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Curated Track: Black Geographies Specialty Group Curated Track

Description:

The entry of the Anthropocene into the popular lexicon of climate change offered an important conceptual opening for examining the provenance of anthropogenic factors in driving the global ecological crisis (Lewis and Maslin, 2015; Steffen, et al., 2011). However, as critics of the term have made clear, the Anthropocene masks the relations of racial capitalism, (settler-)colonialism, and Indigenous land expropriation entailed in the production of the modern world system (Davis, et al., 2019; Tuana, 2019; Vergès, 2019). A crucial consequence of these elisions is the presentation of an undifferentiated humanity as the agent of socio-ecological change often with no distinction between those who have driven the socio-ecological crisis and those who are disproportionately bearing the risks and vulnerability of modern capitalist socio-ecology (Sultana, 2022). Critical interventions that provide increased awareness of global climate injustice and clarify the dynamics of power that reproduce socio-ecological inequality make clear how climate change is narrated and how climate futurities are imagined are politically and materially important. The stories and storytelling of ecological catastrophe matter for how we envision and enact viable, equitable, and just futures (Gergan, et al., 2020; Harris, 2020; Wynter and McKittrick, 2015).

So what happens when climate catastrophes cause the destruction of sites that help us remember legacies of colonialism, racial capitalism, and slavery? Sites of memory and remembering, as painful as they may be, are central to climate justice, as spaces of resistance and models for forecasting climate futures without recapitulating harmful pasts (de Massol, 2019; Harris, 2022). For example, we see how histories of flooding have been used to erase important landmarks-- thriving Black communities in the U.S. South, for example-- and we can see how sea-level rise threatens to repeat these histories. We see how legacies of colonial forest management have resulted in scorched landscapes in the increasingly arid U.S. West, and how this mismanagement, which has ignored Indigenous fire ecologies, is leading to the burning of sacred Indigenous landscapes in the present. What happens when these histories are lost?

In this session we invite papers that attend to this central question: How does climate related transformation of commemorative landscapes of slavery, settler-colonialism, and racial capitalist extraction affect the prospects of climate change storytelling, and prospects for climate justice by proxy? We seek papers and presentations that draw on a multiplicity of methods and theoretical approaches across different, but intersecting disciplines. We welcome projects examining the plurality of climate change geographies. We envision papers that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

Coastal flooding and submergence of plantation geographies in the Caribbean
Storm surges and threats to cultural heritage in the Pacific Islands
Hurricanes and destruction of Black historical sites in the U.S. South and East Coast
Forest forest fires and the risks for Indigenous cultural centers in the U.S. West and Southwest
Droughts in Europe and the emergence of new records of climate change

Please submit an abstract of 250-words or a 250-word description of creative project/presentation to Alex Moulton (amoulto3@utk.edu) and Dylan M. Harris (dharri14@uccs.edu) by November 1, 2022. We will explore the possibilities of a special issue based on abstract and later paper submissions, as well as participants' interest. We envision a hybrid session, to ensure that potential participants that are in either in-person or virtual/zoom presentations will be able to participate based on their preference.

References

Davis, J., Moulton, A. A., Van Sant, L. & Williams, B. (2019) Anthropocene, capitolocene…plantationocene?: A manifesto for ecological justice in an age of global crises. Geography Compass, 13(5), e12438.

de Massol, C. (2019). The Anthropocene Memorial:: Recording Climate Change on The Banks of the Potomac River in Washington DC. Sanglap: Journal of literary and cultural inquiry, 5(2), 5-18.

Gergan, M., Smith, S., & Vasudevan, P. (2020). Earth beyond repair: Race and apocalypse in collective imagination. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(1), 91-110.

Harris, D. M. (2020). Telling stories about climate change. The Professional Geographer, 72(3), 309-316.

Harris, D. M. (2022). The Trouble with Modeling the Human into the Future Climate. GeoHumanities, 1-17.

Lewis, S. L., & Maslin, M. A. (2015). Defining the anthropocene. Nature, 519(7542), 171-180.

Steffen, W., Grinevald, J., Crutzen, P., & McNeill, J. (2011). The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 369(1938), 842-867.

Sultana, F. (2022). The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality. Political Geography, 102638.

Tuana, N. (2019). Climate apartheid: The forgetting of race in the Anthropocene. Critical Philosophy of Race, 7(1), 1-31.

Vergès, F. (2019). Capitalocene, waste, race, and gender. e-flux journal, 100.

Wynter, S., & McKittrick, K. (2015). Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations. In Sylvia Wynter (pp. 9-89). Duke University Press.

Non-Presenting Participants