(The Center Square) – The University of Louisville hosted a lecture in mid-January that called swamps “nonbinary space[s]” and discussed the relationship swamps and swamp narratives have with “race, gender, and sexuality.”
The lecture, entitled “Swamp Tales, Trans Ghosts, and Nonbinary Magical Realism,” weaved “together the insights of Black ecologies and trans studies through a nonbinary analytic to raise questions about the coloniality of climate (change) and being,” according to the event’s description.
The Global Humanities lecture also highlighted “how Black and Indigenous queer, trans and nonbinary artists and activists are redefining the terms of their difference.”
“As a nonbinary space that is neither land nor water but both, the swamp serves as the material grounds – as the ‘terra infirma’ – for a series of considerations about transformation and difference,” the description says.
“Swamp Tales” was presented by Professor C. Riley Snorton of the University of Chicago and was based around the lecturer’s new work: “Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning.”
Snorton told The Center Square that “the lecture explored how swamp ecologies offer different language for thinking about social differences, like race, gender, and sexuality.”
“The implications of the presentation and of my larger project, ‘Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning,’ is the ability to find more frameworks to express and enact solidarity across differences,” Snorton said.
According to its description, Snorton’s UofL lecture juxtaposed three different swamp narratives “to discuss how swamps confound common sense notions of difference, especially in terms of racial and gender categorization.”
The three narratives discussed were the Wild Man of the Green Swamp, the Honey Island Swamp monster, and the Amazonian plant-spirits.
“Narratives about swamp people and swamp things punctuate the story of the New World,” the description says.
Snorton graduated with a Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010, and is described as “a cultural theorist who focuses on racial, sexual and transgender histories and cultural productions,” in a University of Chicago bio.
Snorton has been involved with a few books, authoring one entitled “Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low.” and another called “Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity,” according to the University of Chicago.
Snorton also gave a lecture with the same title and similar description as UofL’s “Swamp Tales” at Harvard in 2023.
When reached for comment, neither UofL communications specialist Amanda Carroll nor the lecture’s media contact Meg Kennedy responded.
The lecture was open to the public. It was sponsored by a number of UofL departments, including the College of Arts & Sciences; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and the Office of the President & Provost.
