In his 1994 classic, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture, historian a... more In his 1994 classic, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture, historian and Ethnic Studies scholar Gary Y. Okihiro wrote about the role of race and racism in what constitutes "America." Written in the swirl of public contentiousness over identity politics and multiculturalism, the book argued that core national values and ideals stemmed from the margins of US communities, specifically from politically and racially disenfranchised communities. He suggested that it is through the struggles for equality by African Americans, Native peoples, Latinos, and Asians as immigrants and refugees, and by those sexually marginalized, that the United States gradually moves toward the Founders' values and visions of democracy and freedom. This argument resonated deeply with me as an undergraduate in the early 1990s. Much of what we now call "MAGA" politics ("Make America Great Again") and Trumpism was led by currents that emerged in California around then, especially through the proposition system that shaped public policy through viciously racist incarceration, anti-immigration, and anti-affirmative action proposals that all passed (Hosang). At the same time, these same currents generated incredible organizing cultures which forced students and people to choose political sides and stances. I was also impacted by place (in addition to time); UC Berkeley was (and remains) an important place for Ethnic Studies. The campus was a hotbed of emergent scholarship and activism in environmental justice that have since gained empirical validation within academia and some policy purchase. This piece is a personal and scholarly reflection on how environmental justice has moved from the margins to the center of the field of American Studies, and how that has affected pedagogy, particularly in the classroom.
This 50-year anniversary of Women's Studies is a good chance to reflect on what has changed and w... more This 50-year anniversary of Women's Studies is a good chance to reflect on what has changed and what has remained the same-or, at least, similar. Amiri Baraka, the Black revolutionary poet writing on jazz, calls its rhyming, repetition, and remake "the Changing Same." 1 Anniversaries invite reflection, especially when paired with the theme of "what matters most." This position paper focuses on environmental racism, climate injustice, and gendered environmental violence, and how I came to care about and act on these issues. I have spent 25+ years working in and with environmental justice movements, first in New York City and then in California. But how did my engagement with and in environmental justice movements come to be? For me, the answer lies (partially) in pedagogy. My scholarly activism, engaged research in American Studies with communities of color and other disadvantaged communities, began as an inchoate spark in three undergraduate classes: Race, Poverty, and the Environment; Social Movements; and Ecofeminism. These three classes represent an ongoing conversation about how to balance generatively between anger at environmental and racial injustice, hope that change is possible through social movements, and the belief that peace and nonviolence are worthy goals in and of themselves, informed by my own struggle to avoid burnout, in order to maintain a commitment to longterm engagement with struggles for justice. The search for a balance between rage and hope is only made possible through the lessons I learned in ecofeminism. One of my central aims in the classroom is to educate and facilitate the growth and empowerment of the next generation of organizers and activists. Informed by my prior coursework and experiences and contemporary currents in abolitionist classroom spaces, I have sought to facilitate rigorous, justice-oriented, and less hierarchical classrooms. In this work, I emphasize that systems of oppression are interlinked: militarism, incarceration/ policing, domination of nonhuman nature, and gender and racial hierarchies.
This paper examines environmental justice movements focusing on how organizers rewrite stories, m... more This paper examines environmental justice movements focusing on how organizers rewrite stories, make artwork, seek to build and grow a different world than the one we currently inhabit. Specifically, I ask: What does environmental justice look like in the face of interconnected disasters caused by environmental and state violence in its myriad forms: climate change, gentrification, policing and deportation regimes? I argue that culture and media, in the form of abolitionist climate justice narratives, offer a partial and important response. Abolitionist climate justice narratives enact an imaginative reclamation and recognition in a brutalizing economic and political system that seeks to deny the rights of survival for vulnerable peoples and communities, animals and the ecosystems. Cultural production and storytelling from climate justice social movements build kinship between people of color with animals, and to imagine what abolition might look, in imagining conceptions of home, and a politics of mutual aid, care, and solidarity in the face of climate crises that have provoked tribalism, closed borders, violence, and individualism. My case study is a particular web-series called The North Pole that shows how cultural production matters in defining, expanding and broadening the concept of abolitionist climate justice narratives and their audiences within the cultural sphere. I use a close reading of The North Pole and its characters within the broader context of its production grounded squarely within the climate justice movement. Abolitionist climate justice narratives bridge distinct strands of abolitionist praxis: against incarceration (prisons/policing, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement 2 Julie Sze and Border Patrol), carbon emissions, and speciesism, or hierarchy between human/non-human populations. The North Pole represents the different strands of abolitionism, and thus is an important bridge between parallel conversations and critiques that have not well integrated. In bridging these abolitionist theories and movements, The North Pole has potential to speak with and expand the conversations between each. Expanding these conversations preempts a potential critique of each to build broader solidarities in imagining a more just and liberatory world without incarceration, climate chaos, and animal exploitation.
People who shut their eyes to reality invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on rem... more People who shut their eyes to reality invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."-James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village" (175) "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."-Antonio Gramsci (qtd. in Žižek)
Diritti: gli articoli di Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea sono pubblicati sotto licenza C... more Diritti: gli articoli di Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea sono pubblicati sotto licenza Creative Commons 3.0. Possono essere riprodotti e modificati a patto di indicare eventuali modifiche dei contenuti, di riconoscere la paternità dell'opera e di condividerla allo stesso modo. La citazione di estratti è comunque sempre autorizzata, nei limiti previsti dalla legge. Sul ruolo della giustizia ambientale oggi: una conversazione con Julie Sze
In his 1994 classic, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture, historian a... more In his 1994 classic, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture, historian and Ethnic Studies scholar Gary Y. Okihiro wrote about the role of race and racism in what constitutes "America." Written in the swirl of public contentiousness over identity politics and multiculturalism, the book argued that core national values and ideals stemmed from the margins of US communities, specifically from politically and racially disenfranchised communities. He suggested that it is through the struggles for equality by African Americans, Native peoples, Latinos, and Asians as immigrants and refugees, and by those sexually marginalized, that the United States gradually moves toward the Founders' values and visions of democracy and freedom. This argument resonated deeply with me as an undergraduate in the early 1990s. Much of what we now call "MAGA" politics ("Make America Great Again") and Trumpism was led by currents that emerged in California around then, especially through the proposition system that shaped public policy through viciously racist incarceration, anti-immigration, and anti-affirmative action proposals that all passed (Hosang). At the same time, these same currents generated incredible organizing cultures which forced students and people to choose political sides and stances. I was also impacted by place (in addition to time); UC Berkeley was (and remains) an important place for Ethnic Studies. The campus was a hotbed of emergent scholarship and activism in environmental justice that have since gained empirical validation within academia and some policy purchase. This piece is a personal and scholarly reflection on how environmental justice has moved from the margins to the center of the field of American Studies, and how that has affected pedagogy, particularly in the classroom.
This 50-year anniversary of Women's Studies is a good chance to reflect on what has changed and w... more This 50-year anniversary of Women's Studies is a good chance to reflect on what has changed and what has remained the same-or, at least, similar. Amiri Baraka, the Black revolutionary poet writing on jazz, calls its rhyming, repetition, and remake "the Changing Same." 1 Anniversaries invite reflection, especially when paired with the theme of "what matters most." This position paper focuses on environmental racism, climate injustice, and gendered environmental violence, and how I came to care about and act on these issues. I have spent 25+ years working in and with environmental justice movements, first in New York City and then in California. But how did my engagement with and in environmental justice movements come to be? For me, the answer lies (partially) in pedagogy. My scholarly activism, engaged research in American Studies with communities of color and other disadvantaged communities, began as an inchoate spark in three undergraduate classes: Race, Poverty, and the Environment; Social Movements; and Ecofeminism. These three classes represent an ongoing conversation about how to balance generatively between anger at environmental and racial injustice, hope that change is possible through social movements, and the belief that peace and nonviolence are worthy goals in and of themselves, informed by my own struggle to avoid burnout, in order to maintain a commitment to longterm engagement with struggles for justice. The search for a balance between rage and hope is only made possible through the lessons I learned in ecofeminism. One of my central aims in the classroom is to educate and facilitate the growth and empowerment of the next generation of organizers and activists. Informed by my prior coursework and experiences and contemporary currents in abolitionist classroom spaces, I have sought to facilitate rigorous, justice-oriented, and less hierarchical classrooms. In this work, I emphasize that systems of oppression are interlinked: militarism, incarceration/ policing, domination of nonhuman nature, and gender and racial hierarchies.
This paper examines environmental justice movements focusing on how organizers rewrite stories, m... more This paper examines environmental justice movements focusing on how organizers rewrite stories, make artwork, seek to build and grow a different world than the one we currently inhabit. Specifically, I ask: What does environmental justice look like in the face of interconnected disasters caused by environmental and state violence in its myriad forms: climate change, gentrification, policing and deportation regimes? I argue that culture and media, in the form of abolitionist climate justice narratives, offer a partial and important response. Abolitionist climate justice narratives enact an imaginative reclamation and recognition in a brutalizing economic and political system that seeks to deny the rights of survival for vulnerable peoples and communities, animals and the ecosystems. Cultural production and storytelling from climate justice social movements build kinship between people of color with animals, and to imagine what abolition might look, in imagining conceptions of home, and a politics of mutual aid, care, and solidarity in the face of climate crises that have provoked tribalism, closed borders, violence, and individualism. My case study is a particular web-series called The North Pole that shows how cultural production matters in defining, expanding and broadening the concept of abolitionist climate justice narratives and their audiences within the cultural sphere. I use a close reading of The North Pole and its characters within the broader context of its production grounded squarely within the climate justice movement. Abolitionist climate justice narratives bridge distinct strands of abolitionist praxis: against incarceration (prisons/policing, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement 2 Julie Sze and Border Patrol), carbon emissions, and speciesism, or hierarchy between human/non-human populations. The North Pole represents the different strands of abolitionism, and thus is an important bridge between parallel conversations and critiques that have not well integrated. In bridging these abolitionist theories and movements, The North Pole has potential to speak with and expand the conversations between each. Expanding these conversations preempts a potential critique of each to build broader solidarities in imagining a more just and liberatory world without incarceration, climate chaos, and animal exploitation.
People who shut their eyes to reality invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on rem... more People who shut their eyes to reality invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."-James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village" (175) "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."-Antonio Gramsci (qtd. in Žižek)
Diritti: gli articoli di Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea sono pubblicati sotto licenza C... more Diritti: gli articoli di Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea sono pubblicati sotto licenza Creative Commons 3.0. Possono essere riprodotti e modificati a patto di indicare eventuali modifiche dei contenuti, di riconoscere la paternità dell'opera e di condividerla allo stesso modo. La citazione di estratti è comunque sempre autorizzata, nei limiti previsti dalla legge. Sul ruolo della giustizia ambientale oggi: una conversazione con Julie Sze
This book review symposium for Shiloh Krupar's Hot Spotter's Report includes an introduction by m... more This book review symposium for Shiloh Krupar's Hot Spotter's Report includes an introduction by myself, reviews from Julie Sze, Ryan Griffis, and Cindi Katz, and a response by Shiloh Krupar
My riff on my book in the context of midcentury kitchen cabinets salvaged from Spring Valley/Deat... more My riff on my book in the context of midcentury kitchen cabinets salvaged from Spring Valley/Death Valley, the birthplace of US chemical weapons of mass destruction.
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