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

The January 6, 2021, Capitol riot appeared as an extraordinary and shocking event to many American citizens. In fact, the various framings of the riot such as “insurrection,” “sedition,” or “domestic terrorism” seem to confirm the unprecedented nature of the day. By contrast, in this article we argue that January 6 can be understood in terms of its ordinariness, that is, as “the most ordinary thing that could happen” when viewed in the context of right-wing politics. We first argue that the reliance on a universalized dichotomy between authoritarianism and democracy in current research on right-wing politics in the United States tends to reify those terms, and thus miss the ordinary and routine dimension of antidemocratic practices. We subsequently propose the concept antidemocratic cultures to understand how right-wing political dispositions are fabricated through and mediated by rhetorical acts including speech, written texts, and embodied everyday practice. We analyze the rhetoric of participation of riot participants by reading their text messages, social media posts, and interviews with law enforcement and news media, as detailed in their arrest sheets. The rhetoric of participation of riot participants reveals how political dispositions are fabricated through ordinary language use and how these identities congeal in antidemocratic cultures. In the last section, we further discuss how a theory of antidemocratic cultures provides a novel framework to understand contemporary right-wing politics.