States of Embodiment: Animality, Racialization, and Environmental Justice

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

As a response to this year’s invitation to think about entanglements between (ongoing) states of emergency and “the emergence of contradictions, resistances, and resurgent modes of struggle,” this panel curates papers that think through the relationships among embodiment and ecological harm, place-making and dispossession, capture and fugitivity. Building upon recent cross-pollinations among environmental criticism, critical race studies, and American Studies, this panel attends to forms of ecological, economic, and interspecies violence that are often overlooked or obscured within broader discussions of anthropocentrism and environmental catastrophe.

It is increasingly common for journalists, politicians, and activists to declare exceptional states of environmental emergency in response to viral outbreaks and extreme weather, but, as Rob Nixon has demonstrated, much of the ongoing violence of environmental degradation happens slowly, affecting regions, stakeholders, and nonhuman actors that rest at the periphery of mainstream environmental concern. As we think through links among structural violence, embodiment, and marginalized sites of emergence/y, it behooves us to consider Sarah Jacquette Ray’s assertion that hierarchies of security and vulnerability are embedded in environmentalist critiques that rely on conventional registers of outrage and disgust to frame some humans as “ecologically good” and others as disruptive, “unnatural,” or “ecologically other.”

While it has long been argued that popular distinctions between “the natural” and “the unnatural” (or “the natural” and “the cultural”) identify horizons of human thought rather than ecological reality, these erroneous binaries continue to proliferate in the age of global environmental “emergency.” By examining entanglement among human and nonhuman actors (and environmental and political systems), this panel explores how notions of race, place, animality, “the natural,” and the “unnatural” continue to organize broad environmental activisms while obscuring local manifestations of ecological injustice, dehumanization, and marginalization. Deriving from a variety of different methodologies, disciplines, and socio-cultural theories, each paper investigates an entanglement between state of emergency and state of emergence as it intersects with human and nonhuman forces and discourses.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Janet M. Davis, The University of Texas at Austin

Individual Presentations

• Bass Pro Shops and the Redevelopment of the Memphis Pyramid - Sherri Sheu, University of Colorado-Boulder

• Oaklandish: Space, Dis/possession, and Creaturely Life in Lake Merritt - Daniel Lanza Rivers, Miami University-Oxford

• Proximity, Pestilence, and Blackness: Rats’ Nests as Human Archives - Lindsay Garcia, College of William and Mary

• Invasive Hog Emergenc(ies): Reifying a Multispecies Domesticity - Logan Natalie O'Laughlin, Duke University

Comment

• Janet M. Davis, The University of Texas at Austin