Resisting with/for/as the non/Human in Late Stage American Empire

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel seeks to engage with the metaphorical, affective, biological, and resistive ways in which the non/Human shapes discourse and materiality in Late State American Empire. The figurative non/Human and the actual non/Human are shape-shifters. Historically, as in the present, authoritarian, genocidal, and fascist governments employ the metaphorical animal to dehumanize and rationalize the killing and maiming of minoritarian peoples. Invasion metaphors tie so-called invasive species to immigration imaginaries. Meanwhile, large scale social media algorithms soothe the masses into a state of hypnosis through showing cute animal videos, keeping people distracted from larger regressive governmental policies and structures. The same laws that have harmed and continue to harm multiply marginalized people at disproportionate rates also harm living non-humans and their ecosystems. The ways in which global warming, factory farming, and anti-conservationist greed endeavors to expand the Empires of those in power suture the bodies of human and non/Human into relationships that are, at times intimate, toxic, loving, bigoted, and distant. Drawing upon insights from Black studies, ethnic studies, critical disability studies and queer studies, this panel seeks to connect the ways in which oppressive structures under late stage American Empires enmesh humans and non/Humans into affective, biological, and discursive assemblages and how these relations can be used to resist the rise of facism across the globe.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Unsettling Imperial and Fascist Geographies: U.S. Racial Discourses of Invasion, Alienated Species, and Abolitionist Restoration - Lisa Fink, Michigan State University

• NIMBYism and Neoliberalism: Categorizing and Confining the Unhoused - Maya L McKeever, University of Southern California

• The Visual Politics of Pest Metaphor - Lindsay D Garcia, Brown University

• Listening to Eartha Kitt in Late-Stage Empire - Elea Proctor, Ohio State University-Main Campus

Chair

• Ashley Dawson, CUNY

Biographical Information

Lisa Fink (they, she) is a poet, translator, and scholar of political ecology and environmental humanities. They live and work on Dena’ina lands as a National Park Service (NPS) Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the NPS Alaska Region, affiliated with the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Their first monograph, “Unsettled Ecologies,” is a critical race and Indigenous studies account of environmental discourse, thought, and practice concerning species invasion as it intersects with anti-immigrant, anti-Asian, and anti-Indigenous discourse, and abolitionist forms of environmental thought and practice that emerge in contestation. Their writing can be found in American Quarterly, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Boston Review, Park Science, and Humanities (among others).

Maya McKeever (she/her) is a third-year PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC). She also serves as the Graduate Research Assistant for the Black Studies Initiative at USC. She holds a BA in Political Science with a minor in Critical Black Studies from Bucknell University. Her research explores the histories, lived experiences, and liberatory futures for Black and Indigenous unhoused individuals in the United States.

Lindsay Garcia (she/her) is an artist, scholar, thinker, educator, and advocate in the areas of substance use and mental health. Her current position is the Associate Dean of the College for Junior/Senior Studies and Recovery/Substance-Free Initiatives at Brown University. Garcia is the President of the Board of Directors of RICARES and a Co-chair of the Board of Directors of the Association for Recovery in Higher Education. She is an appointed member of the Rhode Island Governor’s Council on Behavioral Health. Garcia has a BFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design, MA in Contemporary Art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, MFA in Visual Arts from Purchase College, State University of New York, and MA and PhD in American Studies from William & Mary. She lives with her wife Helis Sikk and punk poodle Winslow on the east side of Providence.

Elea Proctor (she/her) is an assistant professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University. She holds a BA in Music from Florida State University and an MA and PhD in Musicology from Stanford University. Her research examines Black women’s musical performance and the blackface minstrelsy tradition. Her most recent writing can be found in the Journal of the Society for American Music.

Ashley Dawson (he/they) is Professor of English at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. Recently published books of his focus on key topics in the Environmental Humanities, and include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). Dawson is the author of a forthcoming book entitled Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket Press), and co-editor of a volume of essays called Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions Press).