The World We Became:

Tackling how racial justice and climate crisis are entangled, The World We Became: Map Quest 2350 is a speculative cartography atlas. Co-curated by Tao Leigh Goffe and Shannon Gleeson, the initiative is a collaboration between a collective of artists, poets, academics, curators, architects, and activists. This digital humanities experiment maps global ecological crises and shared Black, Asian, Pacific, Middle Eastern, Latin American, Caribbean, and Indigenous futures. The names of the contributors are: Atif Khan, Austin Kocher, Christin Washington, Judith Salcido, Rewa Phansalkar, Ryan Persadie, Anisa Jackson, Elspeth Iralu, Erica Violet Lee, Hashem Abushama, Nisrin Elamin, Randa Tawil, Citlali Sosa-Riddell, Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera, Kelsey Moore, Lydia Macklin Camel, Mónica Bernal Ramirez, Nancy Morales, Amanda Pinheiro, Ana Ozaki, André Nascimento, Christopher Roberts, Essah Díaz, and Reighan Gillam.

The born-digital speculative design experiment features visual and audio components presenting a planetary vision of the year 2350 as an underwater future in ruins of climate crisis. The atlas connects five imaginaries that rescript the geographic boundaries of what we currently understand to be South Asia, the South Pacific, the Middle East, North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Situating the borders of the nation-state borders as recent constructs, in this creative exercise the natural environment becomes a model for imagining interspecies relationality and co-presence. Mangroves and atolls form portals to speculative futures beyond the climate crisis and the impact of racial and extractive capitalism. Anchored in five locales, the collective text brings together a global vision of survivance addressing migration, dispossession, Asian diaspora, Native sovereignty, Black fugitivity, and broader questions of global indigeneity. With life emerging from the ruins, this atlas forms a digital blueprint of suboceanic futures and the practice of interrogating what justice could mean in the far future.

Read the academic article, part of the Eco-Crisis Special Issue of the peer-reviewed journal Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures in the Americas, December 2022.