Min Hyoung Song recently highlighted a disavowed yet structurally inevitable entanglement between blackness and Asian Americans in U.S. civil society when he noted that Asian Americans are becoming “less of a model whose successes specifically berate blacks and other racial minorities for their lack of resolve and more a kind of, for lack of a better term, super-minority whose successes berate everyone [including the disabled] who fails somehow to succeed” (18). Song’s provocative take on the evolving status of the “model minority” maps what I see as a potentially productive dialogue between Disability studies and the contemporary critique of the concept of an Asian-American model minority. Also, as Song makes explicit, we should also include in this dialogue the construction of blackness in any discussion of the “model minority” because the term insinuates that there is an antithesis of the “model” and it is safe to say within the Americas that people of African descent have historically and are now under the greatest scrutiny in that category. In this way, Asian Americans’ emergent status as “super-minority” also correlates with what Michelle Alexander has recently diagnosed as the “‘color blind’ public consensus that personal and cultural traits, not structural arrangements, are largely responsible for the fact that the majority of young black men in urban areas across the United States are currently under the control of the criminal justice system or branded as felons for life” (234-5). Broadly put, the aim of the present essay is to foreground how subfields such Asian American and Disability studies can participate, however unwittingly, in deflecting attention from what Alexander calls the “structural arrangements” that contour blackness within U.S. civil society. In doing so, I hope to intervene in the ongoing depoliticization of ethnic/minoritarian studies within higher learning.

The Zero Degree of Sociality of Blackness

To clarify this structural displacement I also draw upon Frank B. Wilderson’s recent intervention entitled Red, White & Black (2011). Wilderson’s provocative study maintains that in order for a politics or ethics to become legible within U.S. civil society, it must be based upon an assumptive logic which calibrates all citizens-subjects as a priori human, which effectively puts under erasure what Wilderson calls one of the “structural antagonisms” that has historically framed black bodies as potentially, or rather, always already non-human. It is, therefore, only by attending to such “structural antagonisms” (as opposed to a conflict which can be dialectically resolved) that anti-blackness (and in a different way, the antagonism toward the Native American) can be brought into sharp relief not as contingent but gratuitous (i.e. structural) to the formation of U.S. civil society. Thus when the concept of the human (or any of its metonymic variation such as personhood) is invoked as the a priori condition that subsumes all persons within civil society, it has the effect of displacing and putting under erasure what Wilderson calls the “blackness’s grammar of suffering”―which is structurally bound to the Middle Passage that effectively transformed the African into the fungible object status of the Slave. Therefore, as Wilderson reminds us:

For the Black, freedom is an ontological, rather than experiential, question. There is no philosophically credible way to attach an experiential, a contingent, rider onto the notion of freedom when one considers the Black―such as freedom from gender or economic oppression, the kind of contingent riders rightfully placed on the non-Black when thinking freedom. Rather, the riders that one could place on Black freedom would be hyperbolic―though no less true―and ultimately untenable: freedom from the world, freedom from Humanity, freedom from everyone (including one’s Black self). (24)

In this, there can be no analogue to “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” which exceeds the descriptive power of representative language, as it gestures toward the unrepresentable, the zero-degree of sociality which the Slave embodies. Drawing upon the interarticulations between Disability and Asian American studies to illuminate this structural displacement is not as arbitrary as it might seem, as both become legible and ultimately unstable in and around “blackness.” This complex entanglement, says Wilderson via Ronald Judy’s (Dis)Forming the American Canon (1994) that

the mere presence of the Black and his or her project, albeit adjusted structurally, threatens the fabric of the ‘stable’ economy by threatening its structure of exchange. ‘Not only are the conjunctive operations of discourse of knowledge and power that so define the way in which academic fields get authenticated implicated in the academic instituting of Afro-American studies, but so is the instability entailed in the nature of the academic work.’ (40)

As previously mentioned, Wilderson’s deployment of the term “antagonism” reflects his understanding that U.S. Civil Society continues to gratuitously position the Black as a being without humanity. According to Wilderson’s extension of Judy’s study, the disavowal of the “structural antagonism” toward the Black is thus a necessary function that is crucial to not only “instituting of Afro-American studies” but the manner in which such fields as Asian American and Disability studies “get authenticated” within academia. This insight is crucial to understanding how the convergence of Disability and Asian American studies on their assumptive logic of the human unwittingly works to displace “blackness’s grammar of suffering” from the political and ethical terrain that contours U.S. civil society.

In other words, the more the Asian American is framed as a “super-minority,” capable of transcending through individual effort all kinds of material, cultural, political barriers, the more the subject of liberal politics gains legitimacy. Crucial to this essay is how this liberal model of political and cultural citizenship is constituted as ideally unmarked by either gender or race, let alone disability. Yet as Linda Martín Alcoff reminds us in her timely intervention, not just any body of any race or gender can embody this privileged model of cultural and political citizenship in the U.S.―a fact that needs reminding in our phantasmatic present that is prone to post-racial imaginings.

Blackness in Disability and Asian American Studies

The prevalence of colorblindness within U.S. civil society is not unrelated to the recent backlash against politics based on identity tout court―complaints from liberals and conservatives alike that politics based on social identity is at best philosophically naïve and at worst pathological. Disability studies, however, insists that distancing social identity from the lived embodied experience denies the materiality of the social world. Indeed, one could argue that the critical insight that lived experience is embodied and thereby embedded in the materiality of the social is the raison d’être of Disability studies. As Tobin Siebers, one of its leading practitioners observes, “Disability exposes with great force the constraints imposed on bodies by social codes and norms” (174). To wit Disability studies accentuates how for certain bodies, the normative ideal of abstract citizenship is at best contradictory and at worst unethical. This is not to imply that the body is neglected altogether in critical theory. Rather, as Lennard J. Davis observes, the problem lies in the fact that when the body does come to matter theoretically,

[it] is seen as a site of jouissance, a native ground of pleasure, the scene of excess that defies reason, that takes dominant culture and its rigid, powerladen vision of the body to task. … [while neglecting the] body … that is deformed, maimed, mutilated, broken, diseased. … [T]he critic [rather] turns to the fluids of sexuality, the gloss of lubrication, the glossary of the body as text, the heteroglossia of the intertext, the glossolalia of the schizophrenic. But almost never the body of the differently abled. (175)

In this, the poststructuralist tendency to read the body as a site of “excess that defies reason”―as a site of epistemological “excess”―works to legitimate the liberal model of cultural and political citizenship, which the universal concept of the “human” subtends. Therefore a politics based on social identity or embodied differences such as gender and race is said to not merit serious attention, as it distracts attention from explicitly universal social problems. As such, the present hostility toward politics based on identity tout court reflects what is:

In classical liberal political theory, the initial state of the self … [which is] conceptualized as an abstract individual without, or prior to, group allegiance. […] As Kant developed this idea, a person who cannot gain critical distance from and thus objectify his or her cultural traditions cannot rationally assess them and thus cannot attain autonomy. In Kant’s view, an abstract or disengaged self is for this reason necessary for full personhood. (Alcoff 21-1)

Contrary to this liberal political model of “full personhood” as an ideally disembodied rationality, free of material ties to individual, collective and structural Other, coupled with the tendency in poststructuralist theorizing of the body as a site of excess that defies signification, Disability studies foregrounds embodied reality as theoretically relevant to understanding the self in the world. Not surprisingly, however, such attention to how the self is embodied and embedded in material reality can work against Disability studies. For if the baseline of liberal and conservative critique of politics based on society identity hinges on the ideality of disembodied rationality, the disabled body, which illumines how self and body are ontologically and epistemologically imbricated becomes aligned with the absence of “full personhood.” In other words, if the mature Kantian political subject is able to achieve autonomy by objectifying his/her material ties to culture, society and history, by foregrounding the nexus between self and body the disabled subjectivity can potentially serve as a metonym for a compromised form of transcendence. Siebers underscores precisely this attendant theoretical and political danger when Disability studies touches upon how the body matters to the self:

Rather than objectifying their body as the other, people with disabilities often work to identify with it, for only a knowledge of their body will decrease pain and permit them to function in society. Unfortunately, this notion of the body as self has been held against people with disabilities. It is represented in the psychological literature as a form of pathological narcissism, with the result that they are represented as mentally unfit in addition to being physically unfit. (182)

Following this logic to its contradictory conclusion, the disabled subject can achieve “full,” that is equal status as person/citizen, only if he or she is able to objectify the very material (corporeal, visible or otherwise) condition that renders his or her disability socially meaningful.

It is through this tension that I read Davis’s call for an end to identity politics tout court. For example, in “The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism: On Disability as an Unstable Category,” Davis supports a dismodernist politics based on what he calls a “new kind of universalism and cosmopolitanism that is reacting to the localization of identity” (239). As the title of his essay announces, Davis suggests “disability” as an identificatory “category” that cannot hold, and so rather than clinging to an outmoded modernist notion of the subject as complete and independent, he calls for a dismondernism which “[is] a new way of thinking [that] rests on the operative notion that postmodernism is still based on a humanistic model” (240). Though I agree with Davis that the essentialization of identity should be challenged, there is a strong sense in his reasoning that the historical-cultural (i.e. broad spectrum of material) specificity derived from the localization of social identity (serves as an obstacle to the achievement of his “new cosmopolitanism,” which unexpectedly intersects with Siebers’s description of how Disability studies is routinely accused of engaging in “pathological narcissism.” As Davis insists, “[t]he problem presented to us by identity politics is the emphasis on an exclusivity (i.e. “localization”) surrounding a specific so-called identity. […] Disability studies can provide a critique of and a politics to discuss how all groups, based on physical traits or markings, are selected for disablement by a large system of regulation and signification” (240). Though Davis’s overarching goal of unsettling essentialist notions of identity is to be commended (as such dismantling is crucial to building broad coalitions across differing social identities), to theorize the body (and by extension “wounds”) in universal and cosmopolitan terms can lead to what Disability studies cannot afford. Notice below how his critique of politics based on identity tout court forces his argument to swerve toward the erasure of crucial material differences, the cultural and historical specificities that obtain in and around the body, and I would argue, suffering:

Politics have been directed toward making all identities equal under the model of rights of the dominant, often white, male, ‘normal’ subject. In a dismodernist mode, the ideal is not a hypostatization of the normal (that is, dominant) subject, but aims to create a new category based on the partial, incomplete subject whose realization is not autonomy and independence but dependence and interdependence. This is a very different notion from subjectivity organized around wounded identities; rather, all humans are seen as wounded. (240-1)

The problematic model of civil society as constituent of undifferentiated humans aside (a point to which I will return later), Davis’s critique of identity works to consolidate the idea of liberal political subject that is ideally unmarked by embodied difference such as race and gender. According to Chris Bell, it is precisely such flattening of racial difference in Disability studies that helps to authorize uncritical analogies such as: “Being disabled is just like being black … ” (277). Bell’s critique of Disability studies is far-reaching in its consequences not simply because it points to the structural and ontological differences between being “disabled” and being Black in the U.S., but because it undercuts the assumptive logic that universalizes the concept of the “human” itself, without which civil society would be bereft of it moral/ethical coherence.

For what Bell takes issue with is the tendency in Disability studies to displace race as a social factor that impinges in the materialization of identities in contemporary United States. Put otherwise, an effect made evident in and through Davis’s call for a dismondernist/cosmopolitan ethics is the displacement, if not making light, of cultural (historical) particularity. Indeed, recognizing that race and by extension gender are mere fictions of social construction does not, for example, contradict Manalansan’s insight that: “While race is established through numerous institutional, cultural, quotidian practices, in all of these arenas the racialized subject’s body filters, absorbs, and deflects various interpolating forces and practices” (182). In this, the corporeality of the body (and not simply its metaphorical substitute) is imbricated in production of racialized meanings. Crucial here is how Bell’s and Manalansan’s attempts to illumine embodied realities do not necessarily result in the production of reified, transcendent forms of knowledge. Yet by attending to how blackness structurally differentiates the disabled body, Bell’s critique does localize the disabled body vis-à-vis the social, frustrating, no matter how well intended, Davis’s search for the universal or more precisely, a point of analogy. Upon closer observation, Davis’s desire for the cosmopolitan body—the universally “wounded” body that resists localization enables the return of what he fears—the able-bodied white male subject as the proxy for normalcy. Incidentally, in a slightly different but nevertheless relevant context, Julia Kristeva’s ethico-political orientation toward the “stranger” has come under similar criticism. As Sara Ahmed queries, does not the model of “call[ing] ourselves (i.e. all human subjects) strangers … perform the gesture of killing the strangers it simultaneously creates, by rendering them universal: [as] a new community of the ‘we’ is implicitly created. If we are all strangers (to ourselves), then nobody is” (73). Or in Bell’s more scathing critique: “Far from excluding people of color, White Disability Studies treats people of color as if they were white people, as if there are no critical exigencies involved in being people of color that might necessitate these individuals understanding and negotiating disability in a different way from their white counterparts” (282). Though Bell does not go on to explore what specific “critical exigencies” differentiate how “people of color” embody disability or suffering, it is clear from his critique that he intuits a certain “grammar” to suffering which Davis’s “Dismodernism” cannot accommodate.

For instance, what at first glance seems merely naïve―that is the observation that in the U.S. “[b]eing disabled is just like being black”―actually does index how disability cannot be synonymous with Whiteness. For what is suggested through the forced parity between the construction of blackness and disability is that the disabled body or mind cannot properly embody Whiteness in toto. And that is what Anna Stubblefield demonstrates in “‘Beyond the Pale’: Tainted Whiteness, Cognitive Disability and Eugenic Sterilization,” which iterates how disabled white persons have historically been categorized as embodying a tainted form of whiteness. She convincingly argues that beginning from the 1800s in the U.S. those who were considered feebleminded, a form of cognitive disability, lost the full privileges attendant with white citizenship. As she writes, “ … to grasp feeblemindedness fully as a signifier of tainted whiteness, it is important to understand that the state-sponsored, involuntary sterilization of tainted whites meant that they had, in effect, lost the full protection that whiteness conferred in a white supremacist society” (178; emphasis added). Not only did the so-called feebleminded whites come to embody a compromised form of whiteness but also the “ … white men [and women] labeled as criminal, sexually deviate, homosexual, … or insane … ” (Stubblefield 178).

What Stubblefield emphasizes is that disability as a social construct cannot easily be detached from its imbricated positioning within a network of material forces that include not only race but sexuality, class, and gender. Her study foregrounds the need for Disability studies to attend to racialization as not a tangential focus but central to its overall theoretical and political project. Interestingly Stubblefield’s study of how disability can dispossess whites of their “full personhood” under U.S. law seemingly lends support to what “Dismodernism” authorizes, which is the idea that the suffering of blacks can be made equivalent to not only what disabled whites come to embody but also to all those other Others represented under the category of “people of color.” In short, disability has the potential to democratize civil society by recalling how all citizens are common in their humanity―that is, equally exposed to disability. Yet, if we read between the lines of Stubblefield’s summary of how “feebleminded whites” can become “tainted,” the singularity of “blackness’s grammar of suffering” emerges. For what distinguishes “blackness grammar of suffering” is how it does not operate according to the assumptive logic of capability. In other words, to approach “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” Wilderson insists that one must be able to imagine “an ethicality … so terrifying that, as a space to be inhabited and terror to be embraced” (41), it resists language. It is a “grammar of suffering” based not upon the logic of a “lost” capacity but that of a deontologized property, the Slave that is not “exploited and alienated” but rather “accumulated and fungible.” The effect of this singular grammar on Asian American and Disability studies is significant, but the impact of Wilderson’s critique on the “scholarly and aesthetic production” of the “Black theorist” is radical by comparison. As he writes:

This [“blackness’s grammar suffering”] makes the labor of disavowal in Black scholarly and aesthetic production doubly burdensome, for it is triggered by a dread of both being ‘discovered,’ and of discovering oneself, as ontological incapacity. Thus, through borrowed institutionality―the feigned capacity to be essentially exploited and alienated (rather than accumulated and fungible) in the first ontological instance (in other words, a fantasy to be just like everyone else, which is a fantasy to be)―the work of Black film theory [and by extension Black studies] operates through a myriad of compensatory gestures in which the Black theorists assumes subjective capacity to be universal and thus ‘finds’ it everywhere. (42)

Placed within the frame of “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” I want to examine the consequences of Davis’s attempt to render disability cosmopolitan. While the move has the virtual effect of equalizing all bodies around human capacity to suffer―such an ethical cum political strategy requires the disavowal of how concepts such as “human” and “civil society” in the U.S. have structurally depended on the production of social death, i.e. the Black (and the Red). As it should be obvious by now, what is therefore unthinkable in Davis’s attempt to make civil society cohere around the universality of human suffering is the contingent nature of the term human itself. This in fact is what Bells intuits but cannot name in his influential essay entitled “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal.” Bell’s hesitation is partly attributable to how pain or suffering is both social (that is communicable, sharable by all humans in equal measure) and incommunicable within Disability studies. That is, Disability studies’ uneven attention to the incommunicability of suffering is seemingly capable of accommodating the unrepresentability that is constituent of “blackness’s grammar of suffering.” As Siebers insists, “[i]ndividuality derived from the incommunicability of pain easily enforces a myth of hyperindividuality, a sense that each individual is locked in solitary confinement where suffering is the only object of contemplation. People with disabilities are already too politically isolated for this myth to be attractive” (176). Yet in an attempt to intervene in the poststructuralist tendency to idealize “physical pain” as site of either transcendent power or pleasure, Siebers also adds, “… [p]hysical pain is [at once] highly individualistic, unpredictable, and raw as reality. Pain is not a resource of political change. It is not a well of delight for the individual” (178). What is directly pertinent to the present essay is how the universal figure of the “individual”- human marks the critical horizon of Disability theory. Or, to put a finer point to it via Widerson’s reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask, “… the Negro … ‘is comparison,’ nothing more and certainly nothing less, for what is less than comparison? … [And as such] ‘No one knows yet who [the Negro] is, but he knows that fear will fill the world when the world finds out’” (42).

We find in the most sophisticated Asian Americanist deployment of poststructuralist strategies of reading―such as the one advanced in the influential work by Kandice Chuh―a similar call to abandon politics based on social identity. While I am in agreement with both Davis’s and Chuh’s overarching critique of uniform identity, I find troubling their wholesale critique of all identity formation as a priori essentialist. For such framing of social identity as necessarily restrictive can only lead to the return of the repressed in our present era of colorblindness―the ideal of abstract citizenship. As she writes: “‘Asian American’ … connotes the violence, exclusion, dislocation, and disenfranchisement that has attended the codification of certain bodies as variously, Oriental, yellow, sometimes brown, inscrutable, devious, always alien. It speaks to the active denial of personhood to the individuals inhabiting those bodies” (Chuh 27). In this, Chuh―along with Davis and Siebers―unwittingly announces the displacement and the erasure of “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” as their strategies of reading the presence or absence of justice within U.S. civil society is predicated upon exploitation and alienation of the a priori human subject.

Nevertheless, by embodying the self―Disability studies helps to shift (though only slightly) critical theory toward an alternative ethicality that does not programmatically endorse the idea and ideals of abstract citizenship. For contrary to the liberal model of the political subject that achieves “hyperindividuality” through social and material detachment, the alternative model of subjectivity that is afforded through the disabled body is a self that is always already in the process of negotiating complex relations to the materiality of the social. Thus, the embodied model of subjectivity helps to re-imagine “personhood” as relation itself, leading not to the reification or essentialization of self, this relational model of subjectivity demands that any identity whatsoever be thought not as autonomous substance but rather as a site, comprising of unfinished, mobile, heterogeneously constituted relations across an embodied hermeneutic horizon. It bears mentioning here that it is this interconnected and radically open vision of “personhood” as relation that is foreclosed in the liberal model of abstract citizenship. For in the liberal model of the self, the ideal is to attain singular indeterminacy through the negation of such social relations, without which no self can hope to attain intelligibility. As Alcoff’s important work suggests:

Social identities … are more properly understood as sites from which we perceive, act, and engage with others. These sites are not simply locations or positions, but also hermeneutic horizons comprised of experiences, basic beliefs, and communal values […] . We are not boxed in by them, constrained, restricted, or held captive―unless … it makes sense to say that we are boxed in by the fact that we have bodies . … (287)

Interestingly it is by attending to how the self is embodied and embedded in social reality that clarifies the radical singularity of the Black’s structural non-relationality, which in turn helps to bring into focus not only what Wilderson calls the “structural antagonisms” that contour U.S. civil society but also unexplored ethico-political limits and possibilities of sub-fields such as Disability and Asian American studies. For according to Wilderson’s Red, White & Black what gives internal coherence to such terms as “human” and “civil society” in the U.S. is the disavowal of the structural (historical) relation blacks have with what is essentially non-human, a form of social death known as slavery. As he summarizes:

During the emergence of new ontological relations in the modern world, from the late Middle Ages through the 1500s, many different kinds of people experienced slavery. … But African, or more precisely Blackness, refers to an individual who is by definition always already void of relationality. Thus modernity marks the emergence of a new ontology because it is an era in which an entire race appears, people who, a priori, that is prior to the contingency of the ‘transgressive act’ (such as losing a war or being convicted of a crime), stand as socially dead in relation to the rest of the world. (17-8)

Wilderson’s intervention therefore hinges on isolating and exposing this dual operation by which civil society makes sense of itself to itself―the simultaneous disavowal of and parasitic dependency on the Black. In other words, the desire to make blackness an analogue of disability amounts to denying the structural relevancy of slavery to the formation of U.S. civil society. Wilderson’s reading of Fanon helps to articulate the radical singularity of “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” as it emphasizes how “… the gratuitous violence of the Black’s first ontological instance, the Middle Passage, ‘wiped out [his or her] metaphysics … his [or her] customs and sources on which they are based.’ Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks” (38). What Wilderson calls the “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” consequently, has no analogue in either the assumptive figure of the “individual” that subtends Disability studies and those other Others within U.S. civil society that have become included within the frame known as “people of color.” In this, “blackness’s grammar of suffering” gestures toward what is unnamable, a form of suffering that is in excess of any ethical language which is based upon the universal figure of the human. This is how Wilderson radically undermines the desire to transpose “blackness’s grammar of suffering” into the ethico-political language upon which civil society’s depends to make suffering (physical, psychic or otherwise) intelligible. As he writes:

The ruse of analogy erroneously locates Blacks in the world―a place where they have not been since the dawn of Blackness. This attempt to position the Black in the world by way of analogy is not only a mystification, and often erasure, of Blackness’s grammar of suffering (accumulation and fungibility or the status of being non-Human) but simultaneously also a provision for civil society, promising an enabling modality for Human ethical dilemmas. It is a mystification and an erasure because … their grammars of suffering are irreconcilable. (37)

Such is the logic that animates Bell’s critique of Disability studies but it does not, cannot obtain the force of Wilderson’s intervention because Bell cannot or dare not disarticulate the Black from the world. Nevertheless both Wilderson and Bell help foreground the important fact that even suffering obtains a “grammar,” that is, has a way of indexing―whether positively in the form of identification or negatively through dis- or even through non-identification, the presence or absence of a world. What Bell’s and especially Wilderson’s critique bring into sharp relief is that anti-blackness is part and parcel of the episteme that gives internal coherence to U.S. civil society. To approach “blackness’s grammar suffering” is therefore to contemplate, albeit always indirectly, not the paradigm of disability which is always already predicated on agency but a radical non-capacity.

Wilderson’s illumination of how the “antagonism” that obtains around blackness is structural to the formation of U.S. civil society has the effect of clarifying the positioning of sub-fields such as Disability and Asian American studies, especially when their protocols aim toward establishing some form of political justice based upon “exploitation and alienation,” which is at odds with “blackness’s grammar of suffering.” As previously mentioned, Wilderson draws a sharp distinction between “conflict” and “antagonism.” And this is key, as it is only when anti-blackness is positioned as an “antagonism” that the residual and structural effects of the Slave (the non-human) can be allowed to erupt into the living present of U.S. civil society. As such, though by comparison far more optimistic than Wilderson’s study, Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) gives powerful evidence to Wilderson’s theory of the “structural antagonisms” that contour U.S. civil society. This is how a critical theory based upon advancing a colorblind world or an ethicality based upon the universal human effectively silences the suffering of the Black. As Alexander argues:

Far from being a worthy goal … colorblindness has proved catastrophic for African Americans. It is not an overstatement to say that the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States would not have been possible in the post-civil rights era if the nation had not fallen under the spell of a callous colorblindness. … Saying that one does not care about race is offered as an exculpatory virtue, when in fact it can be a form of cruelty. … Our blindness also prevents us from seeing the racial and structural divisions that persist in society: the segregated, unequal schools, the segregated, jobless ghettos, and the segregated public discourse―a public conversation that excludes the current pariah of caste [the incarcerated black males in U.S. civil society]. (228)

In this, Wilderson’s Red, White, & Black and Alexander’s The New Jim Crow bring into sharp focus why the framing of blackness within U.S. civil society cannot do without the ruse of analogy which effectively puts under erasure a “… violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroy[ing] the possibility of ontology because it positions the Black in an infinite and indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say fungible) for any subject” (Wilderson, 38). Put otherwise, this “violence” which is in excess of that ideologically saturated term called Humanity demands the infinitely difficult yet necessary encountering with what gives U.S. civil society the simulacrum of ethical and political decency.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.

Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2010. Print.

Bell, Chris. “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal.” The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 2006. 275-282. Print.

Chua, Amy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.

Davis, Lennard J., ed. The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967. Print.

Judy, Ronald. (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Print.

Manalansan IV, Martin F. “Cooking up the Senses: A Critical Embodied Approach to the Study of Food and Asian American Television Audiences.” Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America. Eds. Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. 179-193. Print.

Ruthrof, Horst. Semantics and the Body: Meaning from Frege to the Postmodern. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 1997. Print.

Siebers, Tobin. “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 2006. 173-183. Print.

Song, Min Hyoung. “Communities of Remembrance: Reflections on the Virginia Tech Shootings and Race.” The Journal of Asian American Studies 11:1 (2008): 1-26. Print.

Stubblefield, Anna. “‘Beyond the Pale’”: Tainted Whiteness, Cognitive Disability, and Eugenic Sterilization,” Hypatia 22:1 (2007): 162-81. Print.

Wilderson, Frank B. Red, White, Black: Cinema and the Structures of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Print.

Jimmy Santiago Baca and Terry Tempest Williams exemplify in their poems and prose the desire of humans to merge with the natural world that they inhabit. Place gets made, in part, through poetic response, a response of the body, mind, and heart to environment. It is important that each of these writers chooses to experience place in ways unique to them and to their own distinct autobiographies. Their lives as they have lived them in specific places—for Baca the Black Mesa of Southern Albuquerque in New Mexico and for Williams the red rock lands of Utah—emerge in their work as desire for place as a way of knowing and, too, as acknowledgment of the mystery that is life. The works of these writers reflect a desire to reconceptualize our notions of place through engaged experience and overcoming separation as fear to create new ways of being in relationship with culture, the body, and memory. Baca’s and Williams’ work exemplifies radical notions of place as a poetic politics of thinking and being based on relationality. Several thinkers offer unique ways of conceptualizing these authors’ works: the history of place rendered by Edward Casey in his intellectual history of place in The Fate of Place; French feminist theory that contests reality dictated by normative thought, particularly the work of Hélène Cixous on writing from the body; and, bell hooks’ critical work on the need for an evolving aesthetics that reflects the lives of people of color.

Baca’s and Williams’ writings reveal an intimate relationship with place and its life forms as a politics of dwelling and attending to environments in unique and idiosyncratic ways. The writer divulges this relationship to the reader, adding depth and acuity to understanding the relations she shares with earth, with others, and with herself. The definition of place becomes multiple selves in relationship, rather than a single self that lacks dynamism. These various selves the writers experience in relation to and their openness to multiplicity allows all forms of life as potential lovers.

Simone de Beauvoir, addressing women and creativity, asserts that truly great works “are those which contest the world in its entirety” (French Feminists 28). Of course, she argued when she gave her lecture in Japan in 1966 that the works of women had not yet contested the world, largely because women had not had the education and opportunity, let alone place and position, to contest the world created by men. Baca and Williams contribute to a tradition rapidly evolving of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, one which makes its central purpose not only contestation of the world as we’ve known and inherited it (in de Beauvoir’s case through gender), but new understandings of what it means to know and be in place-world. Baca gives us poems of grief and forgiveness in coming to terms with familial, cultural, and personal loss as a man of color. Williams’ work creates elemental explorations of body in relation to Utah’s desert. Utah also represents the region where her family and community have been exposed to atomic weapons testing by the United States government in the second half of the twentieth century. Her sensual connection with the earth in Desert Quartet becomes a means of renewal from the loss of health and community due to the testing. As we engage the work of these authors, we expand the ways in which we receive and engage place-world as it presents itself to us and we offer ourselves to it, knowing that it will change us and that the places we love and respect are in constant flux.

Tom Lynch describes Jimmy Santiago Baca as “one of America’s great bioregional poets” (EJR 257). In his poems Baca becomes the earth of his people. The poet’s mother abandoned him and his two siblings when he was seven years old. She left her family to live with a white man. After Baca’s release from Florence State Prison at the age of twenty-five he became reacquainted with his mother. Shortly thereafter, his mother’s husband murdered her. “Then he shot you and himself,” Baca writes in one of his poems (Mesa 28). Lynch asserts that mother abandonment has been for Baca an uprooting. He writes to his mother in his semi-autobiographical poem “Martín”: “Your departure uprooted me mother/hollowed core of child/your absence whittled down/to a broken doll/in a barn loft. The small burned area of memory/where your face is supposed to be/moons’ rings pass through/in broken chain of events/in my dreams” (Baca, Meditations 14). Mother memory haunts Baca, as does father-brother-sister-family memory. The adjectives and verbs he chooses in this passage—hollowed, whittled, broken, burned (two times)—address specifically the hole of mother absence and convey violent homelessness at the root of abandonment. The sense of being torn from home and the hole it leaves is for Baca embodied in the loss of his physical mother and the emotional support she might have offered him, but given her own limitations of culture, time, and place, did not.

In Baca’s passionate poems, he asserts the need for merging, a burning desire for possession by the earth, by another, and of himself. He wants to be known and to know totally. This knowing seems improbable, if not impossible. However much we long for total understanding by and from another, that knowing somehow eludes our grasp. He returns again and again to poetry to find this knowing within himself and his life in relationship to others through language. In “Who Understands Me But Me” he writes of learning to live with himself, his limitations and beauty, even while imprisoned and mistreated by guards. “I practice being myself/and I have found parts of myself never dreamed of by me” (Baca, Immigrants 84). It is this multiplicity of selves he engages and inhabits and comes to love. He finds his own best company within his fallible and injured body. That love arrives in total acceptance of all that he has incurred; following the signs like an old tracker into himself “deeper into dangerous regions” he finds so many parts of himself. He is not alone. He can live with himself now (Immigrants 84).

Baca becomes a place for himself and to himself. It is clear in reading his work that if the poet had not discovered that he himself was a place, he would not have survived time in prison. I believe that Baca in some of his poems enacts what feminist theorist and writer Hélène Cixous critically describes as coming to writing in physical movement toward the desired thing. The body serves as a means to writing. It carries us toward what we want and love. Writing is not an occurrence that happens outside the body. Writing is desire expressed through the body. We contain all histories and geographies, a vastness of being within ourselves: “Search yourself, seek out the shattered, the multiple I, that you will be still further on, and emerge from one self, shed the old body” (Cixous 41). Cixous’s thought in the tradition of French feminism has been influenced by Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, which posits a splitting of self when the child sees his mirror reflection. Cixous further urges shedding the Law, which Lacan postulates as the father’s rule, or perhaps in metaphoric terms, the past itself. Baca sheds neither the old body nor his past. Neither is his desire to shed Law, as Lacanian thought asserts is first established by the parent in the role of father. He works these elemental influences in his poetry but does not abandon them. Baca integrates a sense of himself as a child, a growing man, a (sometimes nearly dead) wounded prisoner, and a flourishing poet as a dynamic process grounded in the present. In poetic utterances, cries for love, and expressions of grief, language allows Baca to create himself without separation from and abandonment of that which has created him. In the poems exists the palpable presence/absence of family, home, and community steeped in place and located in time.

What emerges in Baca’s poems is a living autobiography of the complex development of a consciousness in relation to self, others, and the material-sensual world. The combination of these relations forms Baca’s response to place. His poems are songs, inspired by poets like Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca, lengthy, breathless improvisations of jazz, and the insatiable desire to experience union with all living things. He sings his amazement in existence, captured in the most incongruous of pairings, such as when he writes in his collection of river poems: “I catch glimpses of eternity sometimes in stray dogs” (Baca, Winter 18). Simultaneously, he pushes away in hatred those who have betrayed him. The repulsion is complex. He refutes betrayals that he has experienced in the form of racism, violence, alcoholism, bureaucratic and corporate corruption, and “amenity migrants” (qtd. in Lynch 260) to his Southwestern homelands. He also insists on closeness to suffering as embodied knowledge as he makes these betrayals the subject of his poems.

Like Baca, the semi-autobiographical character Martín lives for a time in an orphanage after his mother runs away with her lover and his father disappears into a vagabond life of alcohol. There were times in his childhood and in prison that through dream and visualization Baca was able to transport himself above or away from embodiment. In one poem Martín leaves his body while lying on a cot in a Catholic orphanage. “I dreamed my spirit was straw and mud/a pit dug down below my flesh/to pray in/and I prayed on beads of blue corn kernels/slipped from thumb to earth/while deerskinned drumhead of my heart/gently pounded and I sang/ all earth is holy” (Baca, Martín 17). Baca reaches back through lines of ancestors to the earth. In his willingness to inhabit a past that lives in the narrative present of his body, he forges bonds with his Mexican and Apache ancestors. This transfiguration opens Baca to a different consciousness, as expressed in an interview with Bill Moyers, to “see the reality behind the reality” (Baca, “Swirl Like a Leaf”). In Baca’s work place is earth, acequía, leafy cottonwood, deerskin, and blue corn kernel. He finds place when he sets foot to ground. When absente from the things he loves—land, culture, mother, family—he discovers place as prayer, body-memory, heart-rhythm-beating-song that allows him to recall what matters and who he is in the present because of the past.

What are the philosophical underpinnings to our considerations of place in our contemporary experience? Immanuel Kant first spoke to the body as a locus of perception. His thinking later gave way to phenomenology, pursued by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Bachelard, thinkers who considered space local to the body and experienced intimately in daily life and in one’s sensate knowing of the material world. In Being and Time Heidegger leaves behind an early interest in region to consider dwelling as an act of nearness. This helps him locate place not only in the physical world but as an indwelling, so that place becomes infused with interiority. Nearing is an activity of drawing close, in physical proximity as well as in perception, body, and mind. Dwelling or inhabiting is residing in the nearness of things. Is this, then, an aesthetic as an intimacy with experience? One dwells not only with things but with feelings, senses, and the presences of others. Heidegger’s reflections posit a rehabitation of space, making it place-world and intimate. There are no monovalent definitions in this way of considering being in the world. He writes: “We always go through spaces in such a way that we already experience them by staying constantly with near and remote locations and things” (qtd. in Casey 276).

Forced migration, poverty, racism, and family separation characterizes place in a postmodern age. What are the ways that we experience displacement and replacement? The destruction of place through warfare, which includes racism, poverty, and violence, induces forced migration and creates homelessness, years of living in squalid camps or living in exile away from the origin of birth, culture, and family. Common to modern life is the presence of those without shelter, living on the streets, in the dumps, and under the highways of the world. Globalized industry and transported popular culture erases local, regional, and even national practices and identities. The places that cultures need to thrive dissolve under the pressure of corporate and/or governmental interests. Finally, and this list is not exhaustive, there is a growing sameness (cultural, visual, experiential, material) of the world’s cities under the pressure of globalization. Casey makes an argument for the vitality of place in the midst of these nonarbitrary conditions of modernity that impose sameness as uniformity. “An active desire for the particularity of place—for what is truly ‘local’ or ‘regional’—is aroused by such increasingly common experiences. Place brings with it the very elements sheared off in the planiformitiy of site: identity, character, nuance, history” (Casey, Fate xiii).

Baca has experienced such displacement and his writing becomes an effort to create for himself, mostly through poems but also in stories, memoir, and film, a renewed relationship to his native New Mexican land. He finds himself in cities—Albuquerque, San Diego, and Los Angeles, often homeless or situated in temporary housing and vulnerable to police harassment. Baca reminds us that lived experience of place—physically, in memory, and as expressed through language—allows intimacy with the body. Place fosters nearness to the thingness of multitudinous environments. It connects us, beyond site and sight, to that which gives us meaning and value in the world. When place is insufferable, it lets us occupy our experience. Place helps us determine what is real, if the ability to discriminate remains through suffering and depravation, and to decipher what’s happening and where we are.

In his later Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande (2004), Baca records the river as a teacher, one that shapes the character of the lands of his origin. “The river has taught me/patience—a year I’ve stood every day to watch it,/pray to it that I connect my present moment/to my origins as it does,/that I am connected now/to my beginnings as it is” (Baca, Winter 13). Place, here as river, allows his loves and accepts his despair. Returning to place as a ritual of solace and wisdom provides a vital form of nourishment for life and resistance to nihilism. The river is the dwelling, the thingness and nearness for Baca, to which Heidegger refers in his thoughts on place. Baca’s relationship with the New Mexican earth fuels his desire to enact rituals that connect him with his people, his culture, and the historic longing he has carried in an effort to return to true things. These later poems, written nearly thirty years after his release from prison, are untitled and numbered as a series of autobiographical vignettes. They are prayers of a man in gratitude to life and its sensual offerings, particularly as those sensualities arise in place:

over to the coffee shop to pick up
my latter with soy milk and two brown sugars,
and while my corn meal coagulates on the stove
and my garlic head is roasting,
I compose this poem, to my friend,
celebrating the small things—garlic, oatmeal, coffee,
soy, music, sage, prayers, friendship, laughter,
setting off on this day
prepared to honor the flame in each of us. (Baca, Winter 80)

In bell hooks’ Belonging, a collection of essays in which she explores living a culture of place, she writes of creating a black aesthetic that emerges from black culture and relationships to the earth. She suggests that people of color must reconceptualize beauty as an aesthetic inclusive of their experience. She shares a conversation with her sister upon a return to her native Kentucky in which she learns “to think about blackness in a new way. We think about our skin as a dark room, a place of shadows. We talk often about color politics and the ways racism has created an aesthetic that wounds us, a way of thinking about beauty that hurts. . . .In that space of shadows we long for an aesthetics of blackness—strange and oppositional” (hooks, Belonging 134). Reading her recommendation for an aesthetic of color and culture, I am reminded of Baca’s separation from his Mexican and Apache (mestizo) culture. In his memoir A Place to Stand, he awakens to the damaging impact of split from his culture when he meets Chelo in prison. He describes Chelo, whose body is covered in tattoos, as connected to his Aztec ancestry. He sees the man’s tattoos as written testament to culture, “a walking library” (Baca, Place 223). Others perceive criminality and rebellion in his tattoos, but Chelo shares a perception of beauty new to Baca. “I wear my culture on my skin. They want to make me forget who I am, the beauty of my people and my heritage, but to do it they got to peel my skin off” (223). Chelo is the art, the aesthetic of his people. He wears the stories of his ancestral lineage on his skin. Chelo’s courage and love returns Baca to his own memories that eventually manifest in poems and autobiographical writings that culminate in an aesthetic of his Chicano culture. The bio-regionality that Lynch detects in Baca’s poetry exists in the centrality of rituals, journeys, and social situations that infuse his poems with the nearness and thingness of culture lived and known in a particular place.

Baca’s poetic renderings of desire and memory connected with the past evoke those he has loved and lost. He experiences the earth as salve and nourishing parent. Terry Tempest Williams, on the other hand, experiments in Desert Quartet with sensuality in relation to the earth’s elemental forms: earth, water, fire, air. In the Utah desert, Williams opens to elements that inhabit, please, and pleasure her. She has written often about the damage of places due to human interference and thoughtless action, and, in this vein, Desert Quartet represents an effort to know the land and its life in renewed and life-sustaining ways. Though she does not necessarily recommend an erotics of place to others, as a philosophy or lived system of thought (the risks of such eroticism in open, wild lands are evident to most readers, as they are to her), we can travel with her, sensing her attitude of experimentation. “I dissolve. I am water. Only my face is exposed like an apparition over ripples. Playing with water. Do I dare? My legs open. The rushing water turns my body and touches me with a fast finger that does not tire. I receive without apology. Time. Nothing to rush, only to feel” (Williams, Desert 23). On one trail, within sandstone walls that rise sharply on either side of her, Williams feels her chest and back “in a vise of geologic time” (8). She must surrender in order to experience sensually the structures of rock. With that surrender she finds breath as arousal, a relationship with rock of giving and receiving so that “there is no partition between my body and the body of Earth” (10).

The possibilities of the erotic and of sensuality expand in Williams’ literal and figurative explorations of intimacy with all material forms. In interviews the author speaks to the influence of French feminists on her work, particularly Cixous’s injunction to write out of the body. In Desert Quartet her erotic experimentation evokes the mystery of female embodiment. Williams believes that thinking and relating constitute erotic activity. The editor of A Voice in the Wilderness: Conversations with Terry Tempest Williams, Michael Austin, notes: “For her, wildness represents a force that is at once restorative, transgressive, erotic, playful, and deeply intuitive—terms that French feminist theory applies to the feminine body and to the art that flows from it” (Austin 5). Willliams, for example, compares thought to a river because “rivers inevitably follow their own path, and that channel may change from day to day. . .even though the property of water remains consistent, life sustaining, fierce, and compassionate, at once” (qtd. in Austin 5). In Desert Quartet we can experience her physical contact with the earth as a way of thinking and relating that offers a connected way of being with the place-world in ourselves.

Williams commits a feminist act of non-reservation in her willfulness to open to the desert. Luce Irigaray in “Sexual Difference” imagines that immanence and transcendence might be recast by the female sex. An opening comes in the mystery of female identity, of its self-contemplation, of that strange world of silence (Irigaray, Feminists 128). She wonders “is there not still something held in reserve within the silence of female history: an energy, morphology, growth or blossoming still to come from the female realm? Such a flowering keeps the future open. The world remains uncertain in the fact of this strange advent” (129). It is this flowering that Williams embodies in the desert as she explores physical and sensual contact with the earth as a means of knowing. She has shared that this contact is not expletive, but one undertaken in a manner of reciprocity. The idea is that the body is not just a receptacle of and for the elements, but that we are made of the earth, elemental in our very composition (water, fire, air, and dust). How we approach another—rock, river, flame, lover—creates a space of intention and possibility in our relating. Irigaray writes that desire is a tending toward. It exists in the intervals, the gaps, and requires “a sense of attraction: a change in the interval or the relations of nearness or distance between subject and object” (120). Rather than one subject moving toward or away from, both subjects move toward and away from each another. This, I believe, is the kind of reciprocity in which Williams engages the desert elements. Irigaray draws upon Heidegger’s idea of nearness as specified in place and induced by things and people who cohabit a common place (Casey 282). Nearness then becomes a means of relationality. Williams is radically thoughtful in her desire for nearness with the unknown and potentially dangerous in Desert Quartet. She draws near to what is not necessarily an anthropocentric space-made-place.

Each encounter in the desert is a way to realize something about human being. Like pulled-apart rock that reflects internal tensions and stresses that cause fissures in the earth, our bodies, too, break open with change. The insinuation throughout this sensual work is that we can allow ourselves to “be acted upon” and to “accept the life of another to take root inside” (Williams 11), as we feel life everywhere around and within us. Intimacy is a way to care for place while caring for ourselves. She asserts, “our lack of intimacy with the land has initiated a lack of intimacy with each other” (Austin 75). A question central to Desert Quartet is how we cross borders so that fluidity, rather than fixity, shapes our exploration of relations between our bodies and the earth. Such fluidity becomes “No separation. Eros: nature, even our own” (75).

Thinking in terms of one’s relationship with land as eros is risky, even uncomfortable. Williams proposes place as an engaged dynamic between body and location, making love to land as “an ultimate reciprocity” (Austin 83). As she explores fire in the desert, with its harsh flame that sears and beckons, we find that it is our nature to be aroused repetitively. Such an assertion leads to questions as provocations: “Where do we find the strength to not be pulled apart by our passions? How do we inhabit the canyons inside a divided heart?” (Williams 45). Binaries become sensual areas of exploration and engaged relationship. Questions are arousals that lead us to explore the possibilities of close contact. Williams suggests one, two, even three bodies, as if bodies themselves were flames that jump and retract, play and sear in relation to one another and the earth. In this spirit she says that we cannot preserve or protect wildness. Courage provides impetus to move into what we do not know. “It is the desert that persuades me toward love, to step outside and defy custom one more time” (Williams 46). Love is courage that manifests in our willingness to experiment and to try new things. For Williams, that experimentation becomes a bodily play with flame in the desert as an active contemplation that permits her to honor the element of fire as life.

Irigaray writes that in reciprocity (what she calls “double desire”) each lover possesses place and that no lover is static and fixed in her position to another. Attraction and support might then elude disintegration or rejection; the double pole of attraction and decomposition replaces the separation that articulates all encounters and gives rise to speech, promises and alliances (Irigaray, Feminists 121). Such is the movement Williams shares with fire. In relation to the earth, she does not speak. She feels and intuits the language of the elements through embodied and visceral sensation. Williams offers us a poetic politics of being in place that allows reception as a mode of living. If we listen, she teaches us that to open to all life expands our singular life in the plural existence of multitudinous forms. Our lovers are many. We are loved, caressed, stimulated, burned, and blown by many forces.

Even as there is the risk of discomfort and unfamiliarity in thinking about our relationships with place as erotic, there is value and vitality in pondering environmentalism as primarily relational. When we begin to think in the way that Baca and Williams suggest, we enact an environmental politics as relations between places, bodies, thoughts, and communities of beings—current and ancestral. We create spaces that allow for difference (in race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and expression), places that allow us to experience without fear the kind of reciprocity these writers enact and imagine in their work. Gary Snyder writes: “A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth. It is a quality of one’s own consciousness. The planet is a wild place and always will be” (qtd. in Cronon 89). Attention to place and care for ourselves happens in heart and mind as well as in the physical environs we inhabit. A politics of place asks us to mend separation from environments that surround us. Baca and Williams show us that place is made partly in our evocations of it. Writers pore relation with place into language, forming new visions and versions of space. There is little separation between desire and the formation of places loaded with human meaning and longing for intimacy with the worlds we inhabit. These worlds woo us to know in the midst of the unknown. Our notion of intimacy with the land includes ignorance of it. The mystery of unknowing is a source of knowing.

Two blocks from my front door lays the Pacific Ocean. Though I hear the surf from my bed at night, I do not know its depths. There are dolphin, otter, and seal, but I glimpse them on the surface of the water. I do not fish, swim, or surf in it. Intimacy with this enormous, volatile body of water challenges me. How do I consider it a place—truly a human notion—when I do not inhabit it but live at its edge? My experience of the ocean happens from a trail in Big Sur. I ascend through redwood into a terrain of oak and chaparral and turn towards the Pacific, white-capped and blue under mist-shrouded sun. I feel the ocean as my son and I bike through redwoods that grow along this strip of Pacific Coast from Northern California into Washington. I wake to fog and live summer under a gray marine layer until the warm months of early autumn arrive. I buy lettuce, berries, and basil grown in coastal soil. I cherish the mystery of this place and that there are still some secrets here. I appreciate the ocean in simple ways—at its shore, playing with my young son, dry seaweed ornamenting our sand castles, wind in my hair, cold waves pounding against my thighs, with my child’s hand in mine. It is this spine of land, the coastal ecosystem where mountains meet sea that I know in a personal way and love.

We have to value intimacy in order to achieve it. This valuation requires care of human relationships as well the places of our planet. It asks for awareness of our limited knowledge. Baca and Williams demonstrate that we can create situations for mending within ourselves as well as in cooperative relations with others. These writers show us our desire to explore individually and collectively how we know, experience, and engage with these places that we love in relationship to self and to each other. We think in new ways about places as we replace words like wilderness, pristine, untouched, endangered, transcendent, even nature, with radical notions of passion, intimacy, erotics, and relationship.

Works Cited

Austin, Michael. A Voice in the Wilderness: Conversations with Terry Tempest Williams. Logan: Utah State UP, 2006. Print.

Baca, Jimmy Santiago. A Place to Stand. New York: Grove, 2001. Print.

___. Immigrants in Our Own Land: New and Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1977. Print.

___. Martín & Meditations on the South Valley. New York: New Directions, 1986. Print.

___. “Swirl Like a Leaf.” [Interview with Bill Moyers.] The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets. Arlington: PBS, 1995. Videocassette.

___. Winter Poems on the Rio Grande. New York: New Directions, 2004. Print.

Beauvoir, Simone de. “Women and Creativity.” French Feminist Thought: A Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. 17-32. Print.

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Cixous, Hélène. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Ed. Deborah Jenson. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1991. Print.

Cronon, William. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Ed. William Cronon. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. 69-90. Print.

hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print.

Irigaray, Luce. “Sexual Difference.” French Feminist Thought: A Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. 118-130. Print.

Lynch, Tom. “Toward a Symbiosis of Ecology and Justice: Water and Land Conflicts in Frank Waters, John Nichols, and Jimmy Santiago Baca.” The Environmental Justice Reader. Ed. Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein. Tuscon: U of Arizona Press, 2002. 247-264. Print.

Williams, Terry Tempest and Mary Frank. Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape. New York: Pantheon, 1995. Print.