In this talk, Dr. Pavithra Vasudevan reflects on her evolving relationship with writing and how she has played with performance, prose and poetry in seeking to narrate capitalism’s intimate and illegible violences. Inspired by Black and Women of Color feminist approaches to scholarship as worldmaking, they approach intellectual work as a creative, embodied and relational intervention. Dr. Vasudevan will begin by discussing an ethnographic play they wrote and produced in the course of their research in Badin, North Carolina, an early aluminum smelting site that is the site of an environmental justice struggle today. Titled “Race and Waste in an Aluminum Town,” the play drew on oral history excerpts, ethnographic observations and archival material to narrate how anti-Black racism and toxic waste converged in the history of Badin.
She will then talk about how her writing practice has shifted in the course of working on her manuscript. Toxic Alchemy: Race and Waste in Industrial Capitalism, re-examines racial-colonial capitalism through the materialities and metaphors of aluminum production as a form of alchemy. Writing Toxic Alchemy has been an experiment in learning from and creating forms of poetry and prose that mirror racial-colonial capitalism’s fragmentation of life. In chronicling how we’ve gone wrong, writing as anticolonial praxis enacts its own alchemy, rupturing received understandings and animating alternate possibilities. Dr. Vasudevan builds on the work of anticolonial philosophers whose writings explore not only the theoretical conceits, but also the creative modes of radical politics that transform critique into catalyst.
Dr. Vasudevan is Assistant Professor at the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and Center for Women's and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Please see her profile here.
The Bill Gray speaker series is hosted by PSU's Center for Urban Studies.