California Futures: Haunted Ecologies, Decolonial Relations

California Futures is a critical study of California as a site of liberatory dreaming, one that takes up the history, politics, and afterlives of the region’s colonial imaginings as well as archives of resistance and world-making which strive toward Indigenous, decolonial, Black, queer, feminist, and anti-white supremacist futures. Attending carefully to the colonial, commercial, and environmental entanglements of the region, Daniel Lanza Rivers offers an account of the processes of speculation that worlded California into being. Rivers examines case studies such as the colonial cultures of Grizzly bear eradication and reintroduction; the entanglements of drought, industrial agriculture, and environmental toxicity in California’s Central Valley; utopianism in the Klamath Mountains, from the Black Bear Ranch commune to Octavia Butler’s Parables series; dam removal and Native climate adaptation on the Klamath watershed; and the policing of unhoused people around Oakland’s Lake Merritt. Through these case studies, Rivers interrogates the long histories of settler conquest, extractive and racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy that have shaped California. They chart strategies for thinking beyond the colonial Anthropocene and toward the post-extractive and liberatory futures that emerge from and with decolonial land relations.

Praise

“California Futures is an important revisionist history of the state we call California. Through a powerful range of case studies, Daniel Lanza Rivers demonstrates the many entangled ways that settler colonialism and extractive capitalism have impacted (and continue to impact) the lands, peoples, identities, and futures of ‘California’.” – Melissa K. Nelson, Professor of Indigenous Sustainability, Arizona State University

“California Futures is a powerful, transdisciplinary, and generative re-conceptualization of California rooted in a coalitional politics of decolonization, queer ecologies, and climate justice. Rivers interrogates the dance of speculation and settlement across multiple temporal and spatial registers to envision the possibilities of life outside the settler racial capitalist state.” – Sarah D. Wald, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and English, University of Oregon