Imperial and Decolonial Waters: Knowledge, Dissent, Climate Justice

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel traces the continuity of US imperialism from its beginning to the present from a decidedly water-centered perspective that will reveal the entanglements of settler colonialism, enslavement, imperialism, extraction, and toxicity, which recklessly impose direct and slow violence onto human bodies, coastal and river cultures, bodies of water, ocean floors, littoral and marine habitats, and ocean and river life. It seeks to expose the entanglements of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Planationocene, and Imperialocene we should add, through a water-centered lens that focuses on archipelagic, marine, littoral, and tidalectical paradigms of thought. At the same time the panel explores radical ways of resistance and dissent that are generated through local, Caribbean, LatinX, and Indigenous cultures and, connections to water and the more-than-human, sustainable practices, social and cultural activism, critical art and literature – to achieve essential change and climate justice.
The contributions study historical and present US colonialism and imperialism linked to cultural and environmental destruction and various forms of dissent tied to continental-coastal, Caribbean, and Pacific knowledges, practices, and resistance. Beatriz Llenín Figueroa will start the session with a critical-creative piece that addresses historical and contemporary instances of ecological exploitation and degradation in Guanajibo, Mayagüez, Boquerón, Cabo Rojo and Tallaboa, Peñuelas. She discusses how these ecosystems are symptomatic of both historical and current trajectories of U.S. imperialism and capitalism through canned tuna, luxury tourism, and petrochemical industries and how they are met with local Puerto Rican resistance.
Caroline Rosenthal discusses American colonization through and of rivers, while looking at how Indigenous peoples fight not only for their lands but for control over the course, accessibility, and purity of their waters. She analyses literary texts from Henry David Thoreau to Daphne Marlatt, Lee Maracle and Jeanette Armstrong which decolonize settler-colonialist waters not only in their subject matter but through distinctly water-based means of representation.
Kerstin Knopf concludes arguing that American imperialist claims to Pacific ocean space and its resources are inseparable from the appropriated right to hunt whales and the extractivist exploitation of their oil in the 19th century, while the threat of extinction of the species forced Indigenous whaling cultures to give up sustainable whaling. The paper will read together Moby-Dick and People of the Whale and look at their representation of oceans and whales, extractive and colonial violence, marine knowledges, and resistance struggles that focus on food and water sovereignty.
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is chair/commentator for this session; she specializes in colonial, postcolonial Latin American and Caribbean literatures and co-edits the book series “Critical Caribbean Studies” at Rutgers University Press.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Puerto Rican Bodies of Water and Flesh Against the Hyperbolic Death Machine - Beatriz Llenín Figueroa

• Unlocking the Wild in Rivers of Empire: Decolonizing Settler-Colonialist Waters - Caroline Rosenthal

• Writing Whales: Indigenous Knowledges and Resistance in People of the Whale - Kerstin Knopf, U Bremen

Chair

• Kerstin Knopf, U Bremen

Comment

• Yolanda M Martinez-San Miguel, University of Miami

Biographical Information

Beatriz Llenín Figueroa (1984, Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, she/her) is a companion and friend, an independent writer, scholar, editor, and translator, a student of walks-swims, animals, and live arts. With Lissette Rolón Collazo, she is associate editor of the Puerto Rican independent press, Editora Educación Emergente (EEE). She is also the coordinator of its editing and translation services platform, PalabrAdicción/WordAddiction.
Since 2015, she writes for Será otra cosa, a section of the Claridad newspaper’s cultural bulletin. Her six books to date oscillate between theory, criticism and creation, as well as between prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Among these, Affect, Archive, Archipelago: Puerto Rico’s Sovereign Caribbean Lives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), which will be published in Spanish in 2025, stands out. Currently, she is immersed in a three-volume project preliminarily entitled, Puerto Rico caminado, as well as in the fight against Esencia, a luxury residential and touristic megadevelopment announced for construction near Boquerón, Cabo Rojo. For almost a decade, she taught as adjunct faculty at the Río Piedras and Mayagüez campuses of the University of Puerto Rico. She now teaches and learns wherever possible.

Caroline Rosenthal is Professor of American Literature at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena. She has published on Comparative North American Studies; Canadian literature, culture, and literary theory; city fiction and spatial theory; as well as on present day reverberations of Romantic ideas and practices, especially on Henry David Thoreau. Most recently her research has focused on Ecocriticism, Nature Writing, and the Blue Humanities. Her publications include, New York and Toronto Novels after Postmodernism: Explorations of the Urban (Camden House 2011); Gained Ground: Perspectives on Canadian and Comparative North American Studies (ed. with Eva Gruber, Camden House 2018). Anglophone Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene (ed. with Gina Comos, Cambridge Scholars 2019), Writing Water in Classic American Literature, Special Issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, (with Kerstin Knopf) 2025: 2 (forthcoming), The Blue Humanities, Special Issue of Wissenschaft Literatur und Unterricht, (with Hanna Masslich) 2025: 2 (forthcoming).

Kerstin Knopf is professor for North American and Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Bremen in Germany and director of the institute for postcolonial and transcultural studies (INPUTS) and the Bremen Institute for Canada and Quebec Studies (BICQS). She is also co-founder of the Bremen Blue Humanities Research Group. Her main research interests are Indigenous film and literature, Postcolonial Studies focusing on North America and the Pacific region, Blue Humanities, epistemological power relations and postcolonial knowledge systems, and American and Canadian romantic literature. She published Decolonizing the Lens of Power: Indigenous Films in North America (Rodopi 2008), and edited, among others, Aboriginal Canada Revisited (U of Ottawa P, 2008), North America in the 21st Century: Tribal, Local, and Global (WVT 2011), From Marx to Global Marxism: Eurocentrism, Resistance, Postcolonial Criticism (ed. with Detlev Quintern, Trier: WVT, 2020), Contradiction Studies – Exploring the Field (ed. with Gisela Febel and Martin Nonhoff, Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2023), Biopolitics – Geopolitics – Life: Settler States and Indigenous Presences (ed. with René Dietrich, Duke UP, 2023) and Postcolonial Oceans: Contradictions, Heterogeneities, Knowledges, Materialities (ed. with Sukla Chatterjee, Joanna Chojnicka and Anna-Katharina Hornidge, Heidelberg UP, 2023). Her most recent books are the monograph The Gothic Canadian Century. Unhomely Beginnings and Canada's Gothic Literature in English. 1800-1900 (Trier: WVT, 2024) and The Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Film (ed. with Ernie Blackmore, Wendy Pearson and Corina Wieser-Cox, Routledge, 2024).

Commentator:
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is the Marta Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies at the University of Miami. She received her BA from the University of Puerto Rico and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She has taught at Princeton University (1997-2000), Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (2000-2003; 2008-2017) and the University of Pennsylvania (2003-2008). She specializes in colonial, postcolonial Latin American and Caribbean literatures. She is the author of four books: Saberes americanos: subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana (Iberoamericana, 1999); Caribe Two-Ways?: cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (Ediciones Callejón, 2003); From Lack to Excess: ‘Minor’ Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (Bucknell, 2008), and Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context (Palgrave, 2014). She has co-edited Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations, (with Michelle Stephens, Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) and the Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (with Santa Arias, Routledge, 2021). She is working on her fifth book, “Overseas Archipelagoes: Comparative Caribbean and Colonial Studies.” She co-edits the book series “Critical Caribbean Studies” at Rutgers University Press.