We are Homo Narrans: Experimentations in writing as anticolonial praxis
Topics: Environmental Justice
, Ethnicity and Race
, Cultural and Political Ecology
Keywords: Black geographies; futurity; racial capitalism; anticolonialism; toxicity; creative writing
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 40
Authors:
Pavithra Vasudevan, Assistant Professor, The University of Texas at Austin
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Abstract
My book in progress, Toxic Alchemy, re-examines racial-colonial capitalism through the materiality and metaphor of aluminum production as alchemy. The life and death of people racialized as disposable have endowed aluminum, an inorganic substance, with vitality and value, and in turn, aluminum production has embedded industrial detritus into Black and Indigenous bodies and ecologies. The book is written in two parts: “Book 1: Toxic Alchemy” is meditates on Blackness and industrial capitalism through the ethnography of an aluminum smelting company town in the Southern U.S.; and “Book 2: An Inventory of Injustice” is an experimental account of who and what are rendered disposable in the global aluminum production.
Writing Toxic Alchemy has been an experiment with language, of learning from and creating poetry and prose that mirror racial-colonial capitalism’s fragmentation of life. In chronicling how we’ve gone wrong, writing as anticolonial praxis enacts its own alchemy, rupturing received understandings and animating alternate possibilities. I build on the work of anticolonial philosophers whose writings explore not only the theoretical conceits, but also the creative modes of radical politics that transform critique into catalyst.
In this paper, I write from the perspective of Sylvia Wynter’s aspirational figure of the human - Homo narrans or “the storytelling human” – who looks back upon industrial history as a failed experiment and urges us to reimagine our collective capacity. In narrating industrialization as one mode of organizing the world through the grammar of value, we discover innumerable openings for imagining and building otherwise.
We are Homo Narrans: Experimentations in writing as anticolonial praxis
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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