Archives of Empire in New York & Puerto Rico

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Performative Format

Abstract

Empire obsessively creates archives. These repositories of information about people and places subject to imperial power help facilitate and legitimate domination. Archives are usually assumed to be written texts, or perhaps physical objects like statues and textiles stolen from the colonial world. In recent years movements for reparations have focused attention on imperial archives, challenging the putative public mission of museums and demanding the return of purloined objects and texts. Some of the most radical movements have not only focused on the violence inherent in imperial archives but have called for the abolition of the institutions that house them and the return of cultural and economic resources to the communities from which they have been extracted. But in many parts of the world, the institutional archives that preserve the history of empire – and of anti-imperial resistance – are precarious and compromised by all sorts of forces, human and natural. In addition, archives come in many different forms. What if we assume that the imperial archive includes not just texts and valuable objects like statues but also bodies, buildings, and territories? How can we recuperate the memories of empire archived in bodies and territories?

In this performative panel, Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Ashley Dawson present short experimental films focused on the ways in which imperial power is inscribed in bodies and territory. Gallisá Muriente’s film The Envoy (2022) documents a ritual conducted by a group of friends, who unpack the colonial legacies that inhabit an Airbnb house in Puerto Rico that was built for the last US-appointed governor of the island. The impending sale of the house promises to make this physical remnant of US colonial domination of the island no longer accessible to Puerto Ricans. Dawson’s film Peaker (2024) traces the ways in which New York City’s dirty power plants have inscribed themselves in the bodies of the working-class communities of color where these facilities – essential to the functioning of the electric grid – are overwhelmingly concentrated. The South Bronx, where the city’s largest Puerto Rican population lives, houses the greatest number of these dirty peaker plants. How, Dawson’s film asks, can we not only make the intangible damage generated by the modern power system visible - how can we totally transform this system?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Ashley Dawson, CUNY

Panelist

• Sofia Gallisa Muriente

Comments

• Ruth Santiago

• Macarena Gómez-Barris, Brown University

Biographical Information

Ashley Dawson is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, where he teaches postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities. Recently published books of his include Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket, 2024) and Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2024). Dawson is the Climate Justice Fellow for 2024-25 at the arts organization Culture Push, and is also currently a faculty fellow at Social Practice CUNY. He is currently creating a series of short documentary films about the impact of energy infrastructure in NYC.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a visual artist whose practice proposes mechanisms for remembering and reimagining. Her works employ text, image and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetics and politics. She has been an artist research fellow of the Cisneros Institute at MoMA, Smithsonian Institute and Puerto Rican Arts Initiative, and awarded the Latinx Artist Fellowship and the United States Artist Fellowship. From 2014 to 2020, she co-directed the artist-run organization Beta-Local in San Juan.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar with a focus on the decolonial environmental humanities, authoritarianism and extractivism, queer Latinx epistemes, media environments, racial ecologies, cultural theory and artistic practice. She is author of four books including, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) that examines five scenes of ruinous extractive capitalism, and Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and solidarities in troubled times.

Ruth Santiago is a community and environmental lawyer based in the municipality of Salinas in southeastern Puerto Rico where she has worked with multiple organizations and groups for over thirty-eight years on projects ranging from a community newspaper, children’s services, a community school, fisher’s associations, ecotourism projects to rooftop solar energy pilot projects. Ruth has been involved in the establishment of broad alliances to prevent water pollution from landfills, power plant emissions and discharges and coal combustion residual waste. She is part of civil society initiatives to promote community-based solar projects and energy democracy. Ruth Santiago served on the former White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.