« Indigenous internationalism as infrastructure: Jordan B. Kinder, ‘Indigenous Infrastructuralisms? Grounding Materialisms along and against the Pipeline’, symploke, 31, 1-2, 2023, pp. 103-118
The settling of outer space: Janne Lahti, ‘Settler Colonial Solutions to Settler Colonial Problems: Settler Cinemas and the Crisis of Colonization of Outer Space’, in John L. Hennessey (ed.), History and Speculative Fiction, Palgrave, 2024, pp. 65-81 »

Settler apocalypse in an infrastructure: Sean Grattan, ‘Settler Colonialism and Apocalyptic Infrastructure in Almanac of the Dead’, symploke, 31, 1-2, 2023, pp. 119-131

20Dec23

Excerpt: This is a story of hubris, settler colonialism, and waterWalking onto the University of Arizona campus the dissonance of the lawns is instantly and oppressively apparent. In Tucson there are not a lot of lawns; they still appear in some parks, but it is certainly not a prevalent landscaping decision. Grass, however, is perhaps meant to be inviting to incoming first-year students. The green, green grass of home. I begin here as a way of articulating the construction of spaces through water infrastructure as illustrating the imagination of water in a landscape that cannot support the excess of water necessary for that imaginary project. In “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang describe settler colonialism as a process that is different from other forms of colonialism because “settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain” (2012, 5). These lush lawns on a land-grant university are a symptom of hundreds of years of violence and domination in which infrastructure plays an integral part. As a non-Indigenous queer white man who has just arrived in Tucson, who is writing on and occupying Yaqui and Tohono O’odham land, it is perhaps not my place to blithely enter a conversation about the long history of pervasive violent extractive practices and logics that still continue around Indigenous water rights. Moreover, as a new transplant to Tucson, I don’t want to be taken in by a desire to assume a sense or right of knowledge that I cannot necessarily possess. However, sometimes the newness of a place can cause forms of estrangement that make certain narratives rise to the surface that illustrate ways ideology works through banality. Tracking shifting examples of climate chaos in different locales illustrates the interlocking localities of the large-scale and wide-ranging effects of anthropocentric climate change.


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