Existential Recovery: Re-making and Remembering Through Geo-Storytelling

Abstract

This article draws from a larger auto-ethnographic project in which I have collected life stories via unstructured interviews with Black residents and environmental activists living in southern Louisiana, my hometown. I highlight three in-depth narratives to illustrate how geo-storytelling within racialized communities cultivates what I call existential recovery. Intersecting scholarship in Black ecology, memory studies, and geo-storytelling, I argue that existential recovery communicates a form of environmental justice that turns sacrifice zones into sacred “Black spaces of belonging.” From these narratives, we see that those who inhabit “lands of no-one” are practicing memory-work—remembering pasts and re-making plantation futures. As residents and activists resist those structures that render their geographies “unlivable,” they help shape what it means to live under environmental disaster. A focus on discursive resistance to environmental racism then emphasizes how communities of color re-frame and re-claim what it means to adapt under environmental and climate crises.