Words of Wild Survival: Wombs, Wounds, Wastelands, and Water

Mishuana Goeman
Gender Studies
UC Los Angeles

Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan
Comparative Literature and English
UC Irvine

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard
African American Studies
UC Irvine

Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Comparative Literature and English
UC Irvine

This project tarries with questions prompted by our era of cataclysmic environmental and man-made disasters and the seemingly diminished human capacity to respond collectively. Scholars concerned with race, indigeneity, class, space, and gender are concerned with how we tend to the ecology. Using concepts proper to environmental racism, nature writing, decolonial knowledges, women’s health, women of color ecology studies, indigenous human rights, and feminist geography our goal is to be able to write in new ways—full throated creative ways—about how we have been made by the land/water/air, on one hand, and the stakes of our ties to each other being erased in histories of labor, revolution, the body, and rebellion, on the other. Turning to genealogies and cosmologies that have been central to the past and suppressed in the present, this collaboration culminates in: 1) a half-day conference open to the public for presentation of individual new works and 2) a writing workshop for seminar participants to produce and revise a small collection of creative works including poems, short stories, fables, plays, speeches that reflect shared commitments to the epistemologies that are essential to understanding what survival means today.