Abstract

In 2021, New Orleans–based artist Renee Royale sojourned to Venice, Louisiana—the terminus of walkable land (referred to locally as “the End of the World”) where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico. Surrounded by marshes, human-made canals, and sprawling petrochemical campuses, Royale documented defunct buildings, polluted coasts, and barren trees with a Polaroid camera while collecting water, soil, and flora from each photographed site. The Polaroids were later submerged in jars containing this ecological debris, causing the images to peel, bubble, discolor, and decay. For the artist, the transformed exposures both witness and communicate the stories told by this landscape—indeed, she sees the environment as their cocreator. This article analyzes Renee Royale's work through the lens of ecocriticism and diaspora aesthetics and argues for its symbolic potential to express intersectional histories of violence and climate emergency in the Gulf of Mexico and circum-Caribbean. Reading her photographs as reflective of the Plantationocene condition, the article also considers questions of Black futurity and aftermath, affiliating Royale's practice with Afrofuturist propositions that seek alternate modes of survival beyond racial capitalism.

It's after the end of the world. Don't you know that yet?

—Sun Ra

In November of 2021, New Orleans–based artist Renee Royale sojourned to a sinking stretch of land called Venice, a veritable graveyard of dying wetlands that lies about one hundred miles Southeast of the city. Often referred to by locals as “the End of the World,” Venice is the terminus of walkable and drivable land in the state of Louisiana, marking the point where the Mississippi River fans out into the Gulf of Mexico, surrounded by marshes, human-made canals, and offshore oil fields. With a Polaroid camera, Royale photographed road signs, factories, gravel roads, and views of the marina. She also collected samples of soil and groundwater from each depicted site into mason jars into which she would later submerge the filmic positives. When the images were removed and dried out, they were by all measures completely ruined. The hidden compounds contained within the Polaroid envelope were destabilized, transforming each image into a peeling, bubbling swirl of loosened chemicals. What better representation exists, though, of a coastal landscape that is notorious for oil spills, levee breaches, and catastrophic floods—one that will be subsumed by swelling Gulf waters within our lifetimes?

Royale considers herself a process-based photographer. She was raised in New York of Barbadian parentage and has been based in New Orleans for the last five years; her work engages with the devastating effects of anthropogenic climate change in the United States and the Global South, aiming to “expose and archive the visual messages of ecological and racialized violence.”1 Her series Landscapes of Matter comprises Polaroids taken in Louisiana and Barbados—sites that exemplify the Plantationocene condition, a recent theoretical pathway that sees the extractive logic of contemporary industry as intimately connected to that of the Middle Passage and colonization. Guided by this framework, the present article reflects on Royale's series through the lens of ecocriticism, photographic process, and diaspora aesthetics and argues for the symbolic potential of Royale's work to express intersectional histories of violence and climate emergency in the Gulf of Mexico and circum-Caribbean. As a nod to the seemingly prophetic place-name “the End of the World,” and in conversation with writings on endings by Kathryn Yusoff, Rob Nixon, Kara Keeling, Aimé Césaire, Catherine Keller, and others, I then consider the questions of aftermath and Black futurity that are at stake in Landscapes of Matter, positioning the series as an example of what Keller terms “counter-apocalypse”: a gesture (in art, action, or thought) that acknowledges the simultaneity of beginnings and endings, living and dying, growth and decay, and that seeks alternate modes of survival beyond racial capitalism. Attentive to the intersections of colonial histories and planetary ecological crisis, Royale's photographic practice provides a road map, if you will, for and after the end of the road.

Part 1: The End of the World

The photograph titled “End of the World” from the Landscapes of Matter series depicts a signpost that welcomes visitors to the southernmost point in Louisiana: the Gateway to the Gulf, as it proudly announces. The sign bears the iconic, if outdated, boot-shaped outline of the state. Over the last century, Louisiana has lost over two thousand miles of coastal land, primarily as a result of the dredging of canals by petrochemical corporations leasing offshore waters for oil drilling, alongside the accruing impacts of global warming. The state's southern boundary has been carved out and swallowed by rising seas, and its wetland ecosystems hollowed out along the artery traced by the Mississippi River as its water grows dangerously saline.2

As recently as the mid-twentieth century, this location was miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Elders have described growing up there around cattle pastures and pecan orchards.3 Once-thriving wetlands provided a barrier between the saltwater from the ocean and the freshwater ecosystem of the river delta while dampening the impact of incoming storms. As the marshes have disappeared, the Gulf has lapped its salty waters further north, endangering plant and animal species as well as human communities. To date, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has removed nearly forty place-names from the official map of Southeast Louisiana. Meanwhile, sites like Venice have been occupied by the drilling and refining infrastructures of numerous energy companies.

Standing, then, at what is likely a temporary coastline, Royale snapped pictures with her Polaroid camera. Each press of the button triggered a delicate domino effect of chemical reactions: the shutter opens, letting in photons that ionize the light-sensitive silver halide molecules that coat the surface of the film encased within the camera, exposing a negative image. Simultaneously, two rollers begin to push out the film, ejecting it from the camera while pressing and releasing a pouch of chemicals enclosed within the Polaroid's iconic frame and smearing them across the surface to commence the developing process. A reagent compound is followed by colored dyes that react with the ionized surface and convert the negative into a positive, while opacifying chemicals stop the exposure. A minute or so after the film is in the hands of the photographer, the image visibly appears (figs. 2–3).

While this process is instantaneous, a Polaroid technically continues to dry and develop for thirty days; the company's website warns that if its film is not stored in a “cool, well-ventilated environment” during this period, “visible alterations” can occur.4 The real work of Landscapes of Matter begins at this point, when Royale immerses her film in organic matter collected from each site represented by the imagery, where nature often commingles with toxic pollution. The artist intends to “allow the environment itself to continue the film development process” so that not just sunlight but soil, flora, and water will intervene and transform each print, marking it indexically.5 She had begun experimenting with this technique in the earlier, ongoing series Elements (begun in 2021), in which she tampered with the development process using a Polaroid Spectra camera, a model that has been discontinued due to a jamming issue that frequently damages its film. Immediately after each film was ejected, Royale would introduce the still-developing print to water, light, gravel, fire, and other materials, so as to produce beautifully distorted abstractions from these chemical reactions (fig. 4).

When “End of the World” was resurrected after twenty-eight days, the Gateway to the Gulf had been obliterated: dark ink that once indicated the contours of the sign now oozes across the filmic surface, which peels and cracks into a spread of creamy, rose-hued veils. Likewise, “The Dying Tree” which looks up toward thin, wispy tree branches, is coated with yellow petals while the details in the exposure are blurred by crackling air pockets that discolor the film (figs. 56). In “Bald Cypress Haunting,” an algal colony seems to bubble over the surface, destroying any evidence of the treescape as it leaves behind a faint, emptied-out horizon line at center (fig. 7).

This body of work is essentially ephemeral, or perhaps fugitive, in terms of the images’ condition of color loss. Royale produces unique photographic prints, only to immediately destroy them. But she archives their un-development and agonizing degradation by scanning and digitizing the prints at regular intervals. The resulting sequences offer one possible answer to the question of visualizing what Rob Nixon has termed the “slow violence” of climate crisis: the ecological disrepair that is occurring “gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space.”6 This disrepair is expressed, he continues, in symptoms as wide-ranging as “the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes.” The unrepresentability of these “long dyings,” as Nixon puts it, is one among many factors leading to our society's obstinacy in the face of existential threat.7 Such disaster is all but incomprehensible to our “flickering attention spans” and “spectacle-driven corporate media.”8 As art historian T. J. Demos adds, visual artists and designers often lack the tools to adequately render these planetary impacts: “The minute-by-minute pictorial conventions of landscape photography—even those of photography at large—suddenly become far from accurate.”9 The spatiotemporal scale of this destruction is too incomprehensible, too abstract. Royale's photographs could thus be understood as making visible the gradual unraveling of the landscapes around us, demonstrating that what appears clear to us today can, and will, be gone tomorrow.

Intriguingly, Royale's process of un-fixing the photographic image also echoes the ecology of the region itself, which has always existed in a state of seeping, flooding, swelling, and sinking. The writer John McPhee once described the Mississippi River's lower network of distributaries as behaving “like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or right bank to go off in utterly new directions.”10 Indeed, in a remarkable cartographic document commissioned by the US Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s, the river's extreme meanders were elegantly rendered by geographer Harold Fisk: each writhing chromatic trail shows the river's serpentine courses of 1944, 1880, 1820, 1765, and earlier, with some layers even projecting its prehistoric avulsions (fig. 8). The monumental watershed stretches out, at its lower delta, into a vast network of bayous where the separation between land and water becomes indistinguishable, and this fact has made the task of artistically representing this landscape all the more challenging. Curator Katie Pfohl, who organized a 2019 exhibition on nineteenth-century painting in Louisiana, described this landscape as fundamentally resistant to early colonial and cartographic efforts; it was, as she writes, “impossible to fix the boundaries between delta and marsh, swamp and bayou, or river and sea.”11

Such an animated ecosystem was incompatible with Western approaches to the settlement, annexing, and management of territory, but eventually these waterways were harnessed through the construction of levees, canals, and spillways that fixed them in place, as the landscape was deforested to support the cultivation of cash crops like sugar and cotton. Royale's uncontainable landscapes run counter to representations of Louisiana that celebrate its settlement. As has been the case across the colonized circum-Caribbean, including the Gulf South, representations of plantation landscapes in visual art often became a form of propaganda through which man's control over nature was emphasized through representations of bountiful crops arranged in neatly gridded plots, tended by docile enslaved laborers (or none at all), and surrounded by idyllic, graceful foliage in the distance. As Anna Arabindan-Kesson and Mia Bagneris have written, such picturesque depictions function to transform the land “into an object to be consumed, and nature ordered into a potential center of resource extraction.”12

The compositional un-fixing evident in the Landscapes of Matter series doesn't just replicate the semifluid state of the region's topography prior to its cultivation, however, but also invokes our botched attempts at controlling and exploiting the earth. These oozing, polluted surfaces also serve as indexes to the unmitigated environmental violence committed here. One has only to recall the tragic explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in 2010, which unleashed some 350 million gallons of oil into the water, or the breaching of levees across the New Orleans region in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which decimated many of the poorest and most vulnerable neighborhoods in the city. These crises’ disenfranchising effects, indeed, have their origin in the region's antebellum past. In her important work on Black geographies, for instance, scholar Katherine McKittrick has contextualized the disaster of Katrina amid multigenerational legacies of environmental racism, from the emergence of plantation agriculture through to systematic divestment from poor communities of color, today. “In what ways,” she asks, “are the historical precedents of anti-black violence spatial, and linked to our present geographical organization?”13

Among the theoretical pathways opened up by this question is the productive discourse of the Plantationocene: a subset of the more popular Anthropocene theory, but one that fills a necessary lacuna at the intersection of environmental science and critical race theory. Appearing for the first time in a published roundtable discussion among Donna Haraway, Noboru Ishikawa, Scott F. Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna Tsing, and Nils Bubandt entitled “Anthropologists Are Talking—about the Anthropocene,” the “Plantationocene” is one of many neologisms meant to add nuance to the Anthropocene, the generalized notion that the tangible effects of human-caused climate change on Earth are substantial enough so as to introduce a new geological epoch after the Holocene. In order to better define the chronology and cultural implications of this shift, the Plantationocene demonstrates that the colonial-era “transportation of breeding plants and animals, including people” has led to ecological simplification and the extraction and alienation of resources, a pattern that extends through contemporary extractive industries such as mining, fracking, and the dredging of oil.14 While other terms (such as Capitalocene, Necrocene, or Chthulucene) have been introduced so as to further speculate on the Anthropocene's point(s) of origin, the Plantationocene crucially reminds us of the enduring legacies of environmental racism from the colonial period through the current era of petromodernity.

Royale further pursues these interconnections in the second suite of images for Landscapes of Matter, which also locates her own family history within Plantationocene discourse. In the summer of 2022, the artist traveled to Barbados and made Polaroid photographs in beaches and forests, as well as the very plantation landscape to which she can trace her ancestors’ histories of enslavement: the Drax Hall estate, founded by the brothers James and William Drax in the seventeenth century. James's grandson, Henry Drax, created an empire of sugar plantations across the Caribbean and is credited with inventing new methods for the refinement of sugar, thus increasing the cash crop's profit yields and setting into motion an acceleration in the trafficking of enslaved Africans to the Americas. Royale's great-grandmother and great-uncles were among those who worked in the cane fields at Drax Hall. The artist visited this landscape, which she sees as irreparably traumatized. When asked how it felt to walk in the fields, she told me that the experience was, in a word, indescribable. “The first person who bought this land did not expect me to be here,” she explained. “There was not a thought that my lineage would survive. But I'm here.”15

She photographed the fields only once, and then submerged the Polaroid, without scanning it first, into a jar containing samples of plantation soil. The jar's contents—cane trash, water, and dirt—are visibly toxic and seething. During one of my visits to the artist's New Orleans studio, she unscrewed the lid, allowing the fumes to briefly escape. We both recoiled from the smell, while Royale spoke about the relationship between sugar and chronic illness, citing the high rates of diabetes among African Americans living under conditions of structural poverty—a reminder of the enduring linkages between exploited land and exploited bodies under the longue durée of extractive capitalism. In another set of Polaroids that she produced in Barbados, Royale explores histories of malnutrition as a form of racist violence through the subject of breadfruit (fig. 9). A fibrous crop imported to the Caribbean from the South Pacific, breadfruit could nourish enslaved individuals at the most basic, nutritionally insufficient level for almost no cost to enslavers. She photographed the groves near her cousin's house and placed the Polaroids between fruits that were still growing on the tree, or into a slice made directly through one's core. She smeared pulp over the surfaces of these images which, in turn, began to rot and putrefy. “This is the afterlife of slavery,” Saidiya Hartman has written, “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.”16

Part 2: After the End of the World

In Aimé Césaire's epic, long-form poem of 1946, Return to My Native Land, the Martinican writer makes a surprising claim that the end of the world is “the only thing in the world that's worth beginning.”17 This enigmatic verse also serves as the epigraph for Kathryn Yusoff's short book of ecocriticism A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, which explores the linkages between geology and contemporary racial violence. Yusoff interprets Césaire's statement as a reminder that “the end of the world has already happened for some subjects and is the prerequisite for the possibility of ‘living and breathing again’ for others.”18 If we are still living in the aftermath of the Middle Passage, as Hartman proposes, is there a possibility for Black futurity after or beside this aftermath?19

For sociologist Martin Savransky, Césaire's statement gains a new relevancy today that reaches beyond its original context; we might connect the apocalypse of enslavement and diaspora to that of “runaway climate change, expanding deforestation, recurring bleaching events, earth-wide ecological devastation, and the ongoing prospects of mass extinction that might perhaps implicate the end of ‘Humanity’ itself.”20 To parse the implications of Césaire's end-of-the-world optimism, Savransky invokes the writing of Catherine Keller, a feminist eco-theologian who coined the term “counter-apocalypse” for a position that, as Keller writes, “recognizes itself as a kind of apocalypse; but then it will try to interrupt the habit.”21 Savransky cautions, here, against belief in “good Anthropocene . . . messianism,” in which apocalypse is reframed as a kind of justice or punishment. Instead, he believes, Césaire is compelling us to transform “imminence” into “immanence,” to accept a state of full presence and awareness, wherein we must and will invent new, sustainable ways of inhabiting this world. Counter-apocalypse is “a drive for justice, it's courage in the face of impossible odds and losses.”22 The end of the world that we face at present, Savransky reminds us, is most certainly the end of “the Euro-American extractive mode of living through which ‘civilization’ developed, but not the end of everything as such.”23

Beyond representing the “End of the World”—as a literal place in Louisiana—is there a more speculative vision for the “End of the World,” such as Césaire's, at stake in Royale's work? In answering this question, we might look to Afrofuturism's visionary approach to questions of time and history, as in the eccentric free jazz artist Sun Ra's memorable refrain, which echoes: “It's after the end of the world, don't you know that yet?”

A few months after returning from Barbados, Royale finally dealt with the Drax Hall Polaroid. She traveled up the Great River Road, an eighty-mile stretch of land that hugs the Mississippi as it slithers from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, and brought the jar to a sugarcane field in Ascension Parish, whose residents experience some of the highest rates of cancer in the country (figs. 10–11). Before the Civil War, River Road was home to over three hundred plantations and produced a quarter of the world's cane sugar. Today, nearly all of this land has been bought by corporations that manufacture synthetic rubbers, electronic components, and fertilizers.24 Over 150 plants now line the river, emitting 13 million tons of greenhouse gases each year. Home to one extractive industry, replaced by another, the corridor has been referred to as Cancer Alley by locals since the 1980s on account of the high rates of terminal illnesses experienced among its residents and caused by unmitigated pollution from chemical plants that have colonized their backyards.25 Some of the refineries that loom over shotgun houses and schools, owned by the oil company Shell, Formosa Plastics, and others, have been built over the burial grounds of enslaved communities. Reporting on environmental racism in this region, the activist collective Forensic Architecture identifies the “date of incident” as beginning in 1718: the year in which the city of New Orleans was founded on land formerly (and currently) known to Indigenous communities as Bulbancha, land of many tongues in the Choctaw language. “If toxic air is a monument to slavery,” they ask, “how do we take it down?”26

In this decimated landscape, surrounded by sugarcane and a chemical skyline, Royale set the Drax Hall Polaroid on fire (fig. 12).

In her book Queer Times, Black Futures, Kara Keeling examines Sun Ra's project within a larger reflection on the apparent incompatibility of Black futurity with the financial futures whose survival is prioritized under global capitalism. Science fiction, liberation activism, and multinational corporations all deal in future speculation, wherein tomorrow is the battleground. In Sun Ra's film Space is the Place (John Coney, 1974), the artist-protagonist is a cosmic traveler who shepherds Black people to emancipation, through space travel, from a life of disenfranchisement on Earth. In one scene central to Keeling's analysis, Sun Ra appears into an Oakland community center in 1967 and declares, “I come from a dream that the Black man dreams long ago.” The arc of time is both linearly shifted and obliterated altogether. As Keeling explains, the invocation of the Black man's “dreaming in the present tense” implies that Sun Ra “appears to fulfill the terms of a long-ago dream, perhaps to redeem the freedom dreams of the ancestors—dreams of future pasts.”27 Sun Ra proposes to transport Black people to a new planet where they can be free, using “isotopic teleportation” or “transmolecularization,” imagined methods of teleportation (as theorized in science fiction narratives such as Star Trek) via the disintegration, transportation, and reassembly elsewhere of a person's subatomic particles. “If the terms of modern life have been constructed as such, they might also be de-created,” Keeling ventures, “making another organization of things possible. Such a world exists in Sun Ra's cosmology as an impossible possibility.”28

Royale's project is not explicitly Afrofuturist. Yet she enacts on the Drax Hall Polaroid, if only that one, a parallel gesture of de-creation through which the trauma of the plantation is negated, and an alternate future (one not defined by slavery's afterlife) becomes possible to imagine. Rather than depicting an identifiable, known place in the world and chronicling its decline into the abstraction of rising water (as in much of the Landscapes of Matter series), the artist determines that Drax Hall will be unrepresented, unrepresentable, from the very beginning. Submerged in soil and never scanned, it will never become but is instead undone from the moment of exposure, a fate sealed when it is lit aflame in Cancer Alley (one of Drax Hall's futures), like a Big Bang in reverse. The space between these two points of articulation is both geographic (as the photograph is physically transported from Barbados to Louisiana) and temporal (representing the chronological span of centuries from Royale's ancestors’ time to that of her own). In this act of de-creation, the history that Drax Hall represents never develops (technically and narratively); ancestors are freed from this trajectory. Following Yusoff, again, the end of this one timeline may be “the prerequisite for the possibility of ‘living and breathing again’ for others.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, posthuman and postearth scenarios have become a common and potent theme in the contemporary art of the New Orleans region. For instance, multimedia artist Hannah Chalew's sculptural collages, composed of organic and human-made material salvaged from both urban and rural environments, envision “a future without us, where the swamp and trash dump sites comingle to become new wild ecosystems.”29 Dawn DeDeaux has likewise been grappling with the region's uncertain future for decades. Her ongoing series of large-scale digital photographic collages titled Space Clowns (begun in 2012) envisions “mankind in an imagined post-earth world” via figural composites that combine elements from artistic portrayals of nautical and astronomical explorers with those of first responders in hazmat suits and masks.30 DeDeaux adorns these suits with botanical and architectural ornament, anticipating that a magnolia or daisy might be recast as a symbol of hope and nostalgia for our soon-to-be-mythicized planet of origin. For her ongoing project Souvenirs of Earth (begun in 2014), originally produced for the Prospect 3 triennial, visitors are invited to contribute their own “souvenirs,” objects they might take with them as refugees from Earth.

I've written elsewhere about the Chicago-based artist Regina Agu, who shares connections to Louisiana and Nigeria via her parentage, and her site-specific photographic panorama called Passage, produced for the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2019.31Passage combines dozens of semitransparent images documenting multiple sites across the vast network of waterways around New Orleans, including rivers, bayous, marshes, and wetland forests that have been damaged by fossil fuel infrastructures, salinity, sea level rise, and coastal erosion. One panel contains a faint shadow of a makeshift monument, crafted from rebar and erected on the site of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Canal, which suffered multiple levee breaches and engineering failures during Hurricane Katrina. Like Royale, Agu produces a visual experience that is spatially unfixed, disorienting, and difficult to occupy. We are confronted, at eye level, with flooded landscapes wherein the only remains of human infrastructure are decaying machinery and abandoned boathouses.

Yet Royale's material experimentation with her medium is perhaps most resonant with the accidental interventions that have transformed the work of veteran New Orleanian photographers Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick. Their practices, generally, are more archival than speculative. Based in the city's Lower Ninth Ward, the pair have been documenting Louisiana's Black communities since the 1980s, recording traditions such as second lines and Mardi Gras Indian masking while also making frequent visits to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The state's only maximum-security prison sits on land formerly known as Angola Plantation and has long been criticized for perpetuating a form of modern-day slavery through the exploitative practice of uncompensated field labor (fig. 13). Calhoun's and McCormick's photographs evidence the endurance of the plantation complex, which, as McKittrick writes, has created “an uneven colonial-racial economy that, while differently articulated across time and place, legalized black servitude while simultaneously sanctioning Black placelessness and constraint.”32 McKittrick's concept of Black geographies, which describes sites and spaces of both oppression and resistance, recognizes that “the structural workings of racism kept black cultures in place and tagged them as placeless” at the same time.33

In 2005, when the levee breach at the Lower Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina flooded Calhoun's and McCormick's studio, many of their photographic prints and negatives were destroyed. Over time, however, they came to accept the images as having been merely altered. The chemical interaction of photographic emulsion with floodwater, mold, and sediment left colorful trails of swirling patterns, bubbles, and cracks on the affected images. “I can't even explain what happened,” McCormick reflects, “but the transformation of the slides and the negatives are just beautiful.”34

For instance, McCormick's photograph Mark Gale, Sugar Cane Scrapper, originally captured in 1986 and redeveloped in 2018 (fig. 14), is now cloaked in an otherworldly veil of aqua and indigo, as if the subject is just visible through a faint pool of water. The image's chromatic afterlife brings to mind the manifold symbolic associations of water that might deepen the portrait's resonance with, for instance, the transatlantic journeys of conscripted Africans or emergent diaspora mythologies of the Black Atlantic, at once anticipating and echoing the trauma of both contemporary incarceration and the storm itself.

As Hannah Ryan has written, many others of McCormick's and Calhoun's pre-Katrina photographs reflected the networks of care that strengthened Black communities in New Orleans. “Tenderness can be an act of bold resistance,” she writes, referring to photographs of mothers and children that work to “subvert dominant, pervasive stereotypes that simply do not reflect the relationships that surround them.”35Daydreaming in City Park (1989/2015) (fig. 15), for instance, depicts young children playing in the grassy lawn beneath oak trees. After the storm, the image was distorted by a spray of green and black spots, bubbles, and scratches. In light of the ongoing disenfranchisement of low-income Black communities since Katrina, due to uneven redevelopment, gentrification, and civic divestment, the new altered image both archives a pre-Katrina memory of community and, as with Royale's enigmatic landscapes, creates an alternate vision of Black futurity.

In 2023, Royale trekked beneath the overpass of the St. Claude Avenue Bridge, which carries traffic above the Industrial Canal that marks the Lower Ninth Ward's upriver boundary and was the site of one of Katrina's most devastating levee breaches. She produced three Polaroids and submerged them in jars of ink-black water collected from the canal. The process of removing the film becomes a kind of ritual: the artist kneels on the floor of her studio with the jar before her and slowly unscrews the lid. She tilts her head forward and uses her hands to gently waft the aroma from the jar's contents toward her face, inhaling and internalizing the story told by each site. Then she reaches her hand in and pulls the Polaroid out, lets it drip off excess liquid, and places the final image face up on the floor. It's a kind of divination: the film is coated in a noxious black stain that has breached the plastic casing, spreading trails of exhaust fumes, asphalt, oil, smoke, and perhaps something intangible, a memory now exhumed, across the film (fig. 16).

The twinned disasters of the Middle Passage and industrial extraction have made Louisiana an archetypal case study in the social and ecological conditions that the whole country, indeed the world, will be facing as the Plantationocene advances. The philosopher John P. Clark has referred to the city of New Orleans as a prophet, as “the apocalyptic city par excellence,” but adds that while “apocalypse implies cataclysmic change, destruction, and loss” it also “opens up new utopian possibilities.”36 The city is fragilely poised “at the end of the abyss,” he writes, but this is meant in two distinct senses. The “abyss of non-being” is the frightening awareness of “collapse, catastrophe, and fall” that often becomes debilitating and can hinder progress. Yet, perhaps in an echo of Keller and Sun Ra, he explains that there is also “the abyss of becoming. . . . This second face of Apocalypse is the moment of possibility, of creativity, and of hope.”37

Royale has acknowledged that “the earth will survive us.” She records the stories told by nature while she is still able to listen. Landscapes of Matter renders the slow violence and the urgency, indeed the inevitability, of the end of the world. “I want to bear witness to the messages that the earth is leaving behind,” she writes, “as it leaves us behind in the labyrinth that is deep time.”38 Importantly, though, these works also unfix the narrative from its dystopic implications, inviting a sense of immanence and futurity: she affirms her presence and responds to those past stewards of this landscape who “did not expect me to be here . . . that my lineage would survive. But I'm here.” Her ever-changing works breathe possibility into tomorrow(s). ■■

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the artist, Renee Royale, for her generosity and ongoing dialogue about this work, as well as LSU undergraduate student Jasmine Turner for her insights and assistance with research. I would also like to acknowledge the research support of a 2021 Monroe Fellowship from the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University. An earlier version of this article was presented in the panel “The Art of Removal: Photography and Natural Resource Extraction” at the 2023 College Art Association Annual Conference.

Notes

1

Royale, “Landscapes of Matter” (artist website), https://www.reneeroyale.com/photography/landscapesofmatter (accessed August 2023).

2

See, for instance, the online resource “Losing Ground,” developed for ProPublica by Bob Marshall and Al Shaw in 2014. The authors relay the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's prediction that by the year 2100 the majority of the region will be underwater amid sea level rise of over four feet. “This land being swallowed by the Gulf,” they explain, “is home to half of the country's oil refineries, a matrix of pipelines that serve 90 percent of the nation's offshore energy production and 30 percent of its total oil and gas supply, a port vital to 31 states, and 2 million people who would need to find other places to live” (Marshall, Jacobs, and Shaw, “Losing Ground”). Shaw and Brian Jacobs also published a feature entitled “Louisiana's Moon Shot” that describes the formidable task of replacing disappearing coastal land. See https://projects.propublica.org/larestoration.

3

This region has also been home to Louisiana's indigenous communities, who are among the first victims of sea level rise at the regional and national level. For references on firsthand experiences of those who have been impacted, see Baurick, “Last Days of Isle de Jean Charles,” or the entry on Isle de Jean Charles on the Cultural Landscape Foundation website, which traces the history of the forced relocation of Native Americans to the southern marshes as a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830; the settlements, including cow pastures and rice fields, schools, churches, dance halls, and residences; the subsequent destruction of the coastal ecosystem after the discovery of oil here in the 1920s; and the contemporary abandonment after rising waters have engulfed the land. “Isle de Jean Charles,” Cultural Landscape Foundation, https://www.tclf.org/isle-de-jean-charles (accessed June 24, 2024).

5

Royale, “Landscapes of Matter.”

12

Arabindan-Kesson and Bagneris, “Spirit of Louisiana,” 87.

13

McKittrick, “On Plantations,” 948. McKittrick writes on Katrina in the introductory chapter, “No One Knows the Mysteries at the Bottom of the Ocean,” in her important coedited volume Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (McKittrick and Woods, Black Geographies, 1–13).

15

As told to the author during a studio visit in September 2022.

19

See Hartman, Lose Your Mother. Artist and writer Ayeesha Hameed builds on this language in her essay “Black Atlantis.” 

24

One incredible resource that compiles research on this history is Brown et al., “Environmental Racism in Death Alley, Louisiana.” 

26

Voiceover narration in Forensic Architecture, If Toxic Air Is a Monument.

30

Dawn DeDeaux, artist statement for “Mothership I: Postulations of Myth and Man,” Dawn DeDeaux (artist's website), http://www.dawndedeaux.net/mothership-series---about.html (accessed August 2023).

34

McCormick, in “Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun: Southbound,” video produced to accompany the interactive website for the exhibition Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, curated by Mark Sloan and Mark Long, uploaded September 28, 2018, Vimeo video, 3:41, https://vimeo.com/292415573.

38

Royale, “Landscapes of Matter.”

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