“Pipeline Poetics”

The pipeline—as a carrier of oil, water, or fiberoptic cables—is a military infrastructure that brings dispersed geographical sites in political and economic relation.

Lowered onto seabeds or buried underground, pipelines change ecologies and shape relations in invisible yet irrevocable ways. But as a literary metaphor, the pipeline can be a tool for noticing submerged connections between literary cultures and even reveal weak nodes in organizing structures.

For the 8th Heo/Geo Lecture Series, the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society present a talk by Dr Trisha Remetir at the University of California-Riverside. Titled, “Pipeline Poetics”, the lecture is on Friday, 26 May 2023 at 4:00 PM Philippine Standard Time | 12:00 AM Pacific Standard Time.

For this talk, it asks: what can a close consideration of pipelines reveal about contemporary Filipino literary geographies? By reading poets like Eunice Andrada alongside critical ocean studies and logistics theorists such as Liz Deloughrey, Nicole Starioselski, Charmaine Chua and Craig Santos Perez, Dr Remetir will discuss how an attention to pipelines (as physical structure and as literary metaphor) might reroute literary analysis away from focusing on experience to focusing on structure. For example, in Eunice Andrada’s 2021 poetry collection ‘Take Care’, an engagement with pipelines in stanza and image reveals the larger industries of capitalist extraction that require Filipino transnational labor.

Following Filipinos along the pipeline, the talk hopes to reveal the limits of a literary analysis that is oriented towards a diasporic longing for home, and instead gestures toward spaces (such as the Gulf, the Pacific) that demand our attention and imagination.

Trisha Federis Remetir is a writer who specializes in narratives of race, extraction, and migration in and across the Pacific. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2022 and is currently a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her book project, Unfamiliar Waters, traces how extractive industries over waterscapes have influenced contemporary films, poetry, and experimental media. In her research and creative life, she is interested in witnessing the racial and environmental histories of the Philippines and connecting to other sites of environmental survival and struggle through the comparative potential of water.

This Heo/Geo lecture is part of the department’s ongoing observance and celebration of the 40th anniversary of geography’s advent in the Philippine academy.

To participate for this talk, register here through this link: https://up-edu.zoom.us/…/tJEvdOCqqTMuEtJQzyykGtlO0VthM3…

Source: UP Department of Geography Facebook