in the wake of the santa maria

for audio and Global North carbon-producing infrastructure

Overview:

in the wake of the santa mariais a work that positions global warming within long histories of imperialism, through audio interventions positioned in proximity to carbon-producing infrastructure. The piece’s audio consists of re-edited audio footage of ocean waves from a “relaxing Caribbean beach” video, alluding to rising sea levels caused by global warming, and, as hinted at in the title, to the wakes—both literal and historical—of ships engaged in conquest. The piece is realized by playing audio through hidden speakers in proximity to carbon-producing infrastructures, or by adding audio to video footage of carbon-producing infrastructures.

Essay:

content description: verbal references to colonization, slavery, racialization, and environmental destruction

in the wake of the santa maria is an artistic intervention which proposes a constellation of linguistic-sonic figures for speculative (counter-) mappings of the politics of global warming. The piece takes as axiomatic how decolonial and Black environmentalisms (re)frame global warming, approaching it neither as historically unprecedented, nor as a temporally discrete crisis event, but rather as an intensification of colonizing and racializing power dynamics set in motion during the historical threshold period of the 15th century. As a settler on occupied Turtle Island who is read as white, I take up these analytics in a deliberately delimited way, focusing on their implications for the (predominantly and paradigmatically) white perpetrators of global warming. 

Concretely, the piece annotates carbon-producing infrastructure with a title and audio; altogether, these linguistic-sonic interventions have the potential to reframe all sensory domains, rather than a sound piece per se.  The title alludes to the Santa Maria, the ship taken by Christopher Columbus on his initial 1492 voyage, while the audio samples sounds of ocean waves from a “relaxing Caribbean beach” video. I hope to facilitate two simultaneous ways of hearing the audio. First, the audio of ocean waves might be heard as the wakes of a conquistador’s ship, a ship that is both near and far. The title’s figure of a wake refers to important reframings in Black and Indigenous studies of matters of historical narration, and particularly of the positioning of present-day “crises” in relation to early modern European conquest. Writing in dialogue with multigenerational Black feminist inquiries into the historical persistence of relations of chattel slavery, Christina Sharpe positions contemporary anti-Black violence through the metonym of the “wake” of slavery, noting how a “past that is not past reappears, always to rupture the present.” Conversing with Sharpe, albeit from a distinct location in Indigenous studies, Zoe Todd (Métis) and Heather Davis (settler) situate “present-day” environmental catastrophe as a recent manifestation of the “seismic shock” of European invasion of the Americas, a shock that “kept rolling like a slinky – pressing and compacting in different ways in different places as colonialism spread outwards… this worked to compact and speed up time, laying waste to legal orders, languages, place-story in quick succession.” In the present piece, I take up the implications of these mappings for narrating the environmental history of whiteness and of Euro-American empire. Specifically, these figures suggest ways of excavating continuities in power relations in the midst of change, opening ways to narrate history otherwise to liberal humanist teleological narratives of Rise or Fall. 

In narrating global warming otherwise, I conjoin these wavey figurations to the figure of Columbus, drawing on multigenerational inquiries in Indigenous and Black studies regarding his role in the inauguration of colonization, racialization, and racial slavery. In the 1979 book Columbus and other Cannibals, Powhatan-Renápe and Delaware-Lenápe historian Jack Forbes positions Columbus as a threshold figure in imperial modernity who played a key role in the spread of what the Cree Nation calls wétiko, which Forbes describes as a “disease of aggression against other living things and, more precisely, the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions.” Writing during the 500-year anniversary of Columbus’s initial 1492 voyage, Sylvia Wynter positions this voyage as the culmination of decades of Iberian colonizing-enslaving efforts, the result of which was the codification of modern European grammars of colonization and racialization. More recently, Tiffany Lethabo King has written about how the figure of Columbus can open up encounters between Black and Indigenous positionality, as well as catalyze “unflinching” mappings of the mechanisms of colonization and racialization which might ultimately point towards the abolition of colonizing and white(ning) violence. In different ways, these writers approach the figure of Columbus as a way to defamiliarize the supposedly “progressive” present by unearthing its continuities with earlier regimes of violence, and as a way to open up radical possibility in the present by attending to a moment when present power regimes were not yet solidified or naturalized. The present piece takes a similar approach to global warming, by locating continuities between perpetrators of global warming and those implicated in the inauguration of modern regimes of colonizing land and enslaving bodies.

Second, the audio of ocean waves might be heard as rising sea levels caused by global warming, a phenomenon already affecting shorelines worldwide, with a particularly acute effect upon islands formerly colonized in regions known to white geography as the Caribbean (where Columbus landed in 1492, and where most islands were subsequently terraformed into plantations) and South Pacific. The rising sea levels are a microcosm of a neo-imperial geography of global warming, in which whiteness and the Global North are the largest producers of carbon emissions and racially marginalized people and the Global South are the most impacted by global warming. By connecting the audio to a politicized framing of global warming, the piece implicates “everyday” carbon-producing infrastructures in the (re)production of global warming’s neo-imperial geography. Specifically, I aim to implicate those involved in designing, building, and profiting from the operation of these infrastructures, including state planners and regulators, oil companies, banks, and climate profiteers.

Put together, these two ways of hearing position global warming-caused sea level rise as the wake of the Columbus Event. This figuration links global warming to colonization: to violence against Indigenous nations and to the terraforming of occupied lands. It links global warming to enslavement: to the kidnapping and displacement of Indigenous people known to Europeans as African and to the instrumentalized positioning of enslaved bodies as buffers between white Humanity and Nature. The figure of the wake of the Santa Maria also asks how global warming intensifies earlier binaries between colonizer/colonized and enslaver/enslaved. For example, fossil fuel-powered transportation makes a Global North traveler-consumer whose movement and territorial access is relatively unhindered, while also producing a displaced climate refugee whose movement is limited and policed. Furthermore, carbon emissions have the effect of colonizing as dumping grounds the entirety of the earth’s atmosphere, and in turn other lands rendered less habitable by global warming, with the latter tendency rendering the lands’ prior inhabitants propertyless and displaced. More broadly, fossil fuels allow Global North subjects to effectively transcend their local “natural” environment via climate control, shipping, and other well-funded infrastructures, while Global South subjects are exposed to increasingly dangerous environmental hazards such as rising sea levels, ecosystem collapse, and extremes of temperature and precipitation/drought. In fact, the violence of global warming is wider than earlier modern conquest in geographic scope, and yet is often geographically, racially, and temporally distributed so as to be less visible to its perpetrators and beneficiaries. At the same time, the distribution of global warming’s harms is not easily controlled by those responsible (as in recent record wildfires on occupied Turtle Island), meaning that whiteness may not offer the same protection against environmental harm that it did in early modernity. This increasing unreliability of the environmental “wages of whiteness,” to adopt WB DuBois’s phrase, may offer opportunities for political solidarities that were previously impossible.

I view this piece neither as a Representation of global warming, nor as consciousness-raising regarding global warming, but rather as a proposal for mapping relationality otherwise to historically white/colonizer epistemologies. As I have elaborated, the piece’s reference to a colonizers’ ship contests white/colonizer environmentalism’s abstraction of environmental issues from matters of political power, while its figuration of a wake in/across history operates against white/colonizer historical narration. The goal here is not to achieve epistemic “objectivity,” which is perhaps not even possible in light of the way that present-day Global North environmentalisms close off politicized lines of environmental inquiry, but rather to facilitate ruptures in these paradigms through strategic deployments of contemporary art tools. To catalyze these ruptures, the piece also proceeds in ways distinct from historically white experimental music and audio paradigms. In the field of experimental music, everyday sounds epitomize, for John Cage, an ideal musical situation which is supposedly categorically “free of individual taste and memory… [and] unimpeded by service to any abstraction.” Speaking in a well-known interview from the early 1990s, Cage finds this kind of situation epitomized by the sounds of street traffic of lands colonially known as lower Manhattan, heard from a few stories above. While, in some narrow sense, the sounds of traffic may not be legible in terms of concert music signifiers of Taste and Tradition, this territorial-infrastructural assemblage of land, roadways, oil production, and combustion engines is inconceivable outside of particular constellation of imperial political interests, histories, and abstractions. In particular, Cage’s reading of this Global North scene as dehistoricized, depoliticized Everydayness actively disappears—and thereby naturalizes—the imperial export of environmental harm onto the Global South. The related domain of field recording (both “art” and commercial), historically indebted to Cage’s Everydayness is implicated in perhaps even more pernicious discursive power dynamics. The scenes of docile Nature, empty of human presence prevalent in “nature sound” as well as sound art field recordings recall earlier discursive and legal figurations of terra nullius, whose writings of non-European lands as empty of human presence and/or sovereign governance renders them available and even in need of imperial conquest. The field recording sampled in the present piece can be positioned within a long-standing figure of the terra nullius of an “empty island,” an image whose historical consequences in the Caribbean extend from Spanish conquistadors to present-day global warming.

As a settler who is read as white, I intentionally limit the scope of the piece to the positions of white culprits of racializing and colonizing violence (past and present), and of white producers of related regimes of epistemic violence. This approach enables the piece to name mechanisms and perpetrators of violence while avoiding the “pornotropic” display of wounded bodies cautioned against by Black feminist scholars such as Hortense Spillers, as well as what Eve Tuck (Unangax̂). This approach also prevents me from ventriloquizing about positions that are not mine.

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The piece’s realization in the Intersection Festival at Yonge-Dundas Square in Tkaronto/Toronto takes place at the intersection of two streets named after perpetrators of colonization and racial slavery, and in close proximity to offices of corporate perpetrators of neo-imperialism via environmental means. The settler-imperial project known as Canada was built through the fur trade, in which European elites gained fashion accessories through the rapid destruction of Indigenous sovereignty and relations. This legacy continues today, with Canadian-owned extractive industry acting as a key player, globally, in neo-imperialism; with company names such as “Imperial Oil,” the industry itself openly admits this. Canada is a leading contributor to global warming as an oil producer, and Canadian banks such as RBC, Scotiabank, and TD Bank (TD stands for, significantly, Toronto Dominion) are leading funders, globally, of fossil fuel infrastructure. At the same time, since the decline of the fur trade, Canada and particularly Toronto’s wealth has become closely linked to mining, domestically within “Canada” and in the Global South. Many of the mining sector’s worst perpetrators, such as Barrick Gold and Hudbay Minerals, keep headquarters in the area between Yonge St. and University Ave., between Queen St. and the Gardiner Expressway, while their ill-gotten gains are enabled through the Toronto Stock Exchange, and greenwashed through philanthropic contributions to Toronto General Hospital and the School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

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A portion of artist fees received in connection with this piece will be donated to Casa Pueblo, focused on grassroots environmental organizing in Puerto Rico (https://casapueblo.org/), and to Tsleil-Waututh Nation Sacred Trust, mandated to stop the proposed Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) tanker and pipeline project (https://twnsacredtrust.ca/what-you-can-do/).