Bodies that Weather: Hurricane Katrina and ‘Viscous Porosity’
A reading group led by Kate Pickering
2 December 2020, 3-5pm
Christina Sharpe writes in ‘In the Wake: On Blackness and Being’ (2016) of the climate of anti-blackness that black bodies continue to weather. This occluded reality is foregrounded when a catastrophe such as hurricane Katrina intensifies this weathering and draws the gaze of the world onto the deep inequalities caused by federal complacency and structural oppressions. This year a record number of hurricanes have made landfall in the US. Within the state of Louisiana the Gulf Coast is disappearing into the sea at the rate of a football field an hour. Whilst New Orleans has largely recovered from Katrina, communities along the Gulf Coast continue to face ongoing climate crisis. Nancy Tuana proposes the term ‘Viscous Porosity’ in order to think through the way discrete categories such as ‘nature’, ‘culture’, ‘social’ and ‘biological’ are interrelated and made viscous within an event such as Katrina. In this session we will consider Tuana’s term, read Rebecca Solnit’s writing in relation to the centrality of belief in individual and community response to such a disaster, and lastly deploy Dionne Brand’s poem ‘Ruttier for the Marooned in the Diaspora’ along with the concept of ‘Beloved Community’ to think through the possibilities of orientation and openness within the onslaught of climate crisis.
Readings
Tuana, N. (2008) ‘Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina’ in Alaimo, S. and Hekman, S. J. (eds) (2008) Material feminisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. p. 188-210 [Please note you can read highlighted sections instead of whole text for brevity!]
Solnit, R. (2010) A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. New York: Penguin Books. p. 231-246 [Highlighted sections for brevity]
The Liquidity Cohort is a growing group of researchers who work with various notions of liquidity from the body (in the broadest sense, human and otherwise) to material infrastructures. We are interested in “liquidity” as an immersive experience of being-in-the-world and its implications for practice; questions of how to write from states of immersion, how to work from the body immersed in experience. We are also interested in hydrological and technological infrastructures and their impacts on the body and its worlds. The Liquidity Cohort was initiated by Dr. Bridget Crone (Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths) in 2018, and is open to researchers from CHASE institutions. Please get in touch if you’d like to join us. Supported by CHASE Consortium Development Grant.
Kate Pickering is a London based artist, writer and PhD researcher (AHRC scholarship) in the Departments of Art and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. Pickering writes experimental prose poetry which she develops into site based performative readings. This performed writing creates experiences of bodily orientation and disorientation for an audience as a way to think through how language is world building. The focus of her research is the Evangelical megachurch, specifically how the narrative of Evangelicalism is mediated through site, performance, spectacle and scale to orient the believer in the world, and how a performative poetics might reorient the believer toward a fluid imaginary. Her writing has featured in various publications, including soanyway magazine, Misery Connoisseur, EROS journal, Yellow Pages (Copy Press) and K[]NESH, and has been performed at Tenderpixel, ASC Gallery, X Marks Le Bokship, Library Gallery (Winnipeg, Canada) and the ICA. Pickering co-runs the Writing for Practice Forum for artists who write, and participates in Wet Rest, run by Lucy A. Sames and the Liquidity Cohort, a research group run by Bridget Crone.
https://www.instagram.com/writing_a_body_of_belief/
Image credit: Kate Pickering
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