All-Too-Human Borders / More-Than-Human Planet (HYBRID)

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Borders police and thus produce our most intimate identities: differentiating citizens from migrants, whitened peoples from racialized peoples, and settlers from Natives, they allow accidents of geography to become the basis for societies. However, while borders always have all-too-human causes and consequences, they also take place on the more-than-human planet: of course, they rely on and/or reject preexisting patterns of land and water, but in addition, they facilitate and/or frustrate flows of animals, plants, and more. With the American Studies Association holding its 2025 meeting on an island that was colonized by the Spanish empire then re-colonized by the US empire—and, especially since Hurricane Maria, an island that is experiencing the climate change brought about by such imperialism—this panel hopes to cultivate conversations across ethnic studies, the environmental humanities, and other fields: thinking from Puerto Rico, the panel hopes to highlight the mutually transformative relations among all-too-human borders and the more-than-human planet.

To pursue these (im)possibilities, the panel brings together papers on four spatiotemporal contexts: Hispaniola before and after the Haitian Revolution; the US–Mexico borderlands in the late nineteenth century; the Colville Indian Reservation and surrounding settler communities in the mid twentieth century; and the colonization of outer space in the early twenty-first century. Considering the first of these contexts, SJ Zhang’s “‘To fully understand what follows…’: Contorted Narrations of Maroon Plots and Landscapes” explores the apparent paradox that maroon communities often escaped all-too-human enslavement by living in the more-than-human environments just outside of plantations. Turning from these anticolonial survival strategies to rival racializing technologies, Carlos Alonso Nugent’s “Whiteness and/as Water Infrastructure along the Colorado River” explains why the Mexican borderlands’ famously mud-colored waters became an essential element in US white supremacy. In “Colville contra Washington: Mourning Dove and the Contested Borders of Regionalism,” Lloyd Alimboyao Sy shows how the Okanogan author Mourning Dove mobilized her knowledge of the Columbia watershed’s nonhuman entities to insist on independence from US, Canadian, and other settler societies. Finally, in “Alien Landscapes: Border Security Voids and Astro Settlements on Indigenous Land,” Felicity Amaya Schaeffer examines how the very spaceships and satellites that blur the boundaries between earth’s atmosphere and outer space are used to support borders through the likes of the Tohono O’odham homelands.

With these four papers, and with the chairing and commenting of Julie Sze, our panel hopes to highlight how what this conference calls “Late-Stage American Empire” is shaping and being shaped by emergent experiments in American Studies. While ranging from the US–Mexico border to the earth/space border, and while moving from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first century, the panel also combines scholars of verbal/visual/sonic/other archives with those who do ethnography, oral history, and other site-specific methods. Across these and other borders, the panel thinks of how humans and nonhumans alike might live borderlessly.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• “To fully understand what follows…”: Contorted Narrations of Maroon Plots and Landscapes - SJ Zhang, University of Chicago

• Whiteness and/as Water Infrastructure along the Colorado River - Carlos Alonso Nugent, Columbia University

• Colville contra Washington: Mourning Dove and the Contested Borders of Regionalism - Lloyd A Sy, Yale University

• Alien Landscapes: Border Security Voids and Astro Settlements on Indigenous Land - Felicity Amaya Amaya Schaeffer, University of California-Santa Cruz

Virtual Accommodation Chair

• Julie Sze, University of California-Davis

Virtual Accommodation Commentator

• Julie Sze, University of California-Davis

Biographical Information

Chair/Commentator: Julie Sze is Professor of American Studies at UC Davis. She has written 3 books, most recently Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger (2020, UC press), edited Sustainability and Social Justice (2018, NYU Press), and written over 70 articles and book chapters, on environmental justice, the environmental humanities, geography, and public policy. She collaborates with environmental scientists, engineers, social scientists and community-based organizers in California and New York.

Paper One: SJ Zhang is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Their current project, Going Maroon and Other Forms of Family, considers how reproduction and carceral forces shaped the decisions and triggered the archives of four women who went maroon in North America and the Caribbean between 1781 and 1820. She is also working on a project concerning the woman called “Tituba, the Indian,” accused in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692¬–93. In this work, she examines Tituba’s testimony, racialization and the subsequent scholarly and creative representations of her life from the 17th century through the present. Zhang’s work is published in the History of the Present, William & Mary Quarterly, Small Axe, Representations, and Women & Performance.

Paper Two: Carlos Alonso Nugent is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University, where he offers courses on US literature and culture, Latinx literature and culture, critical race and ethnic studies, and the environmental humanities. Currently, he is completing a book about the ‘‘imagined environments’’ that have shaped and been shaped by the US–Mexico borderlands; previously, he has published in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, and Representations.

Paper Three: Lloyd Alimboyao Sy is an Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. He is completing his first book project, The Shape of Forest to Come, which is about Native depictions of sylvan destruction. His work appears or is forthcoming in PMLA, American Quarterly, American Literary History, ELH, and other venues.

Paper Four: Felicity Amaya Schaeffer is Chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department and Professor of Feminist Studies at UCSC. Her research and teaching interests include: Latinx and Indigenous decolonial studies, migration, and border studies and feminist and critical race STS (Science and Technology Studies). She has written two monographs: Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship Across the Americas (2013) and Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land (2022) which received honorable mention from the John Hope Franklin award at the 2023 ASA. In December of 2022, she participated as a UN Expert Seminar Participant on the Impact of Militarization on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Geneva, Switzerland. Currently, she is working on a co-authored book with Neda Atanasoski tentatively titled, “Planetary Commons” that contests the international space race to extract resources in zones uninhabited by humans, and especially Indigenous peoples, zones considered “non-life”: outer space voids, asteroids; the seabed floor, virtual reality, and Indigenous lands. Throughout the book, they counter these apocalyptic industries to center Indigenous cosmologies of earth and sky that allow us to imagine and remember otherworldly planetary futures.