A01=Traci Brynne Voyles
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
American History
America’s Sahara
Author_Traci Brynne Voyles
automatic-update
California
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJK
Category=NHK
Category=RBKC
Category=RN
Colorado River
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
Environmental History
Environmental Politics
Environmental Studies
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
History
Imperial Valley
Indigenous Dispossession
Inland Body of Water
Inland Sea
Language_English
PA=Available
Pollution
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
Racial Capitalism
Settler Colonialism
softlaunch
Torres Martinez Cahuilla
Water Politics
Wildlife Refuge
Product details
- ISBN 9781496216731
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 2021
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
2022 WHA Caughey Western History Prize for the most distinguished book on the American West
Can a sea be a settler? What if it is a sea that exists only in the form of incongruous, head-scratching contradictions: a wetland in a desert, a wildlife refuge that poisons birds, a body of water in which fish suffocate? Traci Brynne Voyles’s history of the Salton Sea examines how settler colonialism restructures physical environments in ways that further Indigenous dispossession, racial capitalism, and degradation of the natural world. In other words, The Settler Sea asks how settler colonialism entraps nature to do settlers’ work for them.
The Salton Sea, Southern California’s largest inland body of water, occupies the space between the lush agricultural farmland of the Imperial Valley and the austere desert called “America’s Sahara.” The sea sits near the boundary between the United States and Mexico and lies at the often-contested intersections of the sovereign lands of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuillas and the state of California. Created in 1905, when overflow from the Colorado River combined with a poorly constructed irrigation system to cause the whole river to flow into the desert, this human-maintained body of water is considered a looming environmental disaster.
The Salton Sea’s very precariousness—existing always in the interstices of human and natural influences, between desert and wetland, between the skyward pull of the sun and the constant inflow of polluted water—is both a symptom and symbol of the larger precariousness of settler relationships to the environment, in the West and beyond. Voyles provides an innovative exploration of the Salton Sea, looking to the ways the sea, its origins, and its role in human life have been vital to the people who call this region home.
Can a sea be a settler? What if it is a sea that exists only in the form of incongruous, head-scratching contradictions: a wetland in a desert, a wildlife refuge that poisons birds, a body of water in which fish suffocate? Traci Brynne Voyles’s history of the Salton Sea examines how settler colonialism restructures physical environments in ways that further Indigenous dispossession, racial capitalism, and degradation of the natural world. In other words, The Settler Sea asks how settler colonialism entraps nature to do settlers’ work for them.
The Salton Sea, Southern California’s largest inland body of water, occupies the space between the lush agricultural farmland of the Imperial Valley and the austere desert called “America’s Sahara.” The sea sits near the boundary between the United States and Mexico and lies at the often-contested intersections of the sovereign lands of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuillas and the state of California. Created in 1905, when overflow from the Colorado River combined with a poorly constructed irrigation system to cause the whole river to flow into the desert, this human-maintained body of water is considered a looming environmental disaster.
The Salton Sea’s very precariousness—existing always in the interstices of human and natural influences, between desert and wetland, between the skyward pull of the sun and the constant inflow of polluted water—is both a symptom and symbol of the larger precariousness of settler relationships to the environment, in the West and beyond. Voyles provides an innovative exploration of the Salton Sea, looking to the ways the sea, its origins, and its role in human life have been vital to the people who call this region home.
Traci Brynne Voyles is an associate professor and chair of women’s and gender studies and the director of the Center for Social Justice at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country.
