Room Number: TRS 1-073
Join the Meeting: https://ryerson.zoom.us/j/93806163742?pwd=VkIwMVJLbCtCMUM1NXdVVXQvUnFtdz09
Chair: Basmah Rahman (Queens U)
Speakers:
Jill Didur (Concordia U), “Unearthing the Plantationocene in Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse”
Stephanie Oliver (U Alberta), “Rupturing the “Pulmonary Commons”: Toxic Strangulations in Rita Wong’s Poetry”
Paper Summaries:
Jill Didur (Concordia U), “Unearthing the Plantationocene in Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse”
Conscious of the neglect of embodied politics in more recent engagements with the plantation archive and the Plantationocene, this paper turns to Amitav Ghosh’s book of personal essays, The Nutmeg’s Curse, to explore the possibilities of the personal essay for tracking forward the plantation’s “racially and economically ordered space, which violently structured differentiated life” and its contemporary aftermath.
Marisa Lewis (U Ottawa), “Rethinking Treaty as Emplaced Relationship: Diasporic Knowledge and Coalitional Thinking in beholden”
My analysis explores treaty relationships as diasporic emplaced epistemic sites in beholden. I discuss the ways beholden poetically retrieves treaty relationships by challenging the integrity of colonial extraction on the Columbia River within the context of the 1964 Columbia River Treaty between Canada and the United States.
Stephanie Oliver (U Alberta), “Rupturing the “Pulmonary Commons”: Toxic Strangulations in Rita Wong’s Poetry”
Expanding studies of undercurrent and the hydrocommons, this paper analyzes Wong’s “pulmonary commons” as a reciprocal realm inextricably linked to water. Tracing large-scale toxic strangulations’ impact breathing, Wong’s images of airborne toxins and breath-interrupting syntax rupture the unconscious realm of breathing and expose how “settler atmospherics” (Simmons 2017) works in Canada.