Unsettling Imperial and Fascist Geographies: U.S. Racial Discourses of Invasion, Alienated Species, and Abolitionist Restoration

• In Event: Resisting with/for/as the non/Human in Late Stage American Empire

Abstract

“Invasive species” are defined, in Executive Order 13112 (1999), as “alien species whose introduction does or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health.” As feminist science studies scholars and environmental historians such as Banu Subramaniam and Jeanne Shinozuka have noted, environmental discourses of species invasion parallel anti-immigrant rhetoric that constructs certain immigrant groups as alien and invasive. This racial discourse of invasion functions as a “racial script’ (Molina 2013) that has been and is applied at different times to various groups, usually Black and brown immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. President Trump has repeatedly animated this racial script in referring to an “invasion” at the U.S.–Mexico border and suggesting he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act, which allows the U.S. president to deport or detain non-citizens from “hostile” countries. Such rhetoric emboldens a rise in white nationalist violence against immigrants of color by ecofascists, such as the 2019 El Paso shooter, who claim that immigrant “invasions” are responsible for the environmental destruction of U.S. nature. This paper will explore how racial discourses of invasion—entangled with U.S. settler colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism (and thus white supremacy), and including parallel environmental discourses of species invasion and anti-immigrant rhetoric seeking “pristine” nature—enmesh humans and other beings into affective and discursive assemblages under the rubric of “alien invader” as part of settler science’s world-making (through social embeddedness of environmental science, including the ways it circulates in the popular cultural imaginary). It will identify the ecofascism (aiming for white nationalism) latent in parallel anti-immigrant rhetoric and environmental discourses of species invasion. These assemblages give rise to intimate relations between communities constructed as “invasive” and “alien,” which in the U.S. paradoxically includes Native nations as well as immigrants, but especially immigrants of color. This paper will also explore how these relations are used to resist the rise of fascism, especially eco-fascism, through a form of abolitionist restoration, which aims to abolish settler forms of restoration that give rise to notions of “invasive” beings. It will look across Asian American and Indigenous writing, by writers such as Ruth Ozeki and Craig Santos Perez, and Anishinaabe practices that develop through emerging relations and intimacies and that resist with the more-than-human world.

Author

• Lisa Fink, Michigan State University