The Blue of the Plums is the Memory of the Sea: Poetic Ecologies of Displacement (ACLA 2025)

Organizer: Ada Smailbegovic

This seminar takes up the concept of displacement from two  different vantage points. One is a consideration of how anthropogenically generated processes of environmental change can lead to a transformation of ecological edges at which different organisms meet one another in the composition of an ecosystem. Such displaced edges can be both spatial and temporal and they can generate "zones of unmeeting" or abscencess of encounter where hitherto relations had flourished. The other is a consideration of human displacement, particularly in the context of violence such as war. The seminar is particularly interested in what the theorist Sarah Ahmed has termed a "migrant orientation" as a way of contemplating what it means to inhabit a space following such displacements. As Ahmed writes in her book Queer Phenomenology such forms of inhabiting involve a mutual co-creation of both places and bodies through relation: "Migration involves reinhabiting the skin: the different 'impressions' of a new landscape, the air, the smells, the sounds, which accumulate like points, to create lines, or which accumulate like lines to create new textures on the surface of the skin" (9). In assuming a migrant orientation the seminar resists the discourses which have attempted to ground the ecological dimensions of place in an essentialist sense of biological stability, which often obfuscates settler-colonial discourses. Instead, the seminar asks how those whose subjectivities have been shaped by displacement allow a different perspective on ecologies of place. The title of the seminar "the blue of the plums is the memory of the sea," for instance, alludes to a film Snow by the Bosnian director Aida Begić, which explores how a group of women refugees come to re-inhabit a village in Bosnia from which they have been displaced due to genocide during the Bosnian war in the 1990s. In reimagining their relation to place this group of women refugees consider the botanical world around them through practices such the making of preserves, among them plum jam. As such, they demonstrate forms of survival which can be understood through the lens of what Yên Lê Espiritu and Lan Duong have called Feminist Refugee Epistemology - practices that rely on tiny everyday acts that reengage them in ecological worlds that surround them. The seminar welcomes papers that take up the concept of displacement through an array of the above methodologies or add to this theoretical lexicon.