Keywords in Catastrophe

The concept catastrophe elicits images of ecological and planetary-level destruction. Catastrophe is often seen as something naturalized, “an act of God,” and as such is often detached as something intrinsically linked colonial disposession, indigenous genocide and dispossession, and trans-Atlantic slavery.

But more recently scholars, activists, and artists describe catastrophe as a political category, as a marker of Black life, as more than an event but a repetition of the consequences of European extractivism, exploitation, and conquest.

The Diaspora Solidarity Lab (DSL) takes on catastrophe as repetition, as socially produced, and as having an ongoing proximity to Black life. We bring together artists, activists, and scholars who reflect on the many iterations of catastrophe, who define how they understand catastrophe, and who contemplate how catastrophe may hold together Black diasporic communities.

Moving through artistic and scholastic mediums, our speakers will articulate how catastrophe has emerged as a powerful analytic in Black, Indigenous and Ethnic Studies, and then tensions and possibilities of catastrophe as not only an analytic tool of world's ending, but the possibility of catastrophe in amplifying world makin'.