Beyond the Colony
Africanized honey bees,
and the Science & Poetics of Race & Place
Dissertation Research.
How do Africanized honey bees (AHBs) – hybridized after their 'escape' from a Brazilian lab in 1957 and quickly deemed an ‘invasive’ species across the Americas and the Caribbean – reproduce and challenge biogeographic conceptualizations of race and Indigeneity in the Americas?
By “following the swarm” across labs, borders and islands, this project aims to map out how intertwined knowledge, governance, and poetics of non-human and human race moves between time and space, pushing geopolitical, disciplinary and ecological boundaries. It is through tracing these relations across these critical topographies that this project aims to elucidate the place of the nonhuman in the co-constitutive makings of race and place.
Laboratories + Labscapes
São Paulo, Brasil
This module will situate itself in various sites of scientific knowledge production, mainly labs but also museums, scientific conferences and other spaces, to ethnographically understand how the racialization of and about Africanized honey bees are tied to how laboratories are imagined as racialized spaces themselves.
Border/lands
Southern United States
This module interested in how nature horror and science fiction films about Africanized honey bees produced before and after their arrival informed public perceptions, scientific research and environmental governance around them, attending specifically to how it is enmeshed in racialized border politics.
Islands + Archipelagos Vieques, Puerto Rico
The project is particularly invested in how people on the island of Vieques are collaborating with Africanized Bees to imagine food sovereign futures that escape US coloniality, dialoguing with their mobilizations and frictions with hegemonic ideas of sustainability upheld through molecular biology, invasive ecology and island biogeography.