Rewriting Capitalism’s Horror Story

• In Event: Elemental Postcards from Beyond Empire: Excavation / Dust

Abstract

My book, A Toxic Alchemy: Race and Waste in Industrial Capitalism, is a geographic exploration of what Sylvia Wynter calls the “master codes” and “origin stories” of modernity, the storylines that reproduce a world rooted in domination rather than relation. Inspired by Sylvia Wynter’s figure of the homo narrans, the storytelling human, I narrate industrialization as a failed experiment that urges us to reimagine what it means to be human and our place on earth. The concluding chapter opens with a short story, a dystopic parable of the already present/near future: in a Southern US company town, a community of Black workers and families learns that their former employer, a multinational industrial giant, is building an eco-friendly waterpark over the poisoned land and water they have fought for decades to have remediated. This chapter is a provocation to reconsider the horror of capitalism as a speculative fiction; seeing our present as only one among a multitude of potential storylines, we may discover innumerable openings for imagining and building otherwise.

Author

• Pavithra Vasudevan, The University of Texas At Austin