Lead Poisonings as Complex Toxic Assemblages: The Enviro-Racialization of the Body and Socio-Material Production of Polluted Bodies

• In Event: Residues: Rethinking Chemical Environments - II

Abstract

Lead (Pb) is simultaneously chemical, product, contaminant, and assemblage - a produced outcome as a complex toxic formation involving nature-society relations and processes of socio-materiality. But it is also the racialized, class politics of enacted forms of power, the political economy of urban industrial development strategies, as well as an entanglement derived from, and reproduced through, the science, technology, and cultural production of socio-historical and socio-environmental processes. We argue this complex toxic assemblage known as "lead poisoning" is a specific form of what we refer to as the "enviro-racialization" of the body and bodies, and any attempt to map the socio-historical trajectory of lead and its socio-spatial/socio-material configurations “in the world,” must engage with its material-semiotic relations as a chemical residue. To address the multifaceted implications and consequences of lead poisoning, we argue that lead must be explored simultaneously as “residue” – an outcome and byproduct of varies conversions of socio-natures into “artificial” (therefore, “unnaturalized”) products, while at the same time addressing its actively destructive existence as the “naturalized” and internalized outcome of industrial production within specific communities. We argue that lead poisoning is neither simply an either/or expression of these contamination regimes; instead, lead poisonings involve the production of contaminated communities that have historically been disempowered and dispossessed of both their land – in the form of polluted neighborhoods and contaminated homes – and of their bodies. But these assemblages simultaneously have been made opaque by the "forgotten" reconstruction and reproduction of these socio-material enactments of oppression, exclusion, and destruction.

Authors

• Christopher Oliver, Tulane University

• Victor Torres Velez, Eugenio María de Hostos Community College City University of New York