Residues, Traces, and Debris: Inhabiting the Toxic Remains of Empire

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

How do traces of imperial dominance and Cold War conflicts continue to circulate as chemical pollution and atmospheric debris —even as the systems that conceived and produced them are eroded and transformed? From the contaminated “middle ecologies” of US industrial manufacturing to struggles over atmospheric sovereignty, the residues of Cold-War era American empire persist in water, soil, and air. Working to understand what Heather Davis calls the “banal violence” of the everyday transmission of the products and byproducts of the military industrial complex and chemical industries, this panel tackles the complexities of plastics, PCBs, forever chemicals (PFAS), and military refuse as they move through neighborhoods and workplaces, or land, literally and metaphorically, in landscapes for which they were never intended. In powerful ways, the papers in this session explore how following these material traces – the qualities and meanings of which remain emphatically multiple – opens up complex histories of corporate and imperial power. In doing so, they reveal fights for environmental justice that never happened or have yet to be born, those that might unfold at conflicting times of chemical latency and social political realities.

Tracing the material pathways of these relationships across time and space, this panel leans into the necessary and affirming work of thinking the possibility of anti-imperial socioecological forms from amid the debris patterns, contaminated bodies, and chemical residues of late-stage American empire, refusing a politics of purity in favor of forged solidarities and future imaginings within its enduring present. The panelists explore not only the social and political implications of these residues, but also offer important insights into the eco- and somatic temporalities of late-stage American empire.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Breathing Plastic Air - Heather Davis, The New School

• Imperial Fluorine: Documenting the Circulation of Forever Chemicals - Morgan Adamson, Macalester College

• The Environmental Justice Fight that Never Happened in Monsanto, Illinois: PCBs and Material Culture’s Corporate Capture - Jessica Varner, University of Pennsylvania

Chair

• Bruce Braun, University of Minnesota

Comment

• Bruce Braun, University of Minnesota

Biographical Information

Chair/Commenter:
Bruce Braun is Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography, Environment and
Society (GES) at the University of Minnesota. He is a specialist in political ecology,
infrastructural politics, and settler environmentalisms. He is currently working on two projects:
“Learning from Ada’itsx,” with Cliff Atleo and Michael Simpson, which explores the shifting
territorialities, ecologies, and solidarities of forestry on Indigenous lands in British Columbia,
Canada, and “Dismantlings: the Art and Politics of Taking Things Apart,” which delves into the
concrete practices and contentious politics of dismantling infrastructures deemed harmful or
obsolete. Among other books, he is the author of The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture
and Power on Canada’s West Coast (Minnesota, 2002), Social Nature: Theory, Practice, Politics
(Wiley, 2001), Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy and Public Life (Minnesota, 2010),
and most recently Settling the Boom: Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil (Minnesota, 2023).

Panelists:
Jerry Zee is assistant professor in Princeton University’s Department of Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. His interdisciplinary work engages with environmental anthropology and humanities, geography, Asian and Chinese studies, political philosophy, materialisms of various types, feminist science studies, multispecies ethnography, queer theory, science fiction and other SFs. He is the author of Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System (University of California Press, 2022).


Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School. As an interdisciplinary scholar working in environmental humanities, media studies, and visual culture, she is interested in how fossil fuels have shaped contemporary culture. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic’s saturation. Davis is an active member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.

Jessica Varner, PhD, is an assistant professor in history at the University of Pennsylvania, Department of Landscape and Regional Planning, Weitzman School of Design. Her research has received generous support from the ACLS/Getty, Fulbright, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, National Science Foundation, Science History Institute, USC Society of Fellows, and the Graham Foundation. She is working with the University of Chicago Press on her forthcoming book, Chemical Desires: When the Chemical Industry Met Modern Design (1870-1970). Her recent work includes articles and projects on chromium, drywall, toxicity, community-led environmental history, synthetic chemicals, neurotoxins, and chemical modernity. Additionally, she works collectively on alternatives and repair in toxics with A People's EPA (APE, co-founder), Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), and Coming Clean.

Morgan Adamson is Professor and Chair of Media and Cultural Studies at Macalester College and works at the intersections of non-fiction film and cultural studies. Grounded in archival research and collaboration, her film practice animates hidden histories and infrastructures as a form of social engagement situated in place. Her recent award-winning documentary, Brutal Utopias (2023), is an essay on the struggle to define social utopia through architecture. She is the author of a book on political cinema, Enduring Images: A Future History of New Left Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), in addition to numerous scholarly and popular essays on ecologies of race, place, finance, and social reproduction. She is currently working on a feature-length documentary that tackles the colonial and imperial origins of the forever chemical crisis.