UC Santa Barbara

The Leaky Grid: Black and Native Electrified Imaginaries investigates the cultural, ecological, and political entanglements of US electricity infrastructure, analyzing the co-constitutive relationship between electrical power and structural power. The Leaky Grid examines how the power grid and the narrative imaginaries of Western colonial modernity that it sparks produces racialized and colonial violence through different forms of environmental white supremacy. The Leaky Grid prioritizes Black and Native North American cultural production to imagine different modes and scales of electrified energy justice.

Working in concert with the electrified Black and Indigenous multi-media cultural production it centers, The Leaky Grid works against the grid’s colonialist mythology of linear control and containment, instead focusing on aspects of electricity infrastructure that display its inherent porosity: electricity siphoning, leaking sparks, and submersion in the floodwaters caused by hydroelectric damming. Each instance of leakiness is to be learned from, providing a different opportunity to unpack the complicated web of power relations that electrification is at the center of and contributes to. The Leaky Grid illuminates how the infrastructural systems, narratives, and imaginaries of Western modernity are porous, and lingers with the possibilities this porosity creates.

The Black and Native electrified imaginaries foregrounded throughout the project not only diagnose and lay bare colonialism’s milieu of ongoing cultural, political, and environmental violence, but these approaches are also about worldbuilding: they open up other formations of power, identity, resistance, and environment. Ultimately, The Leaky Grid’s primary goal is to perform an anticolonial, antiextractivist, and antiracist reading of the electricity grid. Methodologically, The Leaky Grid reads back and forth between print, audio and visual media, and material infrastructures, stitching together cultural and infrastructural analyses that examine the entanglement of materiality and representation. Foregrounding the power of imagination, The Leaky Grid utilizes an approach to literature that weaves together a genealogy of liberation, narrative, and imagination born from both the Black Radical Tradition and Native North American approaches to the embodied and material power of storytelling.