Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University

C. Riley Snorton
"The Racial Capitaloscene and the Resurgence of Pioneer Species"
[Response: Jay Cephas]

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 @5pm ET

N107 (School of Architecture)

As racial capitalism and the exploitation of natural and human resources sustain and perpetuate our current ecological condition, this talk asks what if the “answer” to climate catastrophe is decolonization and abolition? In close readings of two films, Uyra: The Rising Forest (Dir. Curi, 2022), set in the Amazon forest, and Neptune Frost (Dirs. Uzeyman and Williams, 2022), set in the hilltops of Burundi, Snorton traces a mycorrhizal network among pioneer species plant life and people that make evident that “the seeds of a different world are already alive in the everyday practices of ordinary Black and Indigenous people” (J.T. Roane, et. al. 2022). This talk is drawn from a larger project, tentatively entitled, Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning, which is a transdisciplinary, mixed-methodological study of the social significance of the development, disappearance, and transformation of swamps in the hemispheric Americas.

C. Riley Snorton is a cultural theorist who focuses on racial, sexual and transgender histories and cultural productions. He is the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Snorton is the co-editor of Saturation: Race, Art and the Circulation of Value (MIT Press/New Museum, 2020), The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024), and co-author of A Black Queer History of the United States, forthcoming with Beacon Press. He is also co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies (Duke University Press). Snorton’s next monograph, tentatively titled Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning examines the constitutive presence of swamps to racial practices and formations in the Americas. 
 

Jay Cephas is an historian of architecture, landscapes, and cities conducting research that explores the relationships between labor, technology, and identity in the built environment. Jay analyzes both ordinary and critical spatial practices to recover the latent and as of yet invisible knowledges that are transmitted through the bodies and buildings of urban environments. In his forthcoming book, Jay deploys these frameworks to examine the agonism structuring Fordism and urbanization in early twentieth-century Detroit. Jay’s latest research project turns to New York City to address the knowledge transfer occurring between visionary architects and labor activists in their joint efforts to create cooperative housing.

 

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