Explosivity

"Javier Arbona-Homar takes us through landscapes shaped by violent explosions, whose aftermath rips time and space alike. Through gripping geostories rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, he unearths the unyielding traces of racial capitalism and militarization, challenging us to think about how we remember, forget, and live with destruction. Written with the precision of a geographer and the soul of a radical artist, Explosivity is a vital guide to confronting the latent violence embedded in our environments."—Trevor Paglen, MacArthur Fellow, artist, and author

"Explosivity blasts open how we define harm, exposing the systemic erasure of minor histories and the violent reinscription of memory in ‘afterblast’ landscapes. Organizing an unruly spatial archive of sites bearing repression and radical response, Javier Arbona-Homar experiments with decolonial practices of sensing explosivity and its consequences to defy cultural memoricide, vindicate the dead from the continuing afterlife of racial punishment and economic extraction, and create copresence and care for the scattered remains all around us."—Shiloh Krupar, author of Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste

How explosions across history reveal the violence embedded in San Francisco’s landscape

Offering a novel approach to contemporary landscape studies, Explosivity unearths the hidden legacies of violence that have shaped the physical and cultural environment of the San Francisco Bay area. As he sifts through the historical debris of previous centuries, Javier Arbona-Homar analyzes a series of explosions that took place between 1866 and 2011 to call attention to the scattered remnants of militarism and racialized capitalism embedded in the region’s geography.

From incidents involving nineteenth-century explosives manufacturing and World War II munitions loading to radical activism and contemporary television productions, Arbona-Homar locates a pattern of historical violence that refocuses the broader racial and colonial context. Citing the material, social, and political conditions that gave rise to these disparate episodes, he reviews the historic erasure of those driving forces and puts forth alternative possibilities for how such disasters might be memorialized.

Synthesizing a diverse set of field research methods, including oral histories and site visits, and supplemented by specially commissioned landscape photographs by Andrea Gaffney, Explosivity presents a radical exercise in the exposition of public memory.

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Javier Arbona-Homar is assistant professor in American studies and design at the University of California, Davis.

Andrea Gaffney is a landscape and architecture photographer and urban designer based in San Francisco.

Contents
Preface
Map
Introduction: Package

1. Suspect
2. Punishment
3. Memorial
4. Landscape
5. Accident

Conclusion: Remains
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index