Chemical Diasporas: Kinship in Times of Toxicity

• In Event: Toxic Poetics: Transnational Feminisms and Scales of Resistance

Abstract

Building upon discussions in ethnic studies, cultural studies, and botany, the notion of a chemical diaspora aims to highlight forms of toxic relationality usually ignored by legal discourses about environmental remediation and medical approaches to disability. Instead, chemical diaspora surfaces conditions of imperial warfare that mobilize chemical spread and emphasizes the processual becoming of networks of toxicity. Against bi-national models of legal reparation that locate toxic contamination in a discrete place, time, and body, chemical diaspora considers the relationality of exposure in order to propose a form of transspecies solidarity yet to come.

Presenter

• Natalia Duong, Pomona College