Performances of Race & Disaster

Through close study of popular culture and policy, this course examines the creation and maintenance of race within and through scenes of “natural disaster.” Flood, famine, and earthquake are demonstrations of unrest and rupture that are not simply environmental but also socio-politically produced by the ongoing disaster of racial capitalism. In our efforts to uncover the ways in which race is (per)formed on stage and street as well as within the wide halls of government, we will pay close attention to the language, services, organizations, and cultural productions used to entrench the punitive differences announced and amplified by disaster. Along the way, we will also complicate that word (“disaster”) in order to listen to the voices and make space for the bodies of those vulnerable peoples in the U.S. and contiguous Global South.