Kathleen Kruz Gutierrez’s paper, “White Space: A Colonial Intellectual History of Pitogo,” highlights the connection between ecological degradation and the production of colonial knowledge of botany in the Philippines. Situating the discovery, naming, and study of cycas wadei, a species of cycad endemic to the Culion Island, during the U.S. colonial administration in the archipelago, Guitierrez contends that the ways in which the plant is presented and studied in isolation from its habitat by American botanists and their Filipino assistants are indicative of the anthropocentric approach to “nature.” She examines how Spanish and American naturalists and artists’ drawings helped produce the visual epistemology of the colonial empire for managing the natural resources of the colony. This type of epistemological “white space,” Gutierrez argues, could erase the violence that underpinned imperial expeditions and the local origins of plant species. Seen in this light,Gutierrez contends, the colonial intellectual history of pitogo is also the history of the imperial expansion. She notes that isolated portrayals of plants in the "white space" served to erase the violence accompanied imperial expeditions and resource extractions from the Philippines, which have led to both ecological destruction and environmental activism, demonstrating the lingering material and discursive impact of imperial ruination.
Extending the concept of “imperial debris” to the impact of settler colonialism, Rina Garcia Chua’s paper, “Disentrancing the Rot of White-Settler Colonialism in Philippine and Canadian Ecopoetry,” confronts most settler-colonial subjects’ willful ignorance of the prolonged violence and injustice against Aboriginal communities and their environments. Chua points out that despite the fact that there have been motions presented by government or non-government agencies to address ecological injustice against Aboriginal peoples, disavowal of the destruction of vital socio-ecological communities has prevailed in both the Philippines and Canada. Subsequently, the socio-environmental injustice against the Aboriginal communities and their ancestral lands continues. Chua’s examination of the respective ecopoems by the Filipino poet Achilles B. Mina and the Canadian poet Tom Wayman seeks to foreground instances of indigenous people’s resistance against colonial anthropocentric domination and destruction. Thus, the ecopoems Chua analyses allow her to explore the concept of “disentrancing”: the process of finding instances of resistance against the disavowal. Rather than focusing only on ecological collapses resulting from settler colonialism, Chua explores the agency of literature for intervening in the disavowals that help perpetuate the “rot” of white-settler colonialism in the Philippines and Canada.
Heidi Hong’s paper, “Toxic Waters: Visualizing Vietnamese Ecologies in the Afterlives of Empire,” expands on Stoler’s notion of imperial ruin as an active and ongoing process by contextualizing the ruination of Vietnamese waterscapes within a longer colonial history of U.S. militarism and East Asian sub-imperialism in Southeast Asia. Using the Taiwanese plant Formosa Ha Tinh Steel’s illegal dumping of 300 tons of toxic chemical waste off the central coast of Vietnam as an example, Hong argues that the pollution of Southeast Asian waters and marine life is constitutive of the rise of new “sub-imperial” powers in the form of multinational corporations, global capitalism, and centralized state power. She further illustrates the agency of cultural work for exposing and critiquing environmental devastation by imperial powers in her examination of “ecological visualities” that depict the ocean as an agentic subject capable of witnessing and experiencing ruination. Her analysis focuses on “The Dead Sea” series of paintings by the Vietnamese artist, Nguyen Van Tien, which features skeletal human bodies merging with wastes and ghostly shapes of fish under toxic water in the sea tainted with blood and rust. Hong argues that Nyuyen’s portrayals of the poisoned ocean critique and protest against both the imperial violence of Taiwanese corporate industry and Vietnamese state negligence.
Tracking further “imperial debris,” Zhou Xiaojing’s paper, “Charmorro Ecopoetry as an Archive of Imperial Ruination, Indigenous Resistance, and Environmental Activism,” seeks to locate the impact of protracted nuclear and other toxic contamination by the U.S. military operations in Guåhan (Guam) as documented by the Chamorro poet, Craig Santos Perez. Guåhan was affected by the fallout from the detonation of “Bravo” hydrogen bomb on the Marshall Islands in 1954. The island was further contaminated in the 1970’s when its Cocos Island’s lagoon was used to wash ships after service in the Marshall Islands. And the U.S.’s Andersen Air Force Base on Guåhan remains a source of toxic contamination through its waste disposal sites and the leaching of chemicals into the underground aquifer beneath the base since the Vietnam War, during which the island was a major base for the storage and transportation of defoliants, including Agent Orange. Zhou’s reading of Perez’s poems highlight not only the ongoing imperial ruination in the Pacific, but also Chamorros’ critique of U.S. colonialism and militarism, and activist intervention in the socio-ecological devastation in Guåhan.
All four papers highlight marginalized indigenous people’s agency for exposing and resisting the persistent ecological destruction by imperial and (neo)colonial empires. In so doing, they help broaden the possibilities of intervention in the accelerated damage to the planet earth, while confronting the impact of past and present empire building on the global ecological systems.
Each panelist will use 13 minutes in presenting her paper, leaving enough time for Q&A and discussions.
[1] Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 23, no. 2, 2008, pp. 191–219.