university of toronto quarterly, volume 88, number 2, spring 2019 © university of toronto press doi: 10.3138/utq.88.2.13 ranjan ghosh Plastic Literature ABSTRACT: Using plastic as a “theory machine,” this article looks into the dynam- ics and poetics of what I call plastic literature. It argues out a case for the “plastic sea” with its properties like sinking, mineralization, scopious contamination, per- vasiveness, and deep-water micro-plasticization. The translocationality of plastic represents a spatial consciousness where plastic seeps into salt, water, soil, animal and human bodies, media, and our psychosis in non-linear, non-hierarchical, fragmentary mobility and fuidity; this does not discriminate between its point of origin and eventual destination, race, ethnicities, discriminations of colour, reli- gious affliations, cultural heritage, and political schoolings. Thus, plastic provokes connections/comparatism with a difference that speaks of becomings, dispersions, and immanence. Is plastic behaviour and agency not close to how we think of liter- ature in a globalized world? Working out the other areas of the material aesthetic of plastic, the article connects plastic behaviour with literary habits and thinking. It homes in on “plastic lit(t)erization” to bring about a new poetics of thinking and doing literature. The article strings corresponding coordinates as made available through our understanding of plastic sea, networks of transmission, travel and transition, gradient fow, trans-corporeality, local-global fusion, process time, sink, and the discourses around hyper sea. Plastic literature becomes our new poetics of generating literary capital and rethinking world literature. KEYWORDS: trans-locality, micro-plastic, plastic-literary, plastic globalization, immanence Where is plastic? Here, there, anywhere, everywhere; surely, somewhere. From plastic bottles to plastic money, we are (en)plasticized: have plastic trees, plastic birds, plastic soil, plastic water, plastic stomachs, and a plastic planet. This is our “plastic contract” beyond annulment and revocation, sub- mitted, instead, to renewal every moment, every breath time. We have served ourselves with plastic returns. Ever since its inception at the turn of the last century, plastic has built a complicated mobility: the ways in which it has expressed itself, circulated through the economy, informed habits of use and disposability, accredited its presence against others (glass, metals, ceramic, and wood), and found its value and valence. We are living inside a plastic bomb the sound of whose explosion cannot be heard but can be experienced through the fow of time; this generates a waste apocalypse, an irremediable fate of extinction through a gradual but certain course. Plastic, then, is an explosive, but its effects return to us only after we have long forgotten its use and have no memory of. Used plastic leaves behind a memory of guilt, plastic ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/utq.88.2.13 - Ranjan Ghosh <weransum@yahoo.co.in> - Thursday, August 22, 2019 5:42:21 AM - IP Address:27.125.202.245