Ecologies of Empire II

Abstract

This panel offers ecologies of empire as a frame within which to detect state efforts to territorialize and materialize sovereign power through extensive biotic and geologic systems across space and time. We attend to practices and legacies of war, colonization, and enslavement by exploring the extensive choreography of uneven human and more-than-human flourishing and ruination engendered in land, water, air, waste, and flesh, both by design, and also through practiced ignorance.

We understand ecologies here as naturalcultural spaces-entangled materialities that make living and dying possible-asserting that both an anthropocenic scale and the specific frictions of empire remain integral to any ecological scene. By bringing together work in and on both centers and peripheries of empire (US, Puerto Rico, Korea, India, Iraq), we seek to find new ways to put these nodes into relation. This includes attending to displaced violences, both fast and slow, externalized and internalized, that redistribute the possibilities of living and dying across emergent ecological niches.

We also ask what it means to make good relations both to and within our ecologies, as well as to each other as scholars with overlapping but distinct formations and localizations of empire. We aim to convene these varied projects under the sign of allyship, rather than through a logic of scholarly extraction (how does your work serve my project), and take the occasion of the panel to manifest forms of scholarly conviviality, through parallel practices such as the creation of a collaborative panel playlist and optional co-writing sessions.

Chair

• Zoe Wool, University of Toronto

Discussant

• Hiilei Hobart, The University of Texas at Austin

Individual Presentations

• Surviving the Hunt: White-Tailed Deer on Culebra Island and Reciprocal Capture on the Edges of Empire - Adriana Maria Garriga-López, Kalamazoo College

• Rural Black Social Life in the Chesapeake After the 1933 Great Hurricane - J.T. Roane, Arizona State University

• What happens when war is what queers an ecology? - Kali Rubaii, Purdue University

• Body Heat: Race, Climate and the Consolidation of Imperial Difference - Bharat Jayram Venkat, UCLA

Session Organizers

• Zoe Wool, University of Toronto

• Xan Sarah Chacko, Wellesley College