This chapter examines the print cultural history of queer pulp fiction in the 1950s, paying special attention to obscenity challenges as well as to the cultural afterlives of pulps in contemporary queer culture.

Waste is a slippery word: noun and verb; object and process. It can reference the material objects of garbage and trash, decimated or ruined places, or worn and suffering bodies. As Jennifer Wenzel writes, “waste hews toward its concrete sense as discard: material byproducts of some transformative process, metabolic or mechanical; things past the end of their wonted, wanted life. Quite literally, waste isn’t what it used to be.”1 But waste is also linked to a kind of prodigality and excess that has less to do with scarcity than with surplus. In this sense, people can waste time and money, opportunities and chances. People can be wastrels, excessive and unproductive, squandering the time and potential that are spectral objects exchangeable for money. The category of waste – its implication in the mechanization of laboring bodies, the creation of the infrastructural systems of industrial capital, the administration of various places and populations, the usefulness and charm of various objects – is the fuel for and result of an accelerating industrial system. As such, waste is a particularly acute index of the late nineteenth century’s complex system of values.

This essay examines race and late nineteenth-century regional fiction by asking how neighborliness helps arbitrate the tension between representations of membership in local communities and larger histories of national and regional racial dispossession.

Argues for the value of the humanities in addressing contemporary social and ecological crises.

Critical concerns

Regional fiction, though often associated with the short stories published in the highbrow magazines of the late nineteenth century, has proven to be an enduring genre in US fiction, especially for women writers who were among its first and most accomplished practitioners. Regional fiction's fortunes in the canon of US literature – that selected group of texts thought to be most important to the story that scholars tell about the nation's coherence – have been a barometer of the rise and fall of women's place in that canon. The canon debates around what constitutes great literature were in part spurred by the contemporary political and social debates about who counted in American culture, about whose opinions and knowledge could be understood as both disinterested and distinctive, about who was capable of addressing everyone in the nation while also expressing their own powerfully individualistic and autonomous point of view. In the 1970s and '80s, when feminist activists and feminist literary historians (such as Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert, Elaine Showalter, Mary Poovey, Nina Baym, Judith Fetterley, and Marjorie Pryse) recovered the work of women writers who had been consigned to the dust heap of history, they opened up the canon of US literature to perspectives that challenged the dominant narrative of how literature helped to maintain national unity and coherence, and, by doing so, they revealed a literary and cultural history in which the contests over what counted as literature, culture, and citizenship were pressing concerns for a range of writers and readers.