Nicole Mabry

Ongoing coastal land loss in Louisiana is principally caused by a confluence of extractive depletions and colonial and settler state efforts to stabilize the deltaic plain. My project examines the practical work of sheltering worlds through climatic and sediment collapse in Louisiana’s northshore parishes, asking how racialized and colonial histories of stabilization are both recruited and perhaps disrupted in inhabitants’ responses to worlds increasingly on edge. In this, I reflect on the politics and technologies of stability specific to this landscape, understanding stability in its material, affective, and sensory valences, and appreciating both the destabilizing entailments of its provisional manufacture, and its historical specificity as a desired state. My project seeks to understand how those who live in the northshore parishes contend with destabilizing grounds and atmospheres, and maintains that, in order to do so, it is necessary to situate this exploration within a longue durée of white settler efforts to gain traction on stability, including the affects and sensoria it normatively connotes, and to consider the racialized arrangements and violences such efforts have produced. Amid ongoing negotiations of climatic and sediment collapse on the northshore, are there openings for new sociospatial imaginaries, antiracist and anticolonial subversions and solidarities?