"X Marks the Spot" with Dr. Bedour Alagraa

In this talk, Dr. Bedour Alagraa will offer some insights from her manuscript, The Interminable Catastrophe, to examine how cruel mathematics, fatal liberalisms, and the terror of sovereign power were made ‘new again’, and embedded in everyday life under plantocratic rule and in modern day ecological crises. In this excerpt, she focuses on colonial and postcolonial Louisiana—understood as ‘unlike’ its neighbors and a ‘place apart’—with attention to the Code Noir, plantation economic life, and the French Crown’s appetite for terror via the authoritarian impulses of Bourbonism(s), to discern how plantation life was the site of transformation in our nomos of the earth, turning Western episteme’s discourse(s) and attention away from ‘calamity’ to catastrophe proper. She threads these considerations through the ‘X-code’ or ‘Katrina crosses’, used by search and rescue teams to mark the homes of residents following the Storm, as well as the Kongo cosmogram (also known as a carrefour/kafou) in order to consider how, in the United States, Louisiana represents the crucial intercept of this constellation of mechanisms that constitute catastrophe, and, therefore, a crucial node for articulating the very beginning of the processes which have burdened our planetary assumptions. In other words: ‘x’ marks the spot.

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Presented by the Environmental Humanities Initiative with cosponsorship by Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the Department of American Studies.