DROUGHT: SCENES FROM A COLONIAL HISTORY

In Progress.

This book project examines drought as a genre of the colonial environmental imaginary through which specific national and racial formations are produced and organized. Tracking four apparatuses through which drought was imagined as a justificatory logic of colonial expansion ( photography, parks, concrete, and desalination), this project historicizes U.S. and Zionist dependency on the racializing construction of drought-stricken Indigenous land in need of technocultural rescue. More than a mere repetition of the colonial fantasy of Indigenous vacancy, the negation of Indigenous territorial and political claims via drought discourse sets in motion a catastrophic ideological commitment to extraction in which (contra the axiom “water is life”), water abundance becomes the evidence of Indigenous non-life and non-presence. The book argues that because colonial cultural and political systems constantly have to re-establish the non-existence of Indigenous people they displace, and because (despite the promises of the colonial state) water is a finite materiality, drought ultimately marks an unresolvable contradiction and the description of the ecological limits of the colonial world

RECENT ESSAYS

Sanctuary & the Colonial Politics of Protection (Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment)

Collaborative Review of Romantic Literature and the Colonised World (Romantic Circles)

Still Thinking (PMLA)

Climate at the Threshold (Antipode)

Toxic Recognition: Coloniality and Ecocritical Attention (Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field)

Reading Vulnerably: Indigeneity and the Scale of Harm (Anthropocene Reading)

Review of Whereas by Layli Long Soldier (4Columns)