Elemental Postcards from Beyond Empire: Excavation / Dust

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

These two connected sessions take an elemental fixation through postcards, messages, snapshots from the physical and temporal edges of the dying field of empire. Air and land, land and water, from land to dust and into the air again, we traverse the scapes of the hauntings and futurities of empires. What is possible when empire is left to dust?

In these sessions (Land/Water and Excavation/Dust), we use the heuristic of postcards to dialogue across spatiotemporalities that are simultaneously brought into relation through the structure of colonial modernity, both frictions amongst colonized peoples and the coalitions they sometimes form against logics that seek to dismember their relations to one another and the earth. Whereas Land/Water engages the liminality of horizons and shores, Excavation/Dust captures vertical mobility as particles and memories reemerge from burial.

We examine how colonial racial discursive practices become territorialized and embodied. Refusing a singular story of what it means to be human on earth as the white bourgeois modern male subject, the papers are situated in ongoing genocides, attending to multiple and entangled articulations of colonialisms and imperialisms. Our sessions trace the routes that connect colonial spaces and anti-colonial processes. Each paper unearths the legacies and archives of oppression and resurfaces global subaltern relationships to land and story.

Session I (Land/Water) explores coloniality and capitalism at the interface of land and water. Foregrounding relationships to aquaterreous worlds that derive from colonized people’s knowledges, these postcards from beyond empire refuse to evacuate these ecologies of their life forces. Session II (Excavation/Dust) explores figurative and material excavations of seeds, of artifacts, of archives; and the routes that things once buried take to resurface and, perhaps, take flight. Together, these papers offer a diagnostic of empires’ fixities in relation to land and body by unsettling linear spatiotemporalities.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Collard Atlas: Experiments with multispecies community archives - Christian Keeve, University of Kentucky

• Arctic Zombie Dreaming from the Edge - Patricia Lopez, University of Washington

• Routes of Reclamation - Kaily Heitz, University of California-Los Angeles

• Rewriting Capitalism’s Horror Story - Pavithra Vasudevan, The University of Texas At Austin

• Imperial Circuits of Recognition - Erin McElroy, University of Washington

Chair

• Jane Henderson, Dartmouth College

Biographical Information

Kaily Heitz is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. As a critical human geographer and Black geographies scholar, Dr. Heitz’s work focuses on cultural and community responses to racialized dispossession in California. She is currently working on a manuscript, Oakland is a Vibe: The Relational Geographies of Black Cultural Development, which explores anti-displacement activist projects in Oakland that manipulate the practices of racial capitalist development in order to create sanctuaries for Black life, art, and liberation.

tish lopez is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Washington. As a historical and contemporary geographer, her work is situated at the intersections of health and disease, race and racial science, and care. At the root of much of her work is an attention to how health and disease are exercised in the making of worlds both real and imagined. She has published two co-edited volumes with Kathryn Gillespie: Vulnerable Witness: The politics of grief in the field (UC Press 2019) and Economies of Death: Economic logics of killable life and grievable death. She is currently working on a book titled Monstrous Microbes: Geographies of Disease and the Making of the Human.

Christian Keeve is a seedkeeper, chaotic gardener, and PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Kentucky, as well as Woodson Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia. Their focus is on the cultural and political ecologies of seedkeeping as environmental justice movement work, and as such, they work collaboratively as a grower and organizer with organizations including Truelove Seeds, The Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, The Utopian Seed Project, and The Heirloom Collard Project. They are excited about the archival ecologies of cultural seeds, solidarities beyond the human, and the sorghum harvest

Pavithra Vasudevan is an Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-founder of the UT Austin Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine. Pavithra’s book in progress, A Toxic Alchemy: Race and Waste in Industrial Capitalism, is a geopoetic catalyst testifying to the fragmentation of life under racial-colonial capitalism. Pavithra employs performance, film, poetry and creative writing methods to reimagine scholarship as storytelling. She is a practitioner of movement forms including Bharata Natyam, Odissi, aikido and yoga, a student of Qawwali/Hindusthani music and poetry, and a mama to a rainbow unicorn. https://pavithravasudevan.com

Erin McElroy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, where their work focuses upon intersections of gentrification, technology, empire, and racial capitalism, alongside housing justice organizing and transnational solidarities. McElroy is author of Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times (Duke University Press, 2024) and coeditor of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press, 2021). McElroy is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and also runs Landlord Tech Watch, both committed to producing collaborative housing-justice-based research.

Jane Henderson is an assistant professor in the department of geography at Dartmouth. As a historical geographer, her research addresses the relationship between black placemaking and settler colonialism across North America and the Caribbean. Her current book project focuses specifically on how frontier imaginaries shape black geographies of Minnesota. Jane is also co-PI on the Antipode Foundation funded project “Beyond Esri: Moving Toward Abolition in Geography” which analyzes the role of geography education and geospatial tools in contemporary policing and surveillance.