UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation analyzes artworks by contemporary artists Otobong Nkanga, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Jade Montserrat, and jackie sumell that use the materiality of the earth—rocks, soil, clay, and vegetation—to explore the intertwining of destruction of ecosystems and violence against humans. I situate these works within the racial Capitalocene and an emerging discourse of decolonial geopoetics. To do so, I consider them in contrast to European landscape traditions of representation that went hand-in hand with capitalist and colonialist perceptions of land as an alienable resource and reinforced racial hierarchies. Chapters cover Nkanga’s investigations of the ruins of colonial mining practices in Tsumeb, Namibia; Bopape’s remembering of colonial violence and South African Pan-Africanism through soil installations; Montserrat’s material explorations of the politics of belonging and imperial amnesia in England; and sumell’s use of gardening as a tool towards prison abolition in the United States. I argue that the artworks studied act at the interface between human and environment, addressing the histories and presents of colonialism, extractivism, and incarceration, and drawing attention to the fundamental interconnectedness of humans and the complex network of liveliness that is land. Further, I read the care for and acknowledgement of interdependence with other beings—both human and not—that these artists enact as a strategy for envisioning livable futures beyond the structures of the racial Capitalocene.