Polymeric Thinking: Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography

Keller claims that the distinctive approach to autobiography in Allison Cobb’s hybrid text, Plastic: An Autobiography (2021), both reflects the conditions of this Anthropocene moment and offers a generative model for responding to them, challenging outmoded ideas of boundaries between species, nations, generations, individuals, and between bodies and their material environments. Cobb is the daughter of a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was developed, so her life story necessarily includes the story of the bomb’s development. Because the deployment of the atomic bomb depended on the development of plastic, her autobiography tracks those responsible for plastic’s invention. Entangled in the global accumulation of plastic waste and the trans-corporeal movement of toxins from plastic, Cobb’s story incorporates the poisoning of albatrosses and of human communities where plastics are produced. Importantly, it is Cobb’s way of insisting on elaborate chains of thought linking seemingly distant events and beings—what Keller calls polymeric thinking—that propels her journey of discovery. It draws Cobb into relation with activist communities of color in environmentally degraded and impoverished areas of Texas and Louisiana where petroleum is processed and plastics are made. Keller thus explores what Cobb reveals about the resources of polymeric thinking for confronting current environmental challenges.