Beneath the Toxic Tower (original) (raw)
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The world we live in is shaped by systems of classifications that are often invisible to us. Standards and categories that are implemented in every level of our life, shaping the world we live in, even though they often are overlooked 1. These sets of classifications are not innocuous since they have an origin and an intention that remain present today, perpetuating biases that go as far as two-hundred years ago. As we will see, these categories affect everyone but those who fit the same category as its creator: The Modern and Enlightened White man from the West. This essay will contextualize and further analyse an illustration from a book that became one of the catalysts for the idea of race that we have today and its popularization through the classification of humans-Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History; 1854. Departing from the selected illustration, this essay aims to problematize the idea of race and further acknowledge the relations of power inscribed within a cultural product like this one. It will also show the use of scientific images as a tool to generate racial difference and question why this imaginary has rarely been regarded for analysis in the arts field.
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In a world saturated by toxic substances, the plight of exposed populations has figured prominently in a transdisciplinary body of work that we call political ecologies of toxics. This has, in turn, sparked concerns about the unintended consequences of what Eve Tuck calls “damage-centered research,” which can magnify the very harms it seeks to mitigate. Here, we examine what political ecologists have done to address these concerns. Beginning with work that links toxic harm to broader forces of dispossession and violence, we turn next to reckonings with the queerness, generativity, and even protectiveness of toxics. Together, these studies reveal how the fetishization of purity obscures complex forms of toxic entanglement, stigmatizes “polluted” bodies, and can thereby do as much harm as toxics themselves. We conclude by showing, in dialog with Tuck, how a range of collaborative methodologies (feminist, decolonial, Indigenous, and more-than-human) have advanced our understanding of t...
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In the course of recent world history, humans have permanently changed the chemical composition of the planet, as human‐made chemical substances become part of the air, water and soil, pervading human and non‐human bodies and upsetting linear imaginaries of past and future. The slow violence of toxic exposure associated with industrial activity and economic growth is a particularly insidious dimension of inequality and exploitation, woven into global and post‐colonial relations of race, class and gender. Yet industrial chemicals underlie and support modern forms of life, and livelihoods, as well as our unsustainable economic system. Such tensions shape how toxicity may be located or ignored, resisted or made habitable, how it may congeal into matters of concern or dissipate into modes of ‘unknowing’. In this introduction, the authors review how recent scholarship imagines and engages with toxic flows. Inspired by research in environmental humanities, geography, history and science a...
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Courtney O’Dell-Chaib considers how toxic materials complicate conceptions of “sacred natures” through their ability to ooze beyond categories such as nature/culture, human/nonhuman, sacred/profane. In conversation with voices in material feminisms and affect theory, O’Dell-Chaib suggests possible avenues for navigating our toxic immersions.
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Industrial activities and sewage have led to a proliferation of algal blooms in the world’s oceans, some of which emit toxins. Usually, the intent to study, monitor, and control algal blooms and their toxins means safeguarding humans as well as other lives that they care about. However, by removing this anthropocentric frame, how might algal toxicity be revised? More generally, what might toxicity look like when other-than-human bodies, times, and places are considered? Starting from this question, this chapter attempts to describe how the intersections of algal toxins and algal, animal, and water bodies in different times and places can assist in developing more-than-human narratives about toxins. Mobilizing broad concepts of toxin and body, the chapter addresses the “trajectories” of algal toxins through more-than-human bodies in three sections. The first section looks at algal toxins relationship to algal bodies, highlighting how these “toxins” benefit algae as well as how these chemicals and bodies often cannot be extricated as a result of ontological indeterminacies. The second section points to the various ways by which algal toxins spread through the bodies of other organisms. Third, algal toxins are put in relation to the sea to disclose how they permeate the times and spaces of the sea. As a conclusion, the chapter highlights how non-humans assist in the production of toxic bodies, times, and places. It also reflects on what it means to decenter human interests in toxic narratives, suggesting alternative approaches for dealing with the interrelationship of more-than-human bodies that produce toxicity.