This panel examines imaginative and material relationships among housing, homemaking, alienation and survival by attending to literary scenes of crafting space. If the “house” functions as what Craig Wise calls, “a technology for the organization and distribution of life, health, illness and death,” then the authors under consideration here ask what it means to make home within and beyond those very structures of security. They articulate visions of possibility and liberatory movement within spaces of abandonment and control. As a whole, this panel asks how humans gather and make home within and outside regimes of property, dis/possession, illness, and toxicity. Questions that motivate these papers include: How do material relationships among property, violence, and memory shape the conditions of human life in ways that are spatially-particular. And how, in turn, do literary arts occupy, expand, and move beyond these spaces? How can creative and poetic acts of space-making craft new possibilities for home and homemaking within and outside the regimes of the “house”? How can these literary homes nurture postures of gathering, farewell, and solidarity that challenge equations between humanity and property? How, in short, do literary acts of crafting space both emerge from and reimagine human relationships to the spaces and processes of enclosure?

Mercy Romero's paper offers an intertextual analysis of Julia de Burgos' poem “Farewell from Welfare Island” and Tadashi Kawamata's art installation “Project at Roosevelt Island,” in order to examine how spatial and poetic practices of “re-enchantment” can stage a scene of survival and wonder amid the structural and material conditions of ruin. By 1953, Welfare Island had long been a dumping ground for New York’s sick and criminalized poor. During her own hospitalization on Roosevelt Island (then called Welfare Island), Afro-Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos composed her 1953 poem “Farewell from Welfare Island” during her final return to Goldwater Memorial. The story of Julia de Burgos’s street death, anonymous burial, and exhumation are central to the making of this Puerto Rican poetic figure. “Farewell from Welfare Island” organizes a radical return at a site of dispossession; the poem structures a critical re-enchantment towards a “form of beauty.” Like the poem that references abandonment (the farewell) and folds in upon itself (farewell/welfare), Japanese environmental artist Tadashi Kawamata installed “Project at Roosevelt Island,” at the ruins of the small pox hospital. Recovering cast off wood to create a monumental yet temporary installation, Kawamata's construction posed a critical commentary on ongoing structural and social ruination via a design and materiality that signaled at once structural integrity and disposability. When analyzed in conversation with “Farewell from Welfare Island,” Tadashi Kawamata’s public art process and project, described as “displacements,” offers another innovative understanding of Julia de Burgos’s call by articulating the raced and gendered social life of aesthetic forms, and a (sculptural) poetics of re-enchantment at the (economic, aesthetic) structure of a collapse. This paper examines the spatial and temporal components of structural abandonment, through the various entities that endure that mode of subjection: abandoned lots and buildings, along with those figured as unworthy of wonder, the sexual, racial, and economic lowly. I argue that these texts and performances foreground wonder as occasion and object, structurally enabling what critics of Enlightenment have termed “re-enchantment” and illuminate what Afro-Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter terms the “grounding premise.”

Sarah Jane Cervenak’s paper argues that Black women writers Toni Morrison and Nikki Wallschlaeger enact in their writings--through their aesthetic attunement and literary attention to a range of socialities debased by property- a black feminine ecopoetics where all of the earthly evicted might find momentary shelter. A shelter blooming for those whom it names (or doesn’t) and whom might find some momentary “living room” in its pages. If ecology is derived from “oikoc: a fundamental unit, a household, a collectivizing space, a gathering of people and things,” Beloved enacts all of these definitions while elucidating how oikos itself doesn’t require an extractive gathering and propertizing of self and earth as it very conditions. In Houses, Wallschlaeger makes poems out of houses, houses out of poems, that are at once with and without ground, proper and improper, securitized and violable. Her collection offers a walking tour of property’s extractive view while deploying language, the unheld ground, toward another ecological imagination of home. Ecopoetical occasions, more broadly, where the evicted get to stay around, or come and go as they please, and their presumptive givenness to foreclosure abated by the phantasmatic, uncapturable grounds formed in the oikos between letter and page.

Daniel Lanza Rivers’ paper analyzes analyzes how Cherríe Moraga’s play Heroes and Saints places concerns about fertility, equity, and belonging into conversation with the material, ecological, and chemical consequences of agroindustrial development and localized toxicity in the farming communities of California’s Central Valley. In her forward, Moraga describes Heroes as emerging in response to the depictions of environmental illness, infertility, and infant disability portrayed in the UFW’s documentary film, The Wrath of Grapes. By placing Moraga’s text in conversation with the patterns of development that have shaped Latinx experiences of residency, employment, and exposure in MacFarland, CA (the documentary’s setting), this paper analyzes how Moraga’s play uses the figuration of an animate landscape to denaturalize state policies that have pursued the monocultural consolidation of Central Valley agriculture at the expense of ecological vibrancy and human flourishing. In addition to situating Moraga’s aesthetic strategies within queer, Latinx, and environmental justice frameworks, this presentation examines Moraga’s framing of environmental belonging in relation to deep histories of Latinx industry and dispossession in California. Throughout Heroes, the Central Valley landscape and the Valle family share an intimate alienation shaped by the channels of material water and economic exploitation that entangle them. By analyzing the ways that relationships among landscape, memory, and possibility shape Heroes’ staging of gender, politics, and the environment, this paper closes with a reflection on how Moraga’s work critiques mutually-reinforcing patterns of anthropocentric development and colonial fantasy that have located Central Valley landscapes as idealized sites of corporate investment and consolidation since colonization.