Aesthetics of Immersion
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3914264 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Aida Arosoaie (0000-0002-4790-5662, University of Wisconsin–Madison, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 313-334 |
| Publication date | 2025-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environmental Humanities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2201-1919 • E-ISSN: 2201-1919 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/22011919-11713510 |
| OpenAlex | W4412706450 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 42 |
This article examines the role of rubber in the life and art practices of Malaysian contemporary artist Shooshie Sulaiman and her collaborators. Rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) was transplanted into Malaya by the British in 1877, an endeavor that radically altered the peninsula's landscape and social fabric, routing rubber and local peoples of the peninsula into racialized assemblages. Refusing the racialized commodification of rubber, Shooshie claims rubber is her tradition, playground, kin, education, and the essence of her being, re-representing the Malaysian rubber landscape as a site of productive possibilities. Drawing on the author's virtual and in-person fieldwork in Malaysia from 2019 until 2023, this article focuses on Shooshie's embodied memories of her childhood on the rubber plantation and her artwork in order to theorize an aesthetics of immersion from within plantation spaces that hijacks the rubber-Bumiputra racialized assemblage and instead offers an anticolonial pedagogy of life. The article argues that Shooshie's aesthetics of immersion within the rubberscape and her collaborative and community-oriented artworks destabilize the modern economy of senses and affect, perceptual logic and natural taxonomies, and racialized hierarchies of identity, instead proposing alternative worldings from within spaces of racialized extraction
Aesthetics · Art · Geometry · Immersion (mathematics · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Mathematics · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Theatre and Performance Studies
Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation
Conservation Refugees
Beyond Geography, Past Time
Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
Catching Our Breath
Radical Care
Killing Joy
How Forests Think
Plantation
Plantation Futures
Staying with the Trouble
The things we believe
Black Feminist Plots before the Plantationocene and Anthropology's “Regional Closets”
The extractive zone
Art to come
(Re)mapping Indigenous ‘Race’/Place in Postcolonial Peninsular Malaysia
The Peripatetic Peasant and Land Tenure in British Malaya
An Ecology of Knowledges
Decolonizing Extinction
Poetics of relation
A thousand plateaus
The meaning of race in Malaysia
The making of race in colonial Malaya
Introduction
Trap Door
Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom
Situated Knowledges
Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology
Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, Second Edition
Intersectional Ecologies
Learning the Grammar of Animacy1
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |