Papers by Elspeth Iralu
Tackling how racial justice and climate crisis are entangled, this essay introduces a speculative... more Tackling how racial justice and climate crisis are entangled, this essay introduces a speculative cartography experiment entitled The World We Became: Map Quest 2350. A collaboration between a collective of artists, poets, academics, curators, architects, and activists, this digital humanities project maps global ecological crises and shared Black, Asian, Pacific, Middle Eastern, Latin American, Caribbean, and Indigenous futures. Intentionally produced in a multimedia format, the born-digital speculative design experiment features visual and audio components presenting a planetary vision of the year 2350 as an underwater future in ruins. The atlas connects five transnational imaginaries that rescript the geographic boundaries of what we currently understand to be South Asia, the South Pacific, the Middle East, North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Situating nation-state borders as recent constructs, in this creative exercise the natural environment becomes a model for imagining interspecies relationality and co-presence. Mangroves and atolls form portals to speculative futures of non-human existence beyond the climate crisis and the impact of racial extractive capitalism. Anchored in five locales, the collective text brings together a global vision of survivance addressing migration, dispossession, Asian diaspora, Native sovereignty, Black fugitivity, and broader questions of global indigeneity. With life emerging from the ruins, this atlas forms a digital blueprint of suboceanic futures and the practice of interrogating what justice could mean in the far future.
Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas
Tackling how racial justice and climate crisis are entangled, this essay introduces a speculative... more Tackling how racial justice and climate crisis are entangled, this essay introduces a speculative cartography experiment entitled The World We Became: Map Quest 2350. A collaboration between a collective of artists, poets, academics, curators, architects, and activists, this digital humanities project maps global ecological crises and shared Black, Asian, Pacific, Middle Eastern, Latin American, Caribbean, and Indigenous futures. Intentionally produced in a multimedia format, the born-digital speculative design experiment features visual and audio components presenting a planetary vision of the year 2350 as an underwater future in ruins. The atlas connects five transnational imaginaries that rescript the geographic boundaries of what we currently understand to be South Asia, the South Pacific, the Middle East, North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Situating nation-state borders as recent constructs, in this creative exercise the natural environment becomes a model for ima...
Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 2022
Tackling how racial justice and climate crisis are entangled, this essay introduces a speculative... more Tackling how racial justice and climate crisis are entangled, this essay introduces a speculative cartography experiment entitled The World We Became: Map Quest 2350. A collaboration between a collective of artists, poets, academics, curators, architects, and activists, this digital humanities project maps global ecological crises and shared A high-resolution version of Figure 2 can be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link:
Antipode, 2021
This paper examines a visual archive of Indigenous mapping practices in relationship to theorisat... more This paper examines a visual archive of Indigenous mapping practices in relationship to theorisations of Indigenous spatialities that seek to re-centre practices of counter-mapping around Indigenous spatial justice. After examining a Google Maps initiative that takes on colonial mapping tropes to enforce Indigenous dispossession, I consider two mapping projects based at Zuni Pueblo: first, a Zuni-led response to proposed coal extraction that would have affected Zuni cultural practices; and second, the Zuni Map Art Project, an initiative that remixes tropes of colonial mapping to create spatial representations that are encoded such that the information they contain can only be understood by those who have been initiated in Zuni cultural knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to examine how Indigenous feminist spatial practices disrupt the colonial relations of power that mapping and counter-mapping often reinforce.
Native American and Indigenous Studies, 2018
The New Americanist, 2018
In this essay, I bring Edward Said's notion of contrapuntalism into an analysis of transnational ... more In this essay, I bring Edward Said's notion of contrapuntalism into an analysis of transnational American Studies scholarship, theorizing transnational American Studies as a method of contrapuntalism to examine the imbrication of culture and politics across time and space.
Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography, 2021
This paper examines a visual archive of Indigenous mapping practices in relationship to theorisat... more This paper examines a visual archive of Indigenous mapping practices in relationship to theorisations of Indigenous spatialities that seek to re-centre practices of counter-mapping around Indigenous spatial justice. After examining a Google Maps initiative that takes on colonial mapping tropes to enforce Indigenous dispossession, I consider two mapping projects based at Zuni Pueblo: first, a Zuni-led response to proposed coal extraction that would have affected Zuni cultural practices; and second, the Zuni Map Art Project, an initiative that remixes tropes of colonial mapping to create spatial representations that are encoded such that the information they contain can only be understood by those who have been initiated in Zuni cultural knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to examine how Indigenous feminist spatial practices disrupt the colonial relations of power that mapping and counter-mapping often reinforce.
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2020
This paper takes on the mixtape as a pedagogical method for approaching urgent and critical topic... more This paper takes on the mixtape as a pedagogical method for approaching urgent and critical topics within the undergraduate online classroom. Drawing on two case studies from different sections of an introductory course on environmental and social justice taught in an American studies department, we demonstrate how mixtape-inspired assignments offer a method for theorizing and enacting the connections between popular culture and critical scholarship around injustice in the humanities and social sciences while also altering the space of the classroom to promote deeper student engagement, comprehension, and reflection. We argue that introducing popular culture as both content and method within an undergraduate course not only strengthens student understanding of key concepts and the relevance of these outside the classroom, but also acknowledges the importance of time and context within the space of the online course. Popular culture, a component of this context, enriches the online learning experience and responds to contemporary issues and events that students encounter in the material world. Mixtapes serve as a conceptual tool for understanding the contents of a syllabus and as a pedagogical tool for assessment. The practice of making mixtapes within a course on environmental and social justice opens the possibility for radical expression.
The New Americanist, 2018
In this essay, I bring Edward Said’s notion of contrapuntalism into an analysis of transnational ... more In this essay, I bring Edward Said’s notion of contrapuntalism into an analysis of transnational American studies scholarship, theorizing transnational American studies as a method of contrapuntalism to examine the imbrication of culture and politics across time and space. I consider four books: The Intimacies of Four Continents by Lisa Lowe, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America by Keith Feldman, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary by Alex Lubin, and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South by Vijay Prashad. I examine how these texts take up a contrapuntal methodology to explore interconnections and overlaps hidden from view by structures of modern liberalism, colonialism, and imperialism, challenge normative assumptions of disciplinary and political boundaries, and allow us to view, as Vijay Prashad writes, “America, from elsewhere.” I argue that these texts demand an attention to geopolitics within American studies, provide a method to uncover possible histories, and challenge notions of the nation-state and US exceptionalism through spatial and political imaginaries.
Book Reviews by Elspeth Iralu
AAG Review of Books, 2020
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Papers by Elspeth Iralu
Book Reviews by Elspeth Iralu