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Stratigraphies of Empire: Prison, Landscape, Responsibility

Sun, November 9, 2:00 to 3:45pm, Westin Bonaventure, Floor: Level 1, San Gabriel B (L1)

Abstract

Spanish and Arabic graffiti dotted the walls of the vacant train station in a Greek border town across the Evros Valley from Turkey. I made my way here to do research on Greece’s immigration detention system, but quickly found myself in the ricochets of American empire. Many of the people who were trying to find asylum in Europe by crossing this still militarized space were from Pakistan and Afghanistan, places where the US had been conducting military operations or drone strikes for the past decade.

Much more often, I train my decidedly amateurish photographic and videographic lenses on places that are part of (contested) United States territory. Fleeting images of carceral and border landscapes, often taken while driving, reveal, at times, a horizon of blurred lines. Forms of fencing, razor wire, and deserts and fields stretch across the screen, revealing a sedimentary rock road cut. Or, really, the sedimentation of layers of conquest and confinement, a cross section of carceral and imperial infrastructures accreting in one place and stretching past military forays into present prisons.

For geographer Don Mitchell, “Landscape – as a site or stage of production and reproduction – is knitted together by [a] network of violence. Landscape – as a ‘way of seeing’ that aestheticizes or erases the facts and relations of work – knits together this network of violence” (2003). Mitchell’s labor theory of landscape focuses on the work that goes into making and remaking of landforms and the materiality of representations that naturalize oppressive social relations. The question remains about the work of violence in creating, say, a US imperial landscape lined by sturdy border walls and recurrent Coast Guard patrols, and punctuated by brightly lit perimeter fencing and ephemeral prisoner transport buses. Are these the infrastructure or the product of empire, or might they be both, depending on when and whom one asks? And how do overlapping sites and constellations of prison and military on now-US territory--Krome, Chaffee, and Fort Allen for three examples--propel (us along) networks of imperial aggression to unexpected sites of survival and refusal?

To traverse these questions, I take inspiration from Edouard Glissant’s thoughts on history and modernity. Glissant, himself inspired by Walter Benjamin, writes: “We no longer reveal totality within ourselves by lightning flashes. We approach it through the accumulation of sediments. The poetics of duration … reappears to take up the relay from the poetics of the moment. Lightning flashes are the shivers of one who desires or dreams of a totality that is impossible or yet to come; duration urges on those who attempt to live this totality, when dawn shows through the linked histories of peoples” (in Baucom, 2005). My paper develops an experimental project into landscape and memory that seeks to knit together past and present moments of US empire and its decidedly fortified and carceral form. I situate images of border and prison that I have collected in constellation with far-a-field ricochets of US empire to think about connections between prison abolition and anti-imperialism.

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