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Johns Hopkins University | AS.190.605

Enviromental Racism

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Environmental racism has largely been understood in terms of environmental policy-making that discriminates against people of color, particularly with respect to the state-sanctioned siting of toxic waste facilities, the distribution of pollutants, food-deserts, and the exclusion of non-white peoples from leading positions in the environmental movement. This graduate seminar explores environmental racism more broadly, pushing beyond its conventional, place-based understandings and approaching the corresponding logics that produce human disposability and environmental waste from the standpoint of both space and time. Examining colonial legacies of coding racial others in terms natural disasters, epidemics, infestations, non-human animals and dirt, we shall investigate how the natural world is subjected to exploitation and domination in tandem with the subordination of racial subjects historically identified with nature and rendered expendable. In other words, we shall illuminate the logics of power through which race-making coincides with waste-making. Accordingly, we will explore political and theoretical challenges to environmental racism in multiple registers; such as those posed by indigenous studies, decolonial thinkers and Afro-diasporic theories contesting the intersection of racial biopolitics, ecological crises and racial capitalism in an era of proliferating human disposability. Authors considered may include; Mbembe, Du Bois, Hage, Glissant, Césaire, Wynter & Chakrabarty.

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