After explosivity, what remains?

In this talk, Javier Arbona-Homar will draw from his new book, Explosivity: Following What Remains, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025, as well as introduce new research, to critically examine deeply held assumptions about appearance and disappearance in landscapes. Beyond an academic book, Explosivity is “a vital guide to confronting the latent violence embedded in our environments,” according to artist and geographer Trevor Paglen. It’s a call for slowing down, sensing, and remembering what remains of historical explosions. Explosivity is grounded and written in the unceded Ohlone lands of the so-called San Francisco Bay Area. As a city of explosivity, this urban region is shaped by the industrialization of geophysical combustion fixed into place. Based on five major explosions in the Bay Area between 1866 and 2011, this experimental and creative book proposes explosivity as a novel lens to study the everyday racialized exposure to volatile chemicals. But how to sense explosivity? Created with eclectically mixed field methods - from oral histories to landscape traverses, and more - the text is collagist, weaving geostories of the five main explosions throughout, and augmented with more vignettes from many more explosive moments in Bay Area history. Arbona-Homar reveals a persistent risk of blowing up, centering the lives of Chinese migrant explosives workers in the nineteenth century, followed by Black munition loaders in the twentieth century World War II “home front.” Over time, idyllic urban parks, transport infrastructures, and security assemblages successively develop on top of the same geographies of storing, moving, and testing explosive substances. The placement and sensorial suppression of explosivity locks-in risk, and entangles the lives of environmentalists, anti-war protestors, and even residents exposed to neighboring media productions with explosive stunts on police ranges.

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Speaker: Javier Arbona-Homar, UC Davis