Kate Lewis Hood

Queen Mary, University of London, English, Faculty Member

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I am an interdisciplinary scholar and writer considering how poetic practices address watery places transformed by colonialism and racial capitalism. My work is in dialogue with Black and Indigenous studies, environmental humanities, and geopoetics, with an emphasis on anti-colonial, queer and feminist approaches.

My current book project, 'Overlapping Currents', considers poetic work by m. nourbeSe philip, Jonah Mixon-Webster, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe), No'u Revilla (Kanaka 'Ōiwi), Brandy Nālani McDougall (Kanaka 'Ōiwi), and others, in relation to place-based practices of poetic performance, water protection, and decolonial infrastructure-making.

I am a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London, and formerly held an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in Geography at Royal Holloway University of London.

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Articles by Kate Lewis Hood

Keeping time with digital technologies: From real-time environments to forest futurisms

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2024

Forests are zones of multiple temporalities. They keep time and are constituted through time-keep... more Forests are zones of multiple temporalities. They keep time and are constituted through time-keeping practices. Digital technologies of environmental monitoring and management increasingly organise forest temporalities. This article considers how emerging techno-temporalities measure, pace, and transform forest worlds while reproducing and reconfiguring longer durations of colonial and capitalist technologies. We draw together scholarship on political forests, digital media temporalities, and anti-colonial and Indigenous thinking to analyse the politics of time that materialise through digital technologies and shape what forest pasts, presents, and futures are senseable and possible. In particular, we trace the socio-technical production of the ‘real-time’ as a temporal register of experiencing, knowing, and governing forest environments. Analysing a real-time deforestation alert system in the Amazon, we consider how these temporalities valorise immediate, continuous forest data that can be mobilised for understanding and protecting forests, while simultaneously glossing over durational colonial and capitalist framings of forests that rely on dispossession, extraction, and enclosure. The second half of the article turns to Indigenous futurisms and artistic and socio-political uses of digital platforms that rework forest temporalities. By analysing these multiple and sometimes contradictory temporalities, we suggest that these practices and interventions can challenge dominant timelines and their inequities through pluralistic and redistributive configurations of temporality, land, and data sovereignty.

Port Motions

by Kate Lewis Hood and jac common

Sonic Acts: Ecoes, 2023

(Open access unformatted version – see https://sonicacts.com/archive/magazine-ecoes-issue-5# for ... more (Open access unformatted version – see https://sonicacts.com/archive/magazine-ecoes-issue-5# for formatted version.) In this dialogic essay, we think from and between three port spaces along the River Thames. The first is a washed-up ship’s door at the threshold between the old Port of London and the docklands, where marshland and embankments are enfolded in the water infrastructures of urban development through racial and finance capitalism. Downriver, the second is a seawall along the edge of the Port of Tilbury/London Gateway Port, where deepwater docks and a freeport system reorganise economic and ecological relations of flow in and out of the capital. Back upstream again, the third site is a meander in the river around Port Meadow, a shifting space of seasonal flooding and histories of commoning. Traversing these sites across times and weathers, on foot and by boat, we attend to the scales and logics of their infrastructural forms, the hydrological agencies that shape and exceed them, and the breaks, bubbles, and overspills of otherwise-living with and against these ports in motion.

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Residual Repertoire: Black Geo-Aesthetics After the Mine

GeoHumanities, 2023

(This paper is Open Access on GeoHumanities.) This article attends to how contemporary artists Ot... more (This paper is Open Access on GeoHumanities.) This article attends to how contemporary artists Otobong Nkanga and Libita Sibungu work with mineral residues to locate and reimagine Namibian mining geographies among the material durations of colonialism and racial capitalism. Drawing on Black geographies, postcolonial and performance studies, I suggest that Nkanga’s and Sibungu’s respective methods of presencing uneven accumulations and embodied and geological temporalities constitute 'residual repertoires'. From Nkanga’s work at the Green Hill in Tsumeb, to Sibungu’s traversal of diasporic mining geographies between Namibia and the UK, both artists trace mineral circulations through visual, sonic, and performance elements, finding ways to render forces of dispossession, genocide, struggle, and their afterlives (partially) perceptible. This work questions and repurposes institutionalized forms of representation whose visual and archival modes contribute to ongoing corporeal and material extraction. Critically intervening in and seeking to transform extractive geo-aesthetics, Nkanga and Sibungu generate speculative repertoires for other possible futures of mineral proximity.

In the 'Fissures of Infrastructure': Poetry and Toxicity in 'Garbage Arcadia'

Environmental Humanities, 2021

This article offers an account of 'toxic infrastructures' as mutually material and discursive arr... more This article offers an account of 'toxic infrastructures' as mutually material and discursive arrangements operating in the postwar, postcrash, and settler colonial landscapes of the United States. It specifically responds to Jennifer Scappettone’s multimodal poetic work The Republic of Exit 43, developed after the author’s discovery that the industrial landfill site she grew up alongside in New York had been classified by the US Environmental Protection Agency as requiring federal intervention. Tracing Scappettone’s poetic geographies from the 'corporate dump' of Syosset Landfill to the more (in)famous waste site Fresh Kills, the article argues that Scappettone exposes the ways that certain bodies and ecologies are rendered physically and conceptually toxic and implicates readers in the uneven social, embodied, and ecological conditions of composition and response. It suggests that Scappettone’s practices of collage, salvage, and collaborative performance destabilize lyric subjectivity to address a 'garbage arcadia' compounding the material accumulations of US consumerism and neoliberal financialization with longer processes of dispossession and displacement. Reading this text with feminist materialisms and Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s queer Indigenous poetry, the article considers how poetics might reckon with the material conditions and residues of uneven wasting and generate situated, critical, and relational approaches to toxic infrastructures.

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Clouding knowledge in the Anthropocene: Lisa Robertson’s The Weather and Caroline Bergvall’s Drift

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2018

While the Anthropocene has emerged as a major critical paradigm across multiple disciplines in re... more While the Anthropocene has emerged as a major critical paradigm across multiple disciplines in recent years, its conceptual, aesthetic and political dimensions demand further investigation. Responding to the fact that women’s experimental poetry has often been neglected in ecocriticism, this article draws on feminist new materialist thinking to consider possibilities for Anthropocene poetics in two contemporary poetic works: The Weather by Lisa Robertson and Drift by Caroline Bergvall. Focusing in particular on experimental and performative uses of clouds and fog, I argue that these works re-examine relationships between language(s), knowledge(s) and materiality in order to question ‘natural histories’ that remain implicit in the Anthropocene. By doing so, they develop distinctive poetics with the capacity to critique dominant Anthropocene epistemologies and logics, and register the uneven materialities of environmental change.

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Book Reviews by Kate Lewis Hood

Ecopoetics and the Global Landscape: Critical Essays, ed. by Isabel Sobral Campos

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2020

'to refer to such an insight as mystical is not just to miss the point but to invert it, to demat... more 'to refer to such an insight as mystical is not just to miss the point but to invert it, to dematerialise and mystify that which is intensely and marvellously material' Thinking Continental is a challenging and engaging journey on being in place, a set of essays and poetry that pack a real punch of ideas and insight. Readers travel a cobbled path hard bouncing from the sometimes marvellous to the ultimately 'groundless illusion of place' (Weishaus 308). I look forward to the next volume.

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Intoxicated Feminisms and the Politics of the Visible: Khairani Barokka's Indigenous Species

MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, 2018

Khairani Barokka's Indigenous Species (2016) is a poetry book, an art book, a feminist book. Trac... more Khairani Barokka's Indigenous Species (2016) is a poetry book, an art book, a feminist book. Tracing the journey of an unnamed narrator kidnapped and transported down a polluted river in Indonesia, the work weaves together myth and glitch, translation and toxicity, supercharging visual culture(s) with the politics of the visible. Using a range of visual and verbal techniques, Barokka calls attention to the practices of erasure-or making-invisible-of certain bodies and communities, in particular women of colour living in environmental precarity in places such as Indonesia, and visually impaired people disabled by the lack of accessibility in mainstream publishing. In turn, she works to make visible diverse cultures of creativity, artistry, and resistance against or outside of dominant white, enabled assumptions and the power structures they uphold.

https://maifeminism.com/intoxicated-feminisms-and-the-politics-of-the-visible-khairani-barokkas-indigenous-species/

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