Recording Plan: 

Curated Track: 

Morgan P. Vickers, University of Washington

Call For Participation

Description:

Beyond a scholarly project, 'Explosivity: Following What Remains' (University of Minnesota Press) is a critical activation of the senses. This book presents readers with the explosive remains of racial capitalism and everyday militarisms. It’s a call to practice a radical remembering of what remains from historical explosions through an intimate study, grounded and written in California’s San Francisco Bay Area, and includes specially commissioned landscape photography.

Based on five major explosions in the Bay Area between 1866 and 2011, this highly experimental and creative work proposes explosivity as a novel lens to study the everyday racialized exposure to volatile chemicals. 'Explosivity' exposes, in a comprehensive way for the first time, a city of explosivity. The book reveals an urbanism shaped by the industrialization of geophysical combustion fixed into place. But — how to sense explosivity?

Extensively researched for over a decade, 'Explosivity' is a unique work created with eclectically mixed field methods: from oral histories to on-site landscape traverses, and from archival documents to media studies, and more. The resulting text is collagist in approach, weaving stories of the five main explosions throughout the book, and augmented with additional vignettes of the Bay Area’s explosive landscapes.

'Explosivity' finds persistent risks of blowing up by attending to the lives of Chinese migrant explosives workers in the nineteenth century and followed by Black munition loaders on the World War II home front.

Over time, idyllic urban parks, transport infrastructures, and security assemblages successively develop on top of the same geographies of storing, moving, and testing explosive substances. The placement and sensorial suppression of explosivity locks-in risk, and further entangles the lives of environmentalists, anti-war protestors, and even residents exposed to neighboring media productions staging live explosive stunts on police bombing ranges.

As a proposition, 'Explosivity' applies a range of theoretical approaches--drawing from feminist technoscience, critical military studies, Black and Asian radical geographies, and political ecology--to spend time with the mobilized remains of explosions and their myriad toxicities, bringing attention to the logistical tendrils of racial capitalism.

The resulting text recognizes the radical politics of interrupting the logistics of explosivity, in part, by following what remains. 'Explosivity' is a cry for radical memory, decoupled from staid landmarks, fixed memorials, and historical preservation.

Non-Presenting Participants