| My dissertation, Shocked Spaces: Literary Geographies and Disaster Recovery in the 21st Century, considers how twenty-first-century global texts respond to well-known disasters by producing new spatial imaginaries that counter official narratives of reconstruction. My project takes a global perspective by looking at works from four locations---Cape Town, New Orleans, New York City, and, the Fukushima prefecture---to interrogate the implicit and widespread grip of capitalism's presence during contemporary disaster recovery. My overarching concept, "shocked spaces" draws attention to the contested places within disasters where borders and spatial meaning are vulnerable to the imposition of spatial control from private investors, urban planners, and governments. In opposition to attempts by dominant sources of power to seize control of the landscape after disasters, in my project, I make four clear interventions: I argue for an alternative methodology when analyzing contemporary African cities that more appropriately articulates residual formations of suppression within uneven development. After Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, I explore how people used their accumulated personal materials such as refrigerators and the walls of homes as a form of artistic expression to bring local communities a sense of collective recovery. During the immediate moments of the 9/11 towers collapsing, examining the horrific imagery of people's bodies vaporized with the collapsed buildings helps me reimagine a new, deeply intimate relationship with the city called "blended materialities." Finally, in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown on 3.11.11, I investigate how artists used the forms of their styles to imagine new ways of engaging with impassable "nuclear ruins." As disasters occur with more frequency around the world in the twenty-first century, it is imperative for artists and scholars to participate in the recovery process because of their abilities to reimagine different ways of representing relationships between people and spaces after a hole has been blown into them. |
