterogeneous futurity. These vertiginous snap between futures subtends, but does not override, the critical intervention of the book: to shift contemporary studies of dystopia from an Anglo-American or loosely international frame to one that understands the dystopian literary mode, and the texts specifically produced, in the wake of the cultural changes that have taken place in North America since the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta). In this collection, held separate from its literary tradition, dystopia becomes a critical tool that assesses the unevenness of the North American political economy. Indeed, the dizziness of considering, in turn, Nalo Hopkinson's hollowed Toronto, Alex Rivera's sleep factories, and Neil Gaiman's dystopian phantasmagoria emulates the free flow of goods across Canadian, U.S., Mexican, and the ever-obfuscated Indigenous borders of the continent. From the start, I noticed a typical formal split in the author's approaches to dystopia. On the one hand, some seem to refuse to assume the kind of shared intimacy with their object literary critics so often accept as a part of their endeavour. This variety of essay in the collection relies heavily on quotation, communicating as much as possible of the dystopia in question in its own words, be it Cormac McCarthy's futureless future or Lisa Robertson's critique of a gentrified Vancouver. I like this approach particularly in 'The Dystopia of the Obsolete': Lisa Robertson's Vancouver and the Poetics of Nostalgia, Paul Stephens's essay on Robertson's The Office for Soft Architecture (2003), precisely because he seemed able to remain true to her poetics and her politics through his citational practice. On the other hand, Sharlee Reimer insists on the critical project of interpretation championed by Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl (2002) in Logical Gaps and Capitalist Seduction in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl; Sharon DeGraw places Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) against Detroit's deterioration to highlight the green urban policy of the novel; while Robert T. Tally Jr. comes closest to naming the obfuscated futurity of the global hegemon through Gaiman's American Gods (2001) in Lost in Grand Central: Dystopia and Transgression in Neil Gaiman's American Gods. …

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