MLN

Monica Seger’s Toxic Matters: Narrating Italy’s Dioxin is a timely and creative example of environmental humanities work in Italian studies. This study, which follows her 2015 Landscapes in Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film, aims to survey and understand the complex entanglement of narrative, sanitary and socioecological effects of dioxin contamination in the Italian cultural and natural environments. Seger here denounces instances of toxic and environmental violence and concurrently dignifies and celebrates the efforts of the communities affected by chemical contamination to bring justice through narrative practices. [End Page 226]

Throughout the 20th century, several industrial accidents have marked the Italian landscape, causing extensive ecological damage and sociosanitary crises that remain unresolved and localities including Seveso, Taranto, Porto Marghera and Casale Monferrato are today inextricably associated with widespread and severe forms of toxic contamination and outbreaks of specific illnesses and disabilities. The barely visible, attritional, and long-lasting effects of chemical contamination of the environment and the human and non-human communities define Italy’s toxic landscapes, which in turn have become the subject and setting of extensive yet somehow overlooked by academia literary, cinematic and artistic production.

Published by University of Virginia Press in the series Under the Sign of Nature, Seger’s Toxic Matters attests to the consolidation within Italian studies of both critical interest in environmental issues and also the methodological framework of literary ecocriticism.¹ Seger enters in conversation with two emblematic contaminated geographies: Seveso, known for the tragic 1976 accident at the ICMESA chemical plant that caused a contamination event of an unprecedented magnitude and Taranto, where one of the largest steel plants in Europe—originally operated by Italsider and more recently by ArcelorMittal and Acciaierie d’Italia—has been spreading illness and social unrest for the last few decades. While seemingly distant contexts, Seveso and Taranto are connected by the slow toxic agency of the same chemical compound: 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, the chemical agent released in the environment of Seveso and also found in abundance in the breast milk of Tarantine women.² By focusing on the dioxin itself, Seger interrogates a diverse corpus of literary texts, films and non-fiction works by an equally diverse set of authors. She thus formulates a coherent and innovative theoretical apparatus that effectively employs concepts and methods drawn from material ecocriticism (for example, storied matter, intra-action and agency of matter), from ecofeminism (transcorporeality, corporeal practices), from environmental justice (sacrifice zones, cognitive injustice, plurivocal testimonies, first-person accounts) and, more notably, from econarratology (storyworlds, non-anthropocentric narratives, cognitive and contextualist narratologies).

Thanks to this framework, dioxin is revealed to the readers in its full complexity: as a chemical agent that manifests through symptomatologies and illness, as an ontological operator that rearranges the boundaries between life and non-life, as a byproduct of industrial modernity, as a subject with narrative potentiality and as an agent of transcorporeal relationality. Studying the dioxin in the context of Seveso and Taranto, however, can also illuminate the current state of contemporary narrative practices in Italy, where “residents, [End Page 227] witnesses, and interpreters have responded to Seveso and especially Taranto in a vast array of expressive modes—often seeking to chronicle the burgeoning and largely imperceptible health realities imposed by dioxin”.³ Seger thus presents and the role these expressions play in narrating the invisible transgenerational reality of slow violence.

Seveso is the focus of the first two chapters of the book. The first traces the story of the 1976 ICMESA incident and its aftermath using historical testimonies, journalism and archival sources. Seger’s historiography immediately underlines that during the days of the incident a “pervasive sense of public mistrust was fueled by dioxin’s very nature”.⁴ An invisible agent unpredictably infiltrating bodies and ecosystems, the dioxin forced Seveso to engage “with possible futures in a moment of immediate crisis, as it pushes against traditional bounds of knowability”.⁵ In the aftermath of the incident, the civil...