We have grounded this panel’s topic within anti-colonial writings that challenge Western and capitalist assumptions of life and humanity, such as Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake (2016), Prudence Gibson’s The Plant Contract: Art’s Return to Vegetal Life (2018), Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics (2019), and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt (2022). Given the Anthropocene’s many ecological and human losses, this panel will interrogate what forms of life after death can emerge to propose novel critiques on extinction and death events. The panellists each attend to the expressive materialities, possibilities, and temporalities to which these alternative forms of being present by anchoring them in varied real and imagined historical-political contexts, such as nation-building narratives and the afterlives of chattel slavery.
This panel will have four presenters offering 13-minute papers to ensure adequate time for conversation. The presider, Orchid Tierney, will moderate the session. Cacao Diaz will establish the panel’s conceptual frame by examining Brazilian-Indonesian transartist, Daniel Lie, whose site-specific art installations explore forms of life that thrive in rottenness. Working with fungi, bacteria, and insects that are born in abject matter, Lie uncovers the nonbinary character and cyclicity of rottenness. Drawing on the artist’s Dife and Leath, Scales of Decay (2021) and their postscript text to Transversal Orientations Part II seminar, Dife and Leath: Time Rots, Dr. Diaz argues that rottenness is a more-than-human allegory for our Anthropogenic moment of danger.
Stefanie K. Dunning will advance Diaz’s engagement with apocalyptic conditions by examining the interrelation between the degree of aliveness of the earth as it is mirrored in humankind through the narrative of the BBC Audio drama, Forest 404. Dr. Dunning explores the relation between artificial and organic life through the AI protagonist, Pan, as she apprehends her nature, her world, and the world that has been destroyed. Dr. Dunning argues that ontology is intimately and inextricably tied to ecology in ways that radically alter our relationship to both life and death to undermine the notion that humans are separate from the external world.
Next, Juan Esteban Plaza will shift the panel’s focus to viruses and specters as liminal entities between life and nonlife. This talk attends to the role of viruses and specters in the unfolding of racial governance in Cuba. Dr. Plaza focuses on historian José Antonio Saco’s polemic that advocated the abolition of slavery based on securitarian claims, emphasizing the biopolitical necessity to control disease by incorporating enslaved peoples into civil society. He then reads how Fernando Oritz’s afrocubanista essay resorts to a critique of commodity fetishism to address the specter of slavery in 20th century Cuba as a threat to national sovereignty and antiracist agendas.
The final presentation by Sumita Chakraborty circles back to Dr. Diaz's engagement with vegetal ecologies and decomposition. Dr. Chakraborty reads the corpse poems of Langston Hughes as texts that seek retribution for the deathly violence—directed toward both humans and nonhumans—on which the colonial West is built. The corpse poem is a literary device in which at least one of a poem’s speakers is a dead body. Because speakers have experienced decomposition, this paper argues that they are also vegetal ecologies, and therefore the justice they seek is sociopolitical and ecological in nature. She argues that Hughes’ work embraces the “risk of contaminating” American poetry with vengeful zombies who seek a form of ferocious justice.
This panel offers a diversity of voices with panellists from different institutions. Two speakers come from public universities (Miami U and U North Carolina) and two from a private liberal arts university (Wesleyan U). Speakers are also in different stages of their careers; the panel includes a postdoctoral fellow (Plaza), two assistant professors (Chakraborty and Diaz), and an associate professor (Dunning). Moreover, this panel is constituted by International queer, disabled, scholars of color, who work across a range of disciplines. Their intersectional positionalities are intrinsic to their intellectual explorations of the complex imbrication of politics and ecology within non-white ecocritical studies.