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Abstract
This dissertation considers the anthropocene as a crisis of form and formlessness or, in rather Berlantian terms, as a “waning of genre.” I contend that the anthropocene is occasioned not only by catastrophic geological rupture and the threat of the Human’s demise, but also by a “waning” that reveals the indeterminacy of blackness, indigeneity, and transness as ontological categories. The impulse to make concrete objects of blackness, indigeneity, and transness belies their constitutive porosity. By thinking at the nexus of these objects, what I call Black Transfeminist Ecologies constellates a poethics of the interstitial, of the space in between, that offers lessons on the itinerancy of our objects and the stakes of “loosening” to turn our objects loose alongside our attendant subjectivities. What might “looseness” as an ecological association beget? How might it bear on ontological relations dependent upon attachment and interpolation? How does it bear on the impulse to ontologize gender, to both exceptionalize and ontologize indigeneity? What might making “loose” relations entail at the site of a crisis that doesn’t prioritize the endurance of species-time and obfuscate antiblack violence? I assert a Black, Transfeminist, and Ecological methodology as a poethics of precarious relation that sustains both the relational criticism of Afropessimism, the effusive potentiality of Black Optimism, and the decolonial methodology of Native American and Indigenous Studies, illustrating the ways in which Black Transfeminist Ecologists, otherwise known as “spatial actors”, to reference Katherine McKittrick, who are principally Black, Indigenous, Trans*, or otherwise socially located, literalize a ”loose” orientation to living, dying, and to a precocious interstitial state of (non-)being through aesthetic practices. I explore the question of form and its affective worlds by way of spatial objects, marking out the Coast, the Bottom, and the Plot as metonyms for ecological rupture that, while shoring up anxieties of form(lessness) materialized by reactionary actors, also extend lessons on living “loosely”.