ABSTRACT

This article considers Mississippi River Mud as an analytic for unruly ontologies and fugitive spaces. Historic discourses around mud—and by extension, muddy spaces—were mapped onto lawless, not-fully-humans who occupied them. They reflected efforts to impose rational order and naturalize a political economy of monoculture, river shipping, and fossil fuels. This episteme, which reduces complex ecologies to agents of capital extraction, has transformed the once alluvial forests and marshlands of south Louisiana into subsiding oil and gas fields, abandoned wells, and eroding canals. An explication of mud by communication scholars ruptures this discourse in imagining alternative ways of living.

摘要

本文将密西西比河泥浆视为对不守规矩的本体和逃逸空间的分析。围绕泥土的历史话语——进而延伸到泥泞的空间——被映射到占领它们的无法无天的、非完全人类的身上。它们反映了强加理性秩序并使单一栽培、内河航运和化石燃料的政治经济自然化的努力。这一认识将复杂的生态简化为资本提取的代理人，已经将路易斯安那州南部曾经的冲积森林和沼泽地变成了下沉的油气田、废弃的井和侵蚀的运河。传播学者对泥泞的解释打破了这种想象替代生活方式的话语。