Accumulated Catastrophes

Abstract: This essay considers how the word "catastrophe," as we use it contemporaneously to describe everything from dystopic video game worlds to climate collapse, derives from the multiple catastrophes of conquest and transatlantic slavery as intertwined projects that began with European arrival to the Americas. Engaging theories of racial capitalism in conversation with Black fungibility through Tiffany Lethabo King, Christina Sharpe, and Sylvia Wynter, this essay historicizes catastrophe through Southeastern American Indian (specifically Chickasaw) histories of confrontation with Hernando de Soto in the 1540s. Finally, this essay considers how the use of "burden" and "pieza" embedded within theories of catastrophe, elimination, and disaster to discuss fungibility and genocide absorbs the enslavement of Indigenous peoples and masks how Southeastern American Indian nations participated in chattel slavery as both enslaved and enslaver.