Seminar: Commodity Flows
In the Lower Mississippi region, ongoing addictions to sugar, white supremacy, and capital have fueled exploitation of both nature and human society, and—from the molecular relations of industrial chemistry to the accretion of nitrate emissions—20th century commodities once considered solutions to human need, such as synthesized nitrogen, have become engines of planetary change. This seminar, part of the Anthropocene River Campus in 2019, was intended to map commodity flows and energy cycles in the Mississippi basin as a whole, to document the relations between extraction, synthesis, and exploitation, and the effects of commodity dependencies across scales.
Read More- contributionBenjamin Steininger
Going Against the Flow
How consideration of the local effects of global dependencies, can help us to reckon with—and change—our role in sustaining often damaging entanglements of commodity flows.
Engagement, Intervention, Field Work, Teaching, Extraction, Commodities, Complexity, Slavery, Capitalism, Habits, History, Infrastructure
- contributionNikos Katsikis
The Mississippi Basin: An Operational Landscape
Architect and urbanist Nikos Katsikis describes the assemblage of “operational landscapes” that are tied to the Mississippi basin.
Mapping, Case Study, Modeling, Agriculture, Commodities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Urbanism
- Field Notedeboraswistun
#15405
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Air, Navigation, Transport, Mobility, refinery
- Field Notebsteininger
#16060
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Storytelling, Teaching, Intervention, Commodities, Economy, Perception, Industrialization, Ritual, Archives
- Field Notebsteininger
#16055
Burton Lane, St. James Parish, Louisiana, USA
Storytelling, Field Study, Anthropos, Engagement, Landscape, Inequality, Slavery, Oil, Law, undead
- Julie Dermansky, “Another Death in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley Brings Environmental Activists Together to Honor One of Their Own,” for DeSmog, August 10, 2019, online article.
Donna Haraway, Noboru Ishikawa, Scott F. Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna L. Tsing, Nils Bubandt, “Anthropologists are talking – about the Anthropocene,” Ethnos Journal of Anthropology, 2015.
Matt Huber, “Reinvigorating Class in Political Ecology: Nitrogen Capital and the Means of Degradation,” Geoforum, 2017.
R.W. Peterson “Preface,” “Early Industry,” “Outside Influences,” “Fertilizers,” “Plastics,” Giants on the River: A Story of Chemistry and Industrial Development on the Lower Mississippi River Corridor, Homesite Company, 1999.
Bernd Scherer, “The Monsters,” in Klingan et al., Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray, MIT Press, 2014.
Ibrahima Seck, “Whitney Plantation: From Bradish Johnson to the Formosa controversy,” Bouki Fait Gombo: A History of the Slave Community of Habitation Haydel (Whitney Plantation) Louisiana, 1750-1860, University of New Orleans Press, 2014.
Benjamin Steininger, “Refinery and Catalysis,” in Klingan et al., Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray, MIT Press, 2014.
Shirley Thompson, “No Sweetness is Light,” in Solnit, Snedeker, Unfathomable City. A New Orleans Atlas, University of California Press, 2013.
Richard White, “Knowing Nature Through Labor,” The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia, Hill and Wang, 1995.
Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Program details
Seminar Slot II: November 13–15, 2019
Conveners
Scott Eustis
Beate Geissler
Nikos Katsikis
Oliver Sann
Benjamin Steininger
Thomas Turnbull (primary organizer)
Experts
Ibrahima Seck
