GSA 2023 panel: Geopolitics and Sedimentation. Of Black Earth, Dark Ecologies and Necropower, Montréal

Geopolitics and Sedimentation. Of Black Earth, Dark Ecologies and Necropower

As the place where we dwell, the Earth is a repository for history. At least since the oft-cited proclamation of the Anthropocene, the ground beneath us has regained a meaning and value beyond resources: It shows the impact of the human, as indelible as the fossilized imprints of dinosaur claws. Human impacts, however, go far beyond historical traces, from the all-encompassing distribution of microplastics, deep geological repositories, and fracking to bodies left behind by wars, drone killings, and necropolitics. These matters yield long-lasting and decisive effects on our ecology as well as our societies and demand not only to be conceived of in different terms but in different paradigms. Recently surfacing among attempts to respond to the most pressing contemporary issues as well as the politics of the humanities, discourses of the soil and geology shed light on the natural-cultural areas where geopolitics intersect with geopoetics. This intersection is a crucial frame of criticism: Both as a politics of territory, for example, in terms of cartography, political participation, resources, and labor; and as a poetics of geological sedimentation, in terms of inheritance and responsibility towards the living environment.

In our panel, we propose to reflect on the phenomenon of the Earth as a space of synchronic and diachronic entanglements and thereby consider creative forces and traces in and from the medium of writing. When Timothy Morton creates his ecognostic concept of the arche-lithic, referring to Derrida’s concept of arche-writing (Morton 2016, 80-82), the vision of a specific “grammatolithic archaeology” emerges, combining Morton’s construct of “dark ecology” with literary performances of earthiness, terrestriality, and palimpsests of natural-cultural sedimentations. If rock is the first medium of proto-writing—from the paleontological semiotics of fossilized life to cave petroglyphs, through animal/vegetal soil- and rock-forming agencies fixed in the earth’s layers, of which the fertile chernozem is the outer covering surface of agrilogistic writing on the fragile skin of the earth, to plowing, sowing, growing and harvesting the soil—then a grammatolithic archeology would offer a cartographic trail leading to places of self-encounter and co-habitation, as in Paul Celan’s spectral Chernivtsi (Celan 2003, 53-55), but also a bridge to the historical and once again current connotations of the “black earth” of the European East as a monstrous space of necropolitical extermination practices, as described by Timothy Snyder regarding the perverse “ecology of the Holocaust” (Snyder 2015).

The conceptual as well as actual territory outlined as such, which is determined by a combination of geographic, geologic, historical, natural, cultural and political coordinates, can be perceived as a transitional landscape: both as a specific cartographic location and as a conceptual paradigm in which the boundaries between life and death, animate and inanimate, excess of food and deadly hunger, prosperity and disaster are blurred—or in which its inhabitants are subjected to forms of oppression that collapse languages of artistic or political representation into their own opposite. Conceived of as such, the intersection of geopolitics and sedimentation further relates to the power and limitations of juridical discourse (Lyotard 1983); politics of data and images, particularly in connection with “violence at the threshold of detectability” (Weizman 2017); and, ultimately, the “power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die” (Mbembe 2016).

We would like to invite you to submit paper proposals relating to topics including but not limited to the following:

– the poetics of earthiness in the context of posthumanist concepts, especially Morton’s dark ecology, Haraway’s Chthulucene and Bennett’s political ecology of things

– geological imagery in literary texts 

– pollution as geopolitical hyperobject

– deep time structures in cultural texts and scientific research 

– (trans)territoriality of disaster and oppression and its cultural representations 

– territories of co-habitation and spaces of exile

– (auto)chthonicity of trauma vs literary images of wounded (traumatized) earth 

– semantic sedimentations and creative etymologies as elements of experimental writing 

– the poetics of soil, compost, de-/recomposition and organic/inorganic transformation 

– hybrid beings beyond the duality of the animate and the inanimate in theoretical concepts and cultural practices 

– archeology of memory as a literary strategy 

– geopoetics, literary cartographies and palimpsest structures as territories of utopian poetics and narratives

– the materiality and performativity of writing as a medium of memory sedimentation

Abstracts of about 300 words and a brief bio (100 words) should be sent to Paweł Piszczatowski (p.piszczatowski@uw.edu.pl) and Christian Struck (cstruck@g.harvard.edu) by March 20.