Jeffrey Santa Ana- Environmental Graphic Memory

Lecture by Jeffrey Santa Ana/ENG - "Environmental Graphic Memory: Transpacific Ecological Imagination in Asian Diasporic Comics". Part of the Abolitionist Futures Initiative.
This talk shows how graphic narratives by Asian diasporic artists visualize a transpacific ecological imagination. This ecological imagination in their art remembers, revises, and augments historical knowledge of western empire’s impact on the environments and ecosystems of the transpacific region. Moreover, their art articulates an ecocritical concept that I call environmental graphic memory, which engages with people displaced from their homelands because of ecological ruination caused by settler colonialism, imperialist militarism, war, and economic collapse.Jeffrey Santa Ana is Associate Professor of English. He is the author of Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion (Temple University Press, 2015). His co-edited book volume Empire and Environment: Confronting Ecological Ruination in the Transpacific is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. He is currently completing a book manuscript titled Transpacific Ecological Imagination: Envisioning the Anthropocene in Asian North American and Pacific Islander Literature.
Recorded on November 30. 2021