EXPLOSIVITY virtual event with University of Cambridge CRASSH and Javier Arbona-Homar
March 20 @ 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm GMT
Javier Arbona-Homar will join University of Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities online on Thursday, March 20, for a presentation on his new book Explosivity: Following What Remains, at 5:00 p.m. GMT. He will be joined in discussion by Jonathan Gardner and discussant Emma Shaw Crane.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Explosivity unearths the hidden legacies of violence that have shaped the physical and cultural environment of the San Francisco Bay area. As he analyzes a series of explosions between 1866 and 2011, Javier Arbona-Homar calls attention to the scattered remnants of militarism and racialized capitalism embedded in the region’s geography, presenting a radical exercise in the exposition of public memory.
“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
