Abstract
This article considers the collision of earthly and monetary phase shifts. It situates itself in Richmond, British Columbia, a seam where multiple and disparate processes of landing collaborate in the ongoing transformation and modulation of the earth’s surface. It poses a Chinese-funded construction boom on an island in western Canada as a geological formation, a physical outcropping at the collision of nineteenth-century Chinese terraforming labor and twenty-first-century flyaway Asian wealth. These collisions articulate fault lines in transpacific tectonic and geopolitical relations, even as the fluid dynamics of wealth and islands of impounded silt evince multiple figurations of Asian-ness. Through the juxtaposition of two permutations of land, economics, and racial formation across multiple centuries in the Fraser River Delta, I offer a notion of orogeny, the geological process of mountain building and crustal deformation, to attend to the earthmoving dynamisms of rivers, wealth, and Asian racialization.
In a sleek luxury mall on the main drag of shopping centers and condo towers in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, Rupert tracks his laser pointer through the tiny rooms of the architectural model of the Matisse. The laser point flitters across the foam core walls and Plexiglas windows of the model, illuminating each tiny room in dim red. Rupert describes the full suite of the building’s amenities: a fitness center and concierge, karaoke lounges, and multiple rooms for poker and mahjong for rent by the building’s future residents. The day we visited was the last day of the Lunar New Year holiday and of a Lunar New Year promotion on the property: a solid investment, sturdy in the Year of the Ox, in anticipation of the pandemic’s end. The Matisse, on Richmond’s main boulevard, is one of his Hong Kong–based development firm’s new luxury condo megadevelopments in the Greater Vancouver area. He is brimming with numbers: square footages, prices, and resale projections. He slips seamlessly into Cantonese, then Mandarin, and back to English as we talk, trying out languages until our conversation hardens around Mandarin and English. His laser point lingers on the curve of the building’s walkways and private gardens and the placement of doors and windows; the orientation of significant architectural features relative to the path of the sun and of airplanes to and from the nearby international airport. It moves from the concrete substructures implied below the foam core base of the model, and then, without missing a beat, to the expensive views of the glacier-carved mountains. It flashes to maps that trace the metro lines and highways that connect Richmond to the Greater Vancouver region, with transport links shooting across the Pacific.
These details of orientation, Rupert promises, will entrain the Matisse in a gurgling current of wang. Wang means a bubbling flow of wealth that the building will channel and catch like a pool of living water; fluid dynamics of prosperity that figures it as substance and energy moving through the landscape, both concrete and intangible. As an interplay of flow and phase, it expresses the quirks of Richmond’s geography and its history, an island impounded from the endless flow of silt flowing downstream from the last glaciation event. It locates the Matisse in an arrangement of global and regional channels through which moneys move out of China and around the network of financial nodes where it is offshored around the Pacific Rim, against the controls on capital export in China that would harden it in place. Wang, argues Rupert, gurgles from the convergence of multiple landscapes at the Matisse’s well-oriented construction site. It locates the building in the flow and arrest of people, wealth, and live water around and through the island. It will make the condos junctions and waypoints in an environment channeled out in the ramblings of wealth, water, and earth.
But even as Rupert promises the security of wealth hardened into concrete, Richmond, an island raised largely through Chinese labor in the nineteenth century, is geohydrologically unstable. As geotechnical engineers explain, the soil is “incompetent,” waterlogged and prone to liquefaction, a propensity for land to suddenly behave as a liquid under certain seismic conditions. The entire municipality, located on marshy alluvial silt with a high water table, is a potential slurry in the sheer force of an earthquake from the nearby Cascadia subduction zone.
This article considers the collision of earthly and monetary fluxes. It situates itself in Richmond, British Columbia, a seam where multiple and disparate processes of landing participate in the ongoing transformation and modulation of the earth’s surface. Richmond’s historical hydrology, an interplay of soil and water, has been closely tied to Asian racialization as its geotechnical condition: the Chinese-diked landform, like the Chinese money that now hardens into luxury properties on it, appears in an array of possible phase transitions, too; it seems to be also caught perpetually in its own crises of liquidity. In developments like the Matisse, where liquid money turns to concrete soon to be sinking into liquefaction-prone land, landing takes on multiple valences that move across the seams where multiple Asias meet over a century of deltaic terraformation. Flyaway Asian wealth lands in Canadian offshores as heavily capitalized luxury concrete construction on highly liquefaction-prone soils. These soils, gathered into the shape of islands, were impounded out of the silt flows of dynamic river deltas by Chinese dike- and levee-building laborers a century and a half earlier, a settler-racialized hydrological formation that tangles with new forms of racialized wealth in an ongoing process of terraformation on islands that are prone to phasing into mud. I suggest that the rapacious construction projects that signal the delocalization of western Canadian property markets into the globetrotting trajectories of anxiously mobile Asian wealth both continue and unsettle a centuries-long process of settler island building. I insist that the idiosyncratic entanglements of wealth, water, and Asian labor and capital must be understood as a properly orogenic process: not just of moving money but of raising islands out of streams.
Geology, at such a fault, gathers the uneven meetings of wealth and earth, and new construction is not simply the extraction of capital out of land but a site where land and capital re-form with one another. Liquefaction, in turn, is a rendering of Asian racialization through capital, labor, and investment finance, as a colonial-cum-postsocialist geological emergence at the Pacific edge of North America. I explore how the phase shifts of liquid capital, from renminbi to Canadian dollars to islands of concrete, encounter islands of liquefactable silt through the juxtaposition of two moments of Asian landing in North America through the shapeshifting hydraulic pressures of various faces of capital.
In this article I read between Kathryn Yusoff’s writings on racialization and extraction “in the ontological wake of geology” and Iyko Day’s reflection on the “ways that Asian North Americans are uncomfortably associated with capital” to pose racialization, labor and finance, and the emergent properties of settler river systems as constitutive of a geohydromorphological process that I return to discuss as a mode of orogenesis.1 In the earth sciences, orogenesis refers to “mountain building, especially when a portion of crust is compressed by lateral forces to form a chain of mountains.”2 I mobilize the notion of orogenesis to draw together accounts of the seismic collisions of Asian racialization, capital liquidity, and evolving soil dynamics that transform river deltas into islands studded with concrete. In other words, this article seeks an ethnographic and literary entry point into landscapes as dynamic geohydrological processes whose dynamics are reshaped in the collision of wealth and silt: things that phase between liquid and concrete states.
Liquidity and Liquefaction
Vancouver, since the 1980s, has been deemed a suitable location for Asian, and especially Hong Kong–based, wealth to move: it has historically established Chinese communities; it is close enough to Asia but still far enough away to remain insulated from its potential political instability; and investors have considered Canada amenable to massive influxes of foreign capital. The “steadily increasing linkages between Vancouver and Hong Kong” developed over decades into a legal and financial infrastructure for moving money from the Chinese mainland into a variety of reserve forms, most visibly in real estate.3
By the late 1990s, massive influxes of Hong Kong–based capital, moved out of the country in the political anxiety before the transfer of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, had transformed pockets of Vancouver and especially Richmond’s property market, integrating it through financial and personal ties into the Sinophone Pacific.4 This spurred a process of rapid transformation, oriented toward high-end luxury development and lifestyle-oriented urbanism both vaunted and derided as the Vancouver model. “Expressively P/pacific in its easy-living cosmopolitanism,” the transformation of British Columbia’s Lower Mainland “incorporat[ed] not only capital and expertise but also esthetic, cultural[,] and design sensibilities imported from Asia,” driven largely by the reframing of Vancouver as a “Gateway City” to Asia.5
By the early 2010s, popular and academic outlets began to report that the property markets of British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, a region that includes Richmond and Metro Vancouver, had become decoupled from local labor markets, dislocated into a finance-scape shaped in the transpacific ambit of money leaving Greater China.6 The notion of decoupling announced an apparent breach between two figures of capital, both Asian: the gap between labor and finance. In 2012, the Chinese government implemented new restrictions on capital export, prohibiting Chinese nationals from moving more than US$50,000 per year out of the country without government permission, a measure introduced to stem the hemorrhaging of capital out of China. Contrary to claims that China has become a neoliberal state, dedicated to the facilitation of free markets and the movement of capital, new controls on capital export sought to make Chinese money less mobile, modulating its fungibility and potentiating a crisis of liquidity.7
In Richmond, construction facilitated by mobile wealth contends with water as a geotechnical concern that directly impinges on the stability of investment. As British Columbia is looped into circuits of Chinese capital, crises in the liquidity of wealth in China have forced massive construction in the most geophysically unstable landscapes in Canada. The converging instabilities of this geophysical and financial landscape are, to some extent, generated as one of many “inheritances of past geosocial formations” in the ongoing entanglement of China and western North America—especially long-standing itineraries of Chinese labor migration and Chinese exclusion.8
If construction is a process that articulates the terra-breaking and -forming collision of economic anxiety and earth, Richmond is one of several active geotechnic seams where buildings rise like mountains. In his reflections on building booms in Argentina, Nicholas D’Avella shows that the practice of interconverting rapidly devalued Argentine pesos into US dollars and then into concrete real estate holdings is a practice of both stoking and stemming the fungibility of monetary forms in a time of monetary uncertainty. Concrete itself offers a peculiar purchase on the earth-shaping properties of financial anxiety. Its materiality is “tied closely to geographic forms of emplacement, the terrains from and on which it is built.”9 But specific ecologies of investments, a phrase that “speaks both to relations between diverse things and to relations between people and things,” also facilitate the conversion of money into bricks and other geophysical forms.10
This collision is tectonically articulated in the encounter of geophysically active financial, political, and planetary forces: flyaway capital searching for offshore form collides with the energetic geology-in-process of rivers.11 This compelling near-miss of becomings-solid of liquid earth and money is a scene in the disjunctive contact of capital, race, and land. How, ethnographically, do we trace encounters between “human and nonhuman nature, Earth system and world-system,” attending to the productivity of gaps and encounters between them as they modulate processes of geophysical emergence?12 And how, as multiple phases of an Asian geophysics tangle in what is now (for now) an island in a Canadian river, do racial formations and landscape formations shape each other?
The idiosyncrasies of Asian capital flight, in encounter with processes of hydrological emergence, stage the possibility of how, following Jerome Whitington, “a situated non-totalizing view of the planetary” might be posed.13 Whitington’s challenge can be also read as asking for a situated nonlocalizing view of the planetary, one that works somewhere outside the framework that opposes the ubiquitous no-scale of everywhere to the jealous local of the ethnographic particular. This article’s recurrent figure of the fault or the seam offers, in a deeply material and spatialized way, a way of attending to the where of how disparate forces—racializing, environmental, political—meet to shape the earth. Fault lines are a figure of awkward lithospheric relation. Faults, like other scenes of orogenic happening, “offer a way of posing merging, coming together, as an event that must be traced through mutual deformation.”14
What follows is the juxtaposition of multiple scenes of landing, each of which is a permutation of hydrological modulation, land-making, and the identification of Asian-ness with abstract capacities of capital. Landing describes both the processes by which labor builds islands that tend toward liquefaction and the concretion of wealth into building-mountains on those islands. The contemporary landing of Asian money into Richmond, a financial offshore in concrete construction, depends, geophysically, on earlier moments in which Chinese-ness, as an alien labor force manipulated through racialized controls on wages, becomes a salient geophysical, economic, and racial feature of the future island.
Alien Earthworks
Contemporary liquefaction risk, which is most often discussed in Richmond as a threat to investment property, confronts the curious meeting of historical permutations of race, economics, and geohydromorphology in western North America. Building land—which turned both on geotechnical interventions into the Fraser River’s earths and waters and on hardening nineteenth-century associations of Chinese-ness with emerging figures of settler capitalism—set into play an orogenic process in which island building did not create land in the sense of securing terra firma from the river. Rather, it precipitated a landing, generating a tentative island that settlers could parse into parcels, but the island could also phase, under felicitous seismic conditions, back into mud. The liquefaction potential that threatens to undo investments, I show, must be understood as an earthly affordance of a settler hydrology taking shape since the late 1800s, when white landowners and hired teams of Chinese workers set to the geotechnical work necessary to create earthworks that would, over time, modify the settlement and erosion of riverine sediments and impound silt into the shape of islands.
I consider two moments of Asian geo-racial formation in Richmond through the historical geotechnical interventions that allowed settler land appropriation through island building, and anxious luxury real estate construction a century later, across the transpacific landing pads for offshored Asian wealth. My analysis is indebted to Iyko Day’s study of Asian racialization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America, and especially western Canada. Day emphasizes the deep identification of Asians in North America with “economic efficiency as the basis for exclusion or assimilation,” centering moments in which it becomes “possible to view the Asian alien as the embodiment of the abstract evils of capitalism.”15 Such an identification is clearly at play in Richmond and the Lower Mainland of British Columbia in general, where the figure of the absentee Asian property investor has become a key site for negotiating the tensions of Canadian liberalism.
That is, the liquefaction-prone landscapes built by Chinese laborers meet their uncanny raciohydrological echo in persistent contemporary worries over all-cash Asian buyers whose absent presence is taken to distort both markets and hydrologies in British Columbia. The racialization of Asian-ness as construction and market pressure, the dis- and reembodiment of Asian-ness in disparate forms of finance capital, is a twenty-first-century incarnation of “the economism of the Asian racial form.”16 Asian racialization shifts phases into new figures of hydrological and economic friction. This allows us to understand historical and contemporary hydrological features of Richmond, like its extreme vulnerability to liquefaction risk, as a theater in an ongoing tectonic drama of land, race, and money. Asian racialization, first as alien labor and then as overpowering finance, is thus a significant hydrological feature of the lower Fraser Delta, with its long and complex relations with Asia.
Luxury construction, then, is not simply the dislocation of a properly local market into the overpowering dynamics of Asian wealth. Rather, it is an iteration of an orogenic process that has been ongoing on Richmond since the mid-1800s, when Chinese workers were caught between settler anxieties to, on the one hand, enroll labor for hydrological infrastructures and, on the other, deny work to despised Chinese people, figured explicitly as an alien economic threat to white workers.17
The first member of the Legislative Assembly for Richmond Riding, Thomas Kidd, notes in his 1927 history of settler Richmond that the land itself is a question of the settlement patterns of silt over long timescales. He dramatizes the settler experience of the island largely through a teleological account of the “improvement” of the island through the construction of engineered infrastructures for managing the flow of water and silt. Formed first “by alluvial matter carried down” rivers since the most recent glacial period, he poses the island as part of “the same process [that] is still going on, adding area to these lands.”18 The shape of bogs, he suggests, has been manipulated by First Nations inhabitants, now absent after their physical eviction through expropriative settler land claims, but still present through the provisional island’s landmass as their legacy. This ongoing geotechnical work enacts the island not as a stable landform but as a continuous process in the manipulation of phases of mud, soil, and water, wherein land is only a tentative physical holding pattern in the movement and settlement of silt and settlers. The early white settlers on the island, who styled themselves “Mudflatters,” lamented that “it was no easy job for a short-legged man to get across Lulu Island in those days” even with high gum boots.19
Kidd’s attention to the raising of dikes and digging of ditches closely links the process of building land from river flow, the incoherence of island water-land to settler forms of property, and the persistent reframing of Asian/white racial conflict through the racialized manipulation of labor as a racialized schema of price-fixing. These interventions were aimed at stabilizing muddy land to define the island’s boundary with the river. White settlers raised dikes only along the edges of individual parcels of land, aiming to consolidate the spatial logic of property by attempting to recover solid-enough land out of the muddy interface of earth and river, while pockmarking the boggy island with intermittent islands. “The dikes that had been built” by the 1880s “were all undertakings of the [white] individuals owning the land on the water courses and without any joint action.”20
The municipal incorporation of Richmond was largely driven by the need to raise money and labor for diking the island, building elevated roadways, and digging drainage ditches. Large populations of Chinese laborers became available with the end of the construction of the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railroad, with its terminus in nearby Vancouver. Kidd reports that by the year 1899, the work of road construction and ditch-digging was “practically all in the hands of the Chinese” whose settlements on the soon-to-be-island were not recognized, even as their earthworking labor participated in building up and draining its land.21 Later that year, a municipal resolution was passed that allowed for Chinese labor based on a monetary calculation, carving out an exception to laws that restricted the hiring of Chinese workers in 1878 by setting the price of Chinese labor in relation to that of white workers, to neutralize the perceived competitive advantage of their cheaper labor. No more municipal contracts could be “let to Chinamen” unless it could be shown that “white men could not be obtained . . . for a price that would not exceed twenty-five percent of the lowest tender from Chinamen.”22
Such a regulation formalized Chinese racialization as a monetary-geotechnical formation, posing their labor at the convergence of engineered earthworks and fiscal fiat. Put differently, the configuration of Asian-ness of North America as a mode of monetary racialization became a condition for the terraforming of the lower Fraser Delta. Since the 1800s, argues Day, the “Asian subject in North America” has been a contact point between “abstract processes of value formation anchored by labor” through a racial wage manipulation and the geotechnical modulation of the river delta into an island-building hydrological machinery.23 The proposed construction of a dike road to ring the island, “large and wide enough to have a road on top of it,” expropriated a Chinese settlement—without compensation, as Chinese laborers were not considered settlers.24 A highly monetized Asian-ness became part of the historical and inherited hydrological footprint of the Fraser River, allowing silt to settle into land but rendering Chinese people perpetually evictable from that land.
In twenty-first-century Richmond, amid a crisis in housing affordability and absentee buyers across the Lower Mainland, Asian-ness has become associated with other abstractions of capital. Asian-ness has increasingly come to operate as the disembodied personification of inscrutable whims of foreign wealth. Today Richmond is the Canadian municipality with the highest proportion of foreign-born residents, the majority of whom are from East Asia. The rapid demographic and architectural shift in Richmond has led to a persistent sense that the city has been too quickly transformed by massive influxes of foreign wealth.25
These tensions are captured in the dispersal of Asian-ness into a constellation of geo-monetary entities and forces: the sudden ubiquity of Asian-coded luxury construction and apparent anxiety over the transformation of the physical environment. In the 2010s municipalities across the Lower Mainland introduced a series of fiscal and financial regulations aimed at stemming speculative foreign investment in local real estate. Speculation and vacancy taxes and foreign buyer’s taxes sought to repatriate real estate markets, bringing land and labor into a purported local congruence. These laws, especially vacancy taxes for unoccupied housing stock and a 2023 moratorium on foreign homebuyers in Canada, hinge around a curious absence-presence of Asian people, a mode of liberal racial anxiety disembodied into the phantasmatic figure of the absentee Asian property owner. Asian-ness, that is, is personified into unoccupied construction, which in turn appears as a portfolio of international monetary reserves. Both of these formations of Asian racialization, in which “things have been taken for persons,” have implications for considering “social life of geology” as productively imbricated with multiple formations of capital along a historical transpacific axis: first as despised and geotechnically necessary labor, and second as overpowering, disembodied wealth, sweeping through housing markets and hardened into buildings.26
Orogeny
The concept of orogenesis—poached from seismology and tectonics, where it refers to the geological process of mountain building—helps me approach the apparent confluence of global and planetary forces not in terms of their metaphorical resonances but through an ethnography of faults as scenes of convergence-divergence. Faults are a figure of generative and catastrophic relation, a geology for which meeting and tearing are both involved as crust-shaping process. By reading geological accounts of orogenesis with N. K. Jemisin’s figure of the orogene in her novel The Fifth Season (2018), I propose a robust account of orogenesis as a means of attending to geosocial contact zones. Orogenesis orients us to ongoing crustal deformation through encounters that modulate the earth and its changes at points of ongoing geo- and racio-monetary activity.27
N. K. Jemisin’s figure of the orogene is a despised but begrudgingly necessary group of anatomically distinct humans who, under control of powerful state agencies, manipulate geophysical and seismic activity for hire in the tectonically overactive continent-world ironically named the Stillness. Orogenesis, as a mountain-moving, terraforming conjuncture, is a geotechnics of convergences, coincidences, and meetings that “[open] up fresh gaps in our understanding.”28 The Broken Earth Trilogy has provoked reflections on racialization and climate crisis.29 Jemisin’s orogenes offer a way of posing orogeny as an interface between social, political, and economic forces, on the one hand, with geological processes, on the other.
Jemisin’s orogene links the enactment of deformation in the formation of subjectivity to the enactment of deformation in the formation of the earth. In the trilogy, the orogene is an embodied person and also a subject of a racial bureaucracy that aims to train and harness their powers to intervene in the active geology of the Stillness. In the state appropriation of the anatomical difference that gives trained orogenes the power to shape, quell, and break the earth, their racialization as a necessary and hated underclass makes them a point of contact between social and geophysical agencies. The orogene exists as a hinge between powerful organization and the unstillness of the land; she is a fault through which disparate agencies reshape the earth, from underground to sky. The orogene, as a racialized figure subjectivated between state and seismic power, is herself a fault line that mediates distinct agencies into lithospheric change.
The silting of islands and the consolidation of offshores in concrete are properly orogenic events. They are “mountain-making, crust-warping process by which lithosphere forms, changes,” at the collision of ongoing global and earthly processes. It is important to develop a notion of the orogenic not as a distinct domain of geological activity but, rather, as a metamorphic way of tracing geophysical emergence at the fault lines of disparate processes.30 The orogenic, following Kathryn Yusoff’s writings on geological subjectivity, refuses to “begin with boundary work” and instead “begin[s] in the mix.”31 Orogenesis insists on planetary change as an opening into attending to oblique, fractious, and unexpected relations, attending to any apparent boundary between human and nonhuman entities instead as a fault line along which the earth meets and deforms itself.
The term orogenesis may invoke recent formulations of the anthropogenic and the Anthropocene. Each of these center human agency as an earth-shaping force, posing humanity as a massified geological agency. Jerome Whitington spins the notion of the anthropogenic off its morphological axis. Instead of a rough synonym for that which is human-made, Whitington offers the anthropogenic as “a creative domain for reimagining and reappropriating late industrial ecologies.”32 The human appears as a domain of ethical and practical emergence rather than a fixed and reified actor: in the flux of planetary and geotechnical change, “people become more than they were.”33 The anthropogenic can be retrofitted to elicit an attention toward relational emergence, one that presumes the modulation and not the stability of its erstwhile subject.
Similarly, the orogenic names the earth as a capacity toward relational emergence. It demands an earthly attention toward relational entanglements and the uneven touch of fluxes across apparently separate domains. It does not reemphasize the creative agency of geology as an inhuman force; instead, it poses geology at the idiosyncratic convergence of not-only-geological forces. If, as Yusoff argues, geology, in its formulation as a scientific and philosophical program, distributes inhumanity as a racialized property of human and planetary bodies, the orogenic compels our attention away from the assertion of the human or the geological as competitive loci for planetary agency. Rather, it points where unassimilable dynamisms encounter one another, as in the earth-shaping encounter between overly solid wealth and liquefactable earth, and, following Yusoff, attends to the various ways racialization works in specific geosocial circumstances.
In such an orogenic perspective, the concreteness of concrete appears as a geohydrological outcropping in the abrasive contact between the peculiarities of Asian investment and the historical geophysics of liquefaction zones. For Jemisin, orogeny is not an abstract skill or straightforward anatomical capacity. Rather, it is an articulation of racialization as an earth-shaping collision between institutional and political power, on the one hand, and geological process, on the other. Geology, in this case, is inseparable from the political and social frictions through which a despised minoritarian population interfaces with powerful political and geophysical agencies. Between geology and geo-fiction, orogeny figures crustal deformation not as the natural background but as the uneven entanglement of different modes of happening, insisting that terraformation and racial formation collide in earth praxis. They compose something akin to “the total environment,” a phrase Christina Sharpe associates with slavery as a climatological condition in which racial subjection and ecological emergence are inseparable.34 Concrete can be posed as the orogenetic outcrop that articulates the fault line between two phase-shifting substances, liquefaction-prone land and Asian money, as it bucks against its constraints to its liquidity by phasing into other forms, conspicuous and hidden: paper, data, subsidiaries, condos. The skyline that investment properties cut, crouched beneath the flight paths of planes out of the international airport, makes a topography that mimics the mountain ranges.
Underground, their sealed concrete substructures send piles through mud, seeking grounding in solid bedrock. They obstruct and reroute the flow of earth and water through landscapes, their concrete-like islands inset in the rivers of mud that parcel maps and municipalities call island. In holding wealth on islands offshore, it amplifies seismic risk by concentrating it in liquefaction-prone soils. Abutting banks, luxury towers, and parking lots, construction pits turn into mirror lakes, seasonal with the rains and phases of construction. Excavation unsettles the island into itself. Bulldozers mound the land into pyramids impounded behind giant concrete bricks that, over the course of weeks, will turn green with vegetation neither as a straightforward technical mastery of an unruly landscape nor as abdications of an environmental process. Instead, it poses these processes as a configurational earth praxis, an orogenic deformation of crust where the pressures of landscape and wealth meet at a seam. Such seams are sites for the “creative affirmation of the possibilities for reimagining what it means to live on a planet.”35
Orogenesis insists on attending to how apparently disparate domains—river silts and their unsettlings, vagrant money and its concreteness—contribute their specificity of their encounter into open-ended geophysical systems. If sales pitches situate buildings in the fluid dynamics of transpacific wealth, they also seek to insulate them, imaginatively and technically, from earths and their unfoldings. Instead, buildings, as orogenetic outcrops, are not geophysically or geopolitically final. Wealth that has hardened could liquify again, this time with the ground of which it is a part. They are not formations isolated from the earth, but deformations in its ongoingness, whose significances loop temporal and spatial relations like any other lithic body offshored into river islands. Racialization, money, and the geohydromorphological becomings through which islands are formed and potentially liquified offer insight to a mode of earth praxis along geosocial fault lines. At the seams where disparate social and geological agencies meet, rend, and press into one another, earth praxis is an array of awkward encounters of powerful phase-shifting forces. And at these seams, the lithosphere deforms itself into ever-new versions of itself.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Micah Hilt, my research partner in parts of the project; two anonymous reviewers; and the Environmental Humanities editorial collective. My gratitude also to Asher Ghertner, Charmaine Chua, Jeff Diamanti, Agustin Fuentes, Michael Hathaway, Hanna Garth, Gaston Gordillo, Jane Komori, Beth Lew-Williams, Shaylih Muehlmann, and Jake Silver. Thanks especially to Jerome Whitington, Zeynep Oguz, and other contributors to this issue, as well as participants in the 2023–2024 Davis Seminar in the Princeton history department.
Notes
Peck, Siemiatycki, and Wyly, “Vancouver’s Suburban Involution,” 398; Lowry and McCann, “Asia in the Mix.”
Moos and Skaburskis, “Globalization of Urban Housing Markets”; Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 34–35.
Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism. See also Ong, Flexible Citizenship; and Kipnis, “Neoliberalism Reified.”
Strathern, Partial Connections, xxiii.
Oguz and Whitington, introduction to this special section.
