Abstract: This project analyzes motherhood and environmental destruction in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones in the hopes of highlighting the act of destruction by mother as occurring along a temporal trajectory as a residual effect of long-term catastrophe. In the ties that Ward draws between angry mothers and catastrophe, Ward underscores the ways in which birthing subjects act as potential indiscriminate destroyers of the very bodies they produce. The angry, vengeful mother emblematizes a figure of destruction against rational act—framed by narratives steeped in patriarchal-capitalist discourse. The murderous mother ensures an inevitability of violence, a cycle of events that continues into imagined futurity. Through the vengeful mother, the land reacts against its inhabitants indiscreetly, destroying white and black communities who have altered the landscape in varying ways. In fact, environmental violence is contest over space and time. No analysis of the effects of human subjects on the environment would suffice without acknowledging that high-powered individuals have altered the land in devastating ways, such as in chemical runoff from factories and farms producing consumptive goods at a massive scale. Individual laborers are not responsible for these environmental damages, but they nevertheless must live with the repercussions, just as the consecutive generations of Black Americans living in the south must live with the ongoing catastrophe of slavery. The architectures of slavery present on the surface of the environment inform the relationships subjects hold to the land and to the varying forces of nature that, too, inhabit the land. Ward’s analytic delineates how the catastrophe will be understood as a cultural narrative, and her conceptions of motherhood reveal the potential for structural analysis as a pathway toward survival and futurity.
Bio: Michaela Corning-Myers is a PhD student at Northwestern University in the Department of English. She studies Nineteenth-century American literature with a focus on naturalism, women writers, economic systems of domination, and urbanity.
Abstract: “even when they are nonliving, or rather inorganic, things have a lived experience because they are perceptions and affections” (Deleuze and Guattari).
In Kiran Desai’s ‘Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard’, a young Sampath seeks solace from the clamour of incomprehensible existence in a guava orchard – a rather incidental incident after failing to make a mark in the commercial and familial world. Pre-destined to be ‘different’ (his mother Kulfi has rather uncommon cravings during pregnancy – almost bordering on the absurd), his retreat into the guava orchard – his arboreal kingdom inaugurates a series of adventurous events for the entire town of Shahkot.
This hinging on the arboreal imagery seems to convey a sense of assurance to his being, his existence - and this idea forms the crux of this paper. Through a close reading of the text, I will attempt to unravel how the arboreal imaginations at work in and within the text function as the exponents of existential and personal navigation for the protagonist.
His metamorphosis into a guava affords one to speculate on the various taxonomies of affect in the text, and the aim of the paper is to offer a reconciliatory reading of the text with the arboreal imagination, thereby delineating and bringing to the fore the politics of existence, the politics of existing, the ecology of bio-healing, and the solidarity between (subalterned) humans and trees, the nature-culture division in the wake of the Anthropocene, and metamorphosis as a (possible) posthuman imagination.
Bio: Sonakshi Srivastava graduated from the University of Delhi, in 2020, and is a graduate candidate at Indraprastha University, Delhi, where she researches on the Anthropocene, Phenomenology, and Discard Studies. She was also an Oceanvale Scholar for the Spring-Autumn session at Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi, where she researched on the representation of dis/abilities in the face of unnatural disasters. She is also the recipient of the Tempus Public Foundation scholarship. She is the member of ASLE-UKI, and ASLE-ASEAN, and curator at “DharTree”, her eco-friendly brainchild in formation. Her writings on ecology are upcoming or have appeared in The Green Letters, eSharp Journal etc. She has presented papers at various conferences on themes around the Anthropocene and was the DAAD exchange student fellow at the Climate/Changes/Global Perspectives Summer Symposium at University of Wuerzburg. She is also a translator, and an award-winning writer. Her areas of interests include aesthetics and critical theory, memory and trauma studies, animal studies and ethics, food studies, and Indian Writing in English among others.
Abstract: This paper argues that the most fruitful analysis of the capitalist-colonial enterprise looks not at its modes of production but at its modes of extermination and disposal. It introduces the concept of trashification: the process by which goods are obliterated into waste. The particular material that is traced through commodification and trashification is the flesh of black and brown female or feminized bodies. The paper traces the history of these bodies rendered into fungible goods with no inherent value, only contingent value insofar as they can be used to purchase some desired outcome and then discarded as waste.
Using an interdisciplinary method that combines images, stories and theory, the paper illustrates the process of trashification through three vignettes: One in which bodies become things, material, instrumentalized in the progression of medical science; another in which bodies become animals, sexual beasts to be ravished or livestock to be worked until death; a third in which bodies become real estate, territory to be acquired or reclaimed.
This paper constellates diverse feminist and queer anti-capitalist narratives which descend from South American decolonial theories and US black critical theories. The main interlocutors of the three stories are Riley Snorton, Maria Lugones, and Rita Segato. Departing from different geopolitical locations, their stories challenge a hegemonic historicization based on the “progress” narrative of the contemporary civilizatory project. Specifically, they ask: in which ways did racialized and gendered ideas develop simultaneously as part of a capitalist-colonial enterprise? To what extent does this particular onto-epistemological fusion of race and gender determine who or what is commodified and trashed? Ultimately, they call forth the imagination to address these questions: What would it look like to live in a world where nothing, and no one, is rendered as garbage? What would it take?
Bio: Lucila is a 3rd-year Ph.D. student in the Anthropology Department and the Graduate Certificate Program in Feminist Theory in WGSS, UMass. Lucila has an academic background in medical anthropology, feminist theory, and experimental filmmaking. Her Master's Thesis for the Visual Anthropology Program at San Francisco State University materialized in the documentary "Idalia and the Niño Santo." This film offers a multilayered portrait of Idalia, a Mazatec indigenous shaman and reproductive justice activist from Oaxaca, Mexico. Her current Ph.D. research is titled "The Spectral Landscape of the Womb: Latinx Stories of Pregnancy, Birth, and Abortion in New England." This participatory research aims to appreciate and document the full lived experiences of Latinx pregnant people whom Lucila supports as their full-spectrum doula.