Securing the Crisis: Race and the Poetics of Risk

Abstract

How do we trace what remains in duration—metaphysically, epistemologically—that has no conclusion and remains in suspension? Who gets to define and diagnose “risk?” Securing the Crisis examines overlapping transformations in North American racialization, language, and poetics that inform perceptions of risk in the wake of modern securitization. I argue that for brown and Black artists, a “poetics of risk” encourages untimeliness, dislocation, and conspiratorial opacity to refuse the hold of surveillance, deindustrialization, and fungibility. Each chapter, organized by critical catastrophic events of the early 21st century (September 11, Hurricane Katrina, the subprime mortgage crisis), interrogates how creative and cultural production engage in this poetics of risk, informed not only by race in the sociological sense, but by legal, economic, environmental, and affective considerations as well.Risk is the framework which organically enables this project to discuss Black, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, and Asiatic diasporic cultures relationally across material, affective, and theoretical conditions. Ultimately, this is a project concerned with the processes through which historical narratives become embedded within communities, and how racialized and minoritized subjects deploy epistemological abstraction and fragmentation not just as resistance, but to rework the conventions of periodicity, materialism, and reality that we accept as hegemonic. As such, this project asks: what is it that we mean when we use “risk,” whether it is to be at risk or to pose a risk? What, exactly, is being risked? Centering the experiences of those who live in the very matrices of this spectrum, each of these chapters is an attempt to begin new poetic archives curated for understanding these nodes of imperial accumulation and acceleration.