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Javier Arbona-Homar, "Explosivity: Following What Remains" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
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A
It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4 through June 9, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, ebook and audiobook from Princeton University Press. Just go to press princeton.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation and Beyond Belief How Evidence Shows what really Works. There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on Go to press princeton.edu and use the code spring50. That's S P R I N G50 press princeton.edu. the sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with with Dr. Javier Arbona Omar about his book titled Explosivity following what Remains, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2025, which examines and unearths sometimes literally, the hidden legacies of violence that have shaped the the physical, cultural memorial environments in the San Francisco Bay Area. So we're going to a whole bunch of places in time in this space, in this geography of the San Francisco Bay Area, where a lot has happened and a lot of things are kind of all tied together by looking at some moments of explosion, like literally guys explosions. We're talking like things blowing up here. And that's important for reasons I'm sure we're going to discuss. Now, obviously in an audio only medium, the fact the book has a whole bunch of photographs is perhaps less relevant, but definitely worth mentioning that there are lots of photographs from Andrea Gaffney in the book for those who want to go look up those aspects in more detail. But of course, first off, we have a lovely conversation I think to have. Javier, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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A
Thanks, Miranda. It's great to be here. I'm a frequent listener, first time caller as they joke. And yeah, I'm looking forward to speaking with you and listeners about the book.
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B
Well, obviously then having listened to other episodes, I'm sure you know that we like to start off with the author introducing themselves a little bit and telling us why you decided to write this book. So can you tell us about the questions that are motivating this project and kind of how it all developed?
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A
Certainly, I'd be happy to. Well, Explosivity following what remains is a book that in a way caps a long period for me as a social practitioner artist, as a Scholar as someone working in archives in oral history. And I had worked on a dissertation project, my PhD in geography at UC Berkeley, that studied one historical explosion, the 1944 Port Chicago explosion. And listeners might be a little thrown off because the name Chicago a lot of times makes people think it's in Illinois. But Port Chicago was the name of a town that's actually still now swallowed up by a military base in the area of kind of Martinez, if that. That's the nearest city in California. It's the northern parts of the San Francisco Bay area. And I had been really kind of puzzling and struggling with that explosion of two ships during World War II. What's considered the worst home front disaster during World War II. And you know what, what kind of spurred this book was that. I kept thinking that a lot of the narratives around Port Chicago made it sound like it was exceptional, like that this was, of course, as the worst home front disaster. There is something about that explosion that is catastrophic, disastrous, massive loss of life. Over 300 people died in the explosion. And so of course, it has that exceptional quality to it. But I thought there's gotta be something geographic. There's gotta be something. There's gotta be more to the story, as so many authors probably kind of start their books thinking about. And the more I started to think regionally and think about the San Francisco Bay area as this larger metropolis, as this urban region, the more I started to find more explosions. Right. And as you were just telling listeners before, a lot of times people think that, you know, a lot of times I say explosions, and people think, oh, you write about population explosions about like they think it's data driven or something. And no, no, I really mean material that blows up. Chemicals, substances that go off. And so the book kind of, the research took me in the direction of finding out more about how the San Francisco Bay Area frequently blows up or there have been explosions in this region that shape and that make its urbanism. And so it was really kind of like seeking out that broader context that kind of brought me to writing, to writing this book.
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B
Okay, I'm glad you've clarified kind of what you mean by explosions here. Right. It's not a metaphor. Like it really is actual things exploding. But you're not looking at it because you're. You're someone who's just going, ooh, wee, look, fireworks. Right. Like you're approaching it from a very different perspective, I think a much more nuanced perspective. So can we talk a little bit about why you look at explosions? To think about, for example, questions and complications of intimacy.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to. You know, that's. That's one of my favorite questions, in a way. The book is. Has this title that might be kind of new to people, this word explosivity, Right. So as opposed to explosions, the word explosivity is a term that I actually borrow from volcanology geologists or geographers or people, volcanologists, people that study volcanic explosions frequently use a ranking, right, to sort of determine the potential of a volcano to explode. And so that word that I just said, potential, right, the potential of something to explode, that made a lot of sense to me. That kind of clicked. And when I was really struggling with how to kind of bring together all of the history of explosions in the San Francisco Bay Area, something that talks about the potential of something to blow up, to explode, that word really, like, said something to me and really helped me think through the reasons why seemingly catastrophic events kept leading to more catastrophic events. Seemingly disasters kept begetting, more disasters. And so, like, in many ways, that is the story of the book, that what are the cultural, social. And also there are racist reasons for the exposures to these disasters. And like you mentioned the word intimacy a moment ago. And that's. That's one ingredient that's a really important ingredient in this. This notion of explosivity. Because one of the things that I talk about in the introduction of the book is that while while a lot of scholars that I admire, Joseph Masco comes to mind right away. Well, Joe Masco's work looks at a kind of culture of dread and fear of nuclear explosions, right? People that are familiar with Joe Masco's work know that he writes about the exposure and really, sometimes the kind of anticipation, right? The anticipation of a future, the dread and the kind of affects that fill a person when they have this knowledge that something could blow up. Right. Again, that potential. And I am very much interested in that anticipation, suspicion that weaves its way throughout Explosivity, the book. But I also realized as I was doing this work that I was really interested in the proximity, right, the proximity to explosive materials. It's very much a geographer's question, if you will, because it is very much a spatial question in terms of distances and closeness to volatility, to ignition, to the spark that could set off a chemical substance or a powder or an atmosphere that could explode. And so that intimacy is something that I am very much like, interested in throughout the book. That is a political category. Because the. Because when I say political I mean, what are the politics of who determines that a specific group of people works closely with an explosive who lives close by with explosive ranges or bombing ranges that the police have? For instance, I look at the Alameda county bombing range, for example, in this. In this. In this book. Alameda county is one of them, several counties in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. And so intimacy to just kind of answer your question really quick, is it really a way to keep coming back to questions around that kind of latent risk that is nearby. Right. That's spatial. And so I also think that one thing that I hope that the book does for readers is to understand more about landscapes and the intimacies that we have with explosive substances, with explosives nearby, and with memories of explosions that are not always apparent, and that we have that intimacy in landscape with the explosive past and present?
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B
Yeah, I think that's a great introduction to kind of a lot of the themes that come up in the book. And I think, especially because you highlighted there the importance of space and landscape. I don't want to take for granted that you're asking these questions in the San Francisco Bay Area. Like, why there.
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A
Yeah, that's a. That's a very important question, and one that also, you know, I. It's one that I also. I try to explain this every time I do book events or when I have done different conversations and engagements, because even though this is a. A book that's very much grounded in the San Francisco Bay Area, I would like ideally for the book to speak to people about this language of explosivity or make that concept travel right to many contexts where many cities, urban regions, geographically. It's a concept that has planetary dimensions. And even, I mean, we just saw like a. You know, I don't know if, like, people are following the news, but when we are recording this podcast, just, I think it was about three or four days ago, one of Jeff. Jeff Bezos's rockets blew up leaving Cape Canaveral in a humongous fireball over Florida. And so that kind of frequency and that kind of exposure to emissions, to chemicals, to the danger of ignition and the heat and fire and flames of these is something that I hope people can really kind of follow and apply in any context. But your question is about the San Francisco Bay Area. Why here? Well, for one thing, the San Francisco Bay Area, as I started to. I mentioned before how I started from the 1944 Port Chicago explosion, but as I rewound backwards, in a sense. Right. I kept coming up with a lot of historical Materials, newspaper accounts, archival evidence, references to the ways in which, going back to the mid 19th century and just after the famous San Francisco gold rush, California gold rush, and the rush for mineral wealth. Soon thereafter, San Francisco became an incredibly important city for the development of explosives. To make a long story short, as San Francisco entrepreneurs began to experiment with Nobel's so called blasting oil, which is the precursor to dynamite, they started experimenting with blowing up rocky outcroppings and essentially trying to figure out if this material could be used at a grand scale to build things like railroads, to tunnel through mountains, right? And since they were having a lot of trouble with black powder and the sort of like long, long history of gunpowder or black powder that was used in construction and development and mining and tunneling operations, it was very slow work and was very cumbersome and slow. And so the promise of a new technology, of these new what now nowadays we term the high explosives that begin around the 1860s and specifically with the introduction of nitroglycerin, which is Nobel's blasting oil, going back to the mid-1860s, 1866 to be more precise, that just set off like no pun intended, this period of massive investments in manufacturing and in testing and developing these new materials. And more specifically, soon after the 1860s, Nobel's dynamite started to be. Well, Nobel developed this product and then one of the places where it was manufactured at great scale was in the San Francisco Bay area. And in fact, even though San Francisco, as the geographer Seth Lunain explains, San Francisco didn't have the majority of the explosives manufacturers in the US it maybe had roughly around half, if I recall, off the top of my head. But those, those, those explosive manufacturers accounted for something like the vast majority of the explosives made in the US So they were becoming quite, they were really developing very, very innovative ways to make more and more of the material. San Francisco consumes all of its explosives, all of its dynamite in all of its sort of like magazines and armories. After the 1906 earthquake, the US army trying to build or to, trying to establish a fire line between the fire that breaks out after the earthquake, they start blowing up buildings and they consume just about all the dynamite that they had in storage. So one of the things that I argue makes the San Francisco Bay area a unique region to really kind of explore this concept of explosivity. To think about this concept of explosivity is that it has these incredible, it has these deep roots in the manufacturing of explosives. It has, it's, it's an area, it's a region that also notoriously exploited Chinese workers, migrant workers to death. And this is a history that oftentimes is very kind of papered over and not, not very well understood or discussed in landscapes and places. But a huge migration of Chinese workers come to the San Francisco Bay Area to do a whole bunch of different jobs, but one of those jobs that they take up and that, you know, one of the few jobs that they were allowed to have, packing, doing the most dangerous job of mixing and packing the explosives. So as that. Those are a couple of the reasons why this regional formation is incredibly important in the story of high explosives. And you know, I could go on and on for minutes, but just to just name, you know, a few things too. It, it's a hub of, into World War II. It's a grand arsenal of, of the so called arsenal of democracy, of building ships and loading those ships with weapons for the Pacific Theater. The San Francisco Bay Area also becomes a hub of knowledge making and production and research into explosives, particularly nuclear weapons, even up to the present day with the Lawrence Livermore Labs in the kind of southern portion of the Bay Area. So it presents a rather cohesive case study and example of explosivity.
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B
Yeah, and explosivity entangled with all these other things happening. Right. Changing of the whole economic system with the gold rush questions around immigration and race and who is exposed to what sort of risk. So it really helps put, as you mentioned earlier, the Port Chicago disaster kind of in context that doesn't come out of nowhere. So maybe we can talk a little bit more, more about that particular disaster and especially the ways in which it was racialized in terms of these questions of risk and danger.
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A
Yeah, yeah. So I think maybe. Yes, absolutely. You know, one thing for listeners to kind of might, might help to know about the book is that it, the way I, I, the way I organize the book is that I lay out in the introduction this kind of almost like a definition of explosivity. And I enter into theorizing what is explosivity as we've been talking about in the last few minutes. And then the book is organized and this might be surprising to readers in a way it's not told as just one chronological story. Right. It's told in this very, what I call a kind of collagist fashion because each chapter is, each chapter is a kind of consequence of explosivity. Actually, let me go to the table of contents really quick and I'll tell people just a little bit of what I mean. The first chapter Being about suspects and suspicions that are produced and necessary for the perpetuation of explosivity. It's a chapter called Suspect. The second chapter is called Punishment, and it centers around how oftentimes the victims of explosivity are actually blamed for their own demise or for their own participation in disasters. Number three, Memorial, is really centered on that Port Chicago explosion and its remembrance. And number four is about landscape. It's called Landscape. And it's a chapter that thinks very much about the ways in which dispersal of explosivity and landscape clues kind of conceal or embed this evidence and memory of explosivity, but then kind of normalize. Right. Its ongoingness in the landscape. And chapter five is about questions of like, it's called the Accident, and it's about questions of what produces the so called accident with explosives. How explosivity perpetuates this notion, a fallacious notion of, you know, kind of like unexpectedness of disaster that's actually quite mythologized. And lastly, the conclusion gets more into the methods of the book with walking practices and ways of following remains to try to kind of get the contours in the way of explosivity. So going back to your question, the third chapter. The third chapter forms a kind of nucleus in a way. I don't really say this in the book, but it's almost like a kind of backstory to it that that chapter, by being. By centering on the Port Chicago Memorial, it kind of like lets all the other planets revolve around it in a way. And the story of Port Chicago is. And it's a very, you know, I guess like a little bit of context for listeners is that it's. It's a really, really important case in civil rights. It's a precursor to the 1960s civil rights era. But the Port Chicago explosion exposes black stevedores who. Right. I mentioned Chinese workers earlier and in a way, African Americans during World War II come to fill similar roles as the Chinese in the earlier part of the century. They are tasked with the most dangerous loading work. They are working under the conditions of what a lot of times Americans call Jim Crow. Jim Crow. We can get into more about this kind of use of that term. I think a lot of times for people outside the U.S. it's a very confusing. Actually, I know for a fact, even speaking with scholars and editors in the uk, a lot of times it's very much. Yeah, it's a term that a lot of times people don't realize that it's named after a minstrel character in US History. But anyway, So that explosion exposes black workers to this catastrophe. Over 200 of them perish in the explosion. And then survivors of the explosion stage a wildcat strike against the Navy. And they were striking against their very unfair and unjust working conditions at this naval magazine in the northern part of the Bay Area. But I argue in the book that they were also really resisting. They were resisting segregation. They were resisting and fighting back against much larger forms of oppression than simply the sort of limited kind of grievances about the work in the segregated magazines, ammunition magazines in the San Francisco Bay area. And so this disaster kind of exposed the unequal treatment of black service people in the Navy at the time. And it was followed by the strike. I mentioned the strike, to make a long story short for people that maybe don't know about the case, was then. This was then followed by a military tribunal where they were. Where 50 of the strikers were tried for mutiny. And those charges of mutiny were very much trumped up charges. It was an incredibly. It was staged. It was a trial really staged for trying to garner a kind of media and public sympathy for the Navy and for its punitive practices. But it also, it actually led to a lot of backlash against the Navy and then. And it brought about Harry Truman's order to integrate the armed forces. And so even though a lot of times people will not know, when I talk to people, you know, a lot of times, and especially outside of California and even outside of the Bay Area, the Port Chicago case will be very unknown. But it was very important in the story of civil rights. Right. With the integration of the armed forces. And these struggles then also kind of wrote a precursor for the Freedom Riders movement and for many struggles that came later in the 1960s. So again, it's. It's this incredibly transcendental case, and yet one that is oftentimes quite forgotten and written over. Yeah.
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B
And I think that idea of kind of the fact it's forgotten is even more interesting when we get to the part of the book where you talk about the fact that there is a memorial, there is an official memorial, because for some of these reasons you've mentioned in terms of kind of building to the much more famous civil rights movement later. And. But maybe tell us some of your perspective. You talk a lot about the memorial and kind of. There is one, but. Right. What's significant about what's there and what's not?
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A
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for that question. Yeah. One of the characteristics of the book explosivity Right. One way in which I think of this book is that it is, in a sense, a manifesto against memorials. And I laugh at that a little bit because I think that it might help people also understand that my background comes from architecture and design, and I got to practice as an architect for a few years before I went back to pursue a scholarship and academic career. And, you know, one of the. I would. I would argue that one of the sort of defining qualities of explosivity, as this racialized exposure to volatility and combustion is also this kind of characteristic that explosions from the past are oftentimes unmarked and marked. Right. As you noted, there sometimes are monuments and memorials, and many other times there are not. And I'm. I'm not making an argument in the book for these kind of gestures that everything should be labeled or everything should have a landmark or should have a plaque, or should have a memorial and monument. In fact, the kinds of the. The kind of memory making and memory work that I argue for in this book is one that's a lot more mobilized. It's one that has to do more with the way in which stories and memories circulate, oftentimes on foot, oftentimes through the kind of traverse in and around sites of memory, rather than in these kind of choreographed ways in which architecture tells us a certain way in which we should look, a certain way in which we should remember, a certain way in which we should kind of notice something. And so the Port Chicago Memorial is really, really fascinating, and it's very perplexing. And I struggled with it for a very long time, actually, because it is very much controlled and it tells a specific kind of story about disaster, and yet also one that is very restricted and that's very kind of censored, actually. And so it was also kind of thinking about the contradictions of this memorial that I started to realize that in a way, the memorial becomes like a kind of counter reading of the memorial, a kind of counter narrative of the site also can almost dismantle its own militarism and its own forms of perpetuating imperial and racial domination. That wouldn't be the intention of the National Park Service. That wouldn't be the intention of the architects or designers, let's say. But I would counter that there are these kind of counter readings that are possible. These kinds of grammars of place can be challenged and can be read in a site like this. So to really kind of give people a very. A very kind of quick introduction and summary to this. Right. This memorial is Part of the national parks. It's a full unit of the National Park Service and for listeners, the National Park Service in the United States. Sometimes people think of the Grand Canyon, or people might think of places like, even, like the Golden Gate National Recreation Area here in California. But some of the units of the National Park Service are actually relatively small. Or people might think of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, for instance, which is also another full unit of the national parks. So there's all kinds of scales of sites in the National Park Services own, let's call it a portfolio in a sense of memory sites or places of memory. But the Port Chicago Memorial has a very unique peculiarity to it. It is within an active military base. So after the Port Chicago explosion in 1944, that continued to be a naval weapons station of the navies. In the present day, it no longer belongs to the Navy, it belongs to another branch of the US Armed Forces. Now it belongs to the Army. And they use it to ship small munitions to all across the Pacific, right, To, to their wars and to their bases. You know, that, that they reach aboard ships all, all around the Pacific, the Pacific Ocean, going to places like the Philippines or Guam or Hawaii, et cetera. And so it is an active military base. And so it is part of ongoing wars. It's part of, it's still an active part of, you know, the US's secret operations abroad. It's even, it's sometimes it's, it's temporary bases. It's, yeah, the whole, the whole array of carrying out, carrying out war for the United States of America. And so arriving at this base is very challenging. Right? It takes actually advanced preparation. One has to submit ID documents to go to a purportedly public site. The sheriffs run, the county sheriffs run a security check for the army. And so they, so they take one's license data. And so, as some listeners might also intuit, that in a country where there are millions of undocumented folks, for example, that already creates a new kind of segregation condition. Who can go and gain the lessons of civil rights? Who can go to this national park and actually think about this explosion and the subsequent strike and case against black stevedores loading weapons and going on strike. And that condition to me was very, that was something I had to really think through. And I talk about this in the book's preface a little bit more. Right. That, that prohibition and that peculiar condition of a national park that's fully ensconced within an active military base was very thought provoking, but also something that I struggled A lot to kind of think about how does this get even challenged? Like how. How to think through what this represents. Right. And you know, lastly, I'll say too, without, you know, I want to turn it over back to you to. For more questions. But the memorial also has very specific ways in which it draws a viewer. It draws or draws a person through the site to observe like the ruins of the pier or to in honest, looking down a certain angle, just see like a piece of shrapnel from one of the ships that exploded in 1944. And then it kind of moves a person through to see these granite plaques with all the names of everybody who died in that explosion. And then there's also like different information panels that give a. That argue that this explosion had this kind of transcendental quality for civil rights and for integration. But no place on the memorial says anything about the subsequent strike. Right. That actually sailors like Joe Small, Jack Crittenden, many more went on strike, bravely went on strike against the Navy afterwards. And the entire strike is excised from the memorial. And arguably the whole memorial owes its existence and its role as a site of civil rights memory to what black sailors did. But they're only presented as names of the deceased in the explosion. And so that has. That produces a kind of eschaton or a kind of end of history, an end of that story, even though survivors had to continue to contest this trial until they died. And in fact, it was only recently that the Secretary of the Navy overturned the mutiny convictions and none of them lived to see that day.
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B
Yeah, that's definitely a very interesting kind of way in which some of it is memorialized. And it's a very particular way of talking about the history. But as you mentioned earlier, your solution is not necessarily kind of make a better memorial. Right. You talk about in the book maybe some different ways of approaching these questions of memory and legacy. So can we talk about what you think we maybe should be doing instead?
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A
Yeah, I think that's. Yeah. You know, one of the things that. So maybe another sort of dimension and maybe a bit of a backstory to the book to talk about is that many years ago, going Back to about 2010, I co founded a little artist group called D Millet. D Millet is a strange little word. It's kind of a hashtag, if you will, that shortens the phrase decoding military landscapes. I co founded this group with Brian Fanoki and Nick Sowers. And the reason why we started the group, actually, at the time there was a call for Panels, as some academics. This might sound familiar to academics. You get a call for panels or papers for a conference. So we went to the University of California at Berkeley to this conference in 2010 that was called the Just Metropolis Conference. And we were asking questions at the time about how can communities affected by militarization, military bases, the legacies of substances like explosive substances, for example, toxic materials at these sites, how could communities share in a kind of archive of these conditions that are so tied to militarization? We were also very much interested in the ways in which militarization also encodes itself into urban sites, into sometimes anonymous buildings, like, for example, places like data centers or places where telecommunications circulate through or our data hubs. But there's also, like. As we were found. As we were finding. As we were finding out at the time, there were TSA taps of telecommunications where the national security state was funneling all of these communications through to try to identify suspects or suspicious people and whatnot. So anyway, the group was very much interested at the time in this kind of, first of all, this kind of archiving, right, and thinking through the way to archive what are sometimes very difficult to archive, conditions of geography of space. But we sort of start to gradually move more into practices of almost these kind of like detours, right? What I call detours, which are almost the counter to a tour, a kind of dictating a walking tour of sites that must be encountered and using walking practices as this way of almost, like I said, decoding these sites and problematizing the presence of power or authority, oftentimes in somewhat invisible or invisibilized ways in our midst. And so it was a little bit like these practices of roaming through sites, of moving through sites that also kind of like, started to make me question very much the solidity, the sort of. The. The. The ways in which memorials dictate, like I said before, sort of like certain ways of viewing or specific angles of viewing and given memories that must be taken away from a site. So the book, if you. If there's something that it kind of prescribes, and I don't love that word, but in a way, what it prescribes is this method of following what remains. It's a. There's a. There's a term from political science called via politics, people might know, like bio politics, as in the. The Foucault. The. The Michel Foucault term, biopolitics, Right? But. But political scientists. And I have to give credit to Desiree Valadares for cueing me into this term have been talking about a via, like via of the root, the via of going from place to place via politics. And so remains travel like these could be the remains of the deceased, but it could also be remains of fragments of memory. It could be ruins, it could be debris, it could be particulate. It's expensive explosions and atmospheres that move with air currents or with water currents. It is the. It could, you know, narratives, travel oral histories, travel secrets, travel with say, like the strikers that survived the Port Chicago explosion. And following what remains is more of a mobility, right. It's a question of movement and mobility, of trying to kind of think with one's own movement about the politics that produce site or produce the urban region as a place that encodes or hides this history of explosivity. So if there's a kind of alternative that the book proposes to monuments and memorials is this kind of activation. Right. I don't mean to be too, you know, prescriptive about it in the sense that I don't mean a kind of. Only an able bodied kind of researcher that can walk from place to place should be able to access these memories and these politics. I try to think of a kind of really a disability politics around movement that includes all ways of all. All ways of moving through space, be it through assisted means or be it through whether one can walk on their own legs. But I'm trying to also think with the actions of, for example, the Ohlone indigenous people in the San Francisco Bay area have been carrying out these. Have carried out refinery walks, for example. So they have carried out these long, long militant walks from toxic site to toxic site to in a sense reveal, right, the connections and the geographies of these infrastructures, also infrastructures of explosivity, actually. These refineries that spew their emissions and toxins, but also from time to time actually also blow up. And in these supposedly unexpected accidents like the Chevron refinery here in the San Francisco Bay area and in the city of Richmond. So whether it's like strikes or whether it's marches that strikers or unionists take part of, it's oftentimes through a walking practice that people have made memory. And so I try to kind of counter the stayed and locked memorial with these kinds of mobilities, if you will.
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B
I think that's really interesting to think about kind of ways in which we think and perhaps rethink about what we remember and what we pay attention to as well, especially space in ways that may not be that visually obvious, but that's something you Talk about in the book as well, not just in terms of space, but also in terms of language. And you kind of briefly mentioned. Hinted at it a moment ago, and I kind of want to pull that out a bit more.
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A
Oh, yeah, please do. Huh.
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B
Which is. What do we call accidents? When is something called an accident? Who decides what is called an accident? Because you could just think of it as. Well, isn't everything that explodes an explosion? Which is true, but some get called accidents. Which ones? Why?
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A
Yeah, so, I mean, a lot of them do, right. The. The. The accident is a very political term and, and it's very frequent, frequently applied to explosions. In fact, the only. I guess the only instances in which I can think of explosions, you know, not being an explanation accident is specifically where they are used in warfare. Right. Where they're used in. I mean, there's also explosions. One of the things that. To back up a little bit. Yeah. There's explosions for infrastructure development or for reasons of landscape formation or earth shaping. Right. And that's a very important part of the book that I. I didn't mention earlier, but I guess I think this is maybe like an important, important kind of background to this question. The San Francisco Bay area, you know, there's a ton I could say about. It's like its imprecations with explosivity and like the ways in which explosive substances have been used. But maybe one of my most. I think one of my favorite stories, favorite in the sense just of its, of its revealingness. Right. Of its tellingness, is that San Francisco used to have. And I. When I say used to have, I mean, before the 1860s, 1870s, it had a lot of rocky shoals. It had a number of rocky outcroppings within the bay, within the waters of the bay. So for people that are not so familiar with this region, the city of San Francisco is on a peninsula. And people might be kind of familiar, listeners from around the world might be familiar with. Yeah, there's like famous photographs. We see maybe like photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge, and that's the mouth of the bay. But so, yeah, people might kind of like know this bridge, this famous bridge with its facing the Pacific with its famous, like, you know, golden sunsets and the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean. But within that, to the. To the east of the peninsula, right to the east of the peninsula of San Francisco, this vast body of water, it's rung by cities like Richmond, Oakland, Berkeley. San Jose is one of California's largest cities by population is at the south, kind of corner of the bay that's sort of the. Well, in a way a part of the famous Silicon Valley of technology fame and ideological fame and billionaire fame today or infamy, let's say. And so for navigation reasons. Right. People might be kind of familiar that as part of extracting wealth and riches from this region and taking and moving gold and weapons out of this place and explosives, shipping is and was and is very important, crucial, essential, one could say. Right. And for ships to move in and out of that mouth of the bay through the Golden Gate, they had to really kind of weave through some very treacherous shoals. So what was the solution to these shoals? In short, nitroglycerin based dynamite essentially was what the Army Corps of Engineers prescribed to get rid of this problem of the shoals. Right. Of removing the shoals like as if they were a kind of. A kind of embarrassing wart. But this created a kind of socio ecological problem because navigate when once navigators couldn't really, you know, they couldn't like sort of line up anymore with the. There were very large trees in the Oakland hills that were used by navigators to kind of navigate through first. Before, even before the explosions, the forest gets cleared. The oak trees, the famous oak trees get used to build the city and ships. And once that kind of forest is gone, the explosive becomes a kind of part of this ecology of removing the shoals so that ships could come in and navigate through. But the problem is too that once you start blowing things up, you also have to kind of continually keep blowing things up, even up to the present day, to continue to make more room, more space for larger and larger hold ships. And so we keep deepening the channel ways. And even though this people might think of again these kind of famous postcard views of the San Francisco Bay area as if it were this divinely created nature that provides these kind of natural resources, it's actually made with explosives. It's very much. Even though like the evidence or like the visuality of those explosions is underwater now in a sense, and it's hardly evident. Right. And the shoals are mostly gone with some exceptions. But I mention all of that because you were asking about the kind of purposefulness of explosions. And so, yes, where explosives get used for infrastructure or mining or warfare, those might be the only context in which explosions are sort of desirable to their makers or to the war makers or nation states and as part of large development projects and so on and so forth. And any other instance in which stored munitions go off or any other instances in which, like a television show shooting with explosives, like mythbusters does in the San Francisco Bay Area, or did when the show was being produced, whenever anything goes out of hand or goes not exactly according to plan, it becomes labeled. It becomes thought of as an accident. And you asked, like, specifically who calls it that? Well, that can be the police. That can be, you know, the bomb squad. That can be. That can be the show, a show's producers, for example, it could be an explosives manufacturer and the kind of, like, responsibility for these explosions. And right there, the veracity of the explanation of an accident is oftentimes kind of tested out in court. And so a lot of times, and I work with a lot of court documents and think through a lot of these kind of like these linguistic. These linguistic constructions through the law, or who contests, right, the veracity of narratives of unpredictability, right. Of the explosion. And so maybe one of my favorite documents in the book is one in which archaeologists working in Oakland, California, working in the vicinity of what was the Western fuse explosion of 1898, they file a report. So these are archaeologists that are working for one of the state campuses of California State University, and they were tasked with finding archaeological resources as part of the construction of a freeway. And freeways are really important in my story, too, because they're also infrastructures of explosivity. They are used to move explosive substances. We have combustion engines, and we have a number of volatile substances moving over and across these. And we also live in a region that is seismically unstable. Like, in a way also, earthquakes and seismicity is evidence of a kind of larger universal force of explosivity. And archaeologists here were tasked with this sort of job, tasked with this obligation of trying to identify what is under the freeway in order to strengthen the freeway, in order to build it up after, actually, after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that was really devastating in the Bay Area anyway, when they were doing research about the neighborhoods that existed in this vicinity of the freeway. This freeway is the 80 and 880 freeways, right? These are very kind of important kind
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of
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connector that goes all through, runs kind of north, south through the Bay Area. And a portion of it carries the name of Chester Nimitz, who was the admiral of the Pacific Fleet. So it has also these connections to military history and militarism. Right? And, you know, and I think that these place. Place naming is also very telling of overriding these stories. But to go back to the question, right, like this, these archaeologists searching for evidence of, like, past Clues of the neighborhoods. There they find reference to a quote unquote, to a quote unquote explosion. Sorry, they put explosives explosion in quotation marks in their archaeological report because they almost couldn't believe that there had been this explosion at the Western Fuse manufacturer. That was that. Nowadays if one, if you visit that site now, you see this like large warehouse and it's one of these places that rents out like warehouse space to customers that just you know, don't have room in their garage or don't have like an extra room in their house. And so it has like self storage space for rent. But underneath that building is, you know, one can suppose what remains of this 1898 explosion that I, I, I, I talk about throughout this, these collages moments in the book. And when they, when they put the explosion in quotation marks, the archaeologists put explosion in quotation marks in their report. They talk about an amazing story what was to them an amazing story about this accidental, purportedly accidental explosion at western fuse in 1898. But, but actually it turns out that this, this explosion as they, as they sort of tell the story in the report, there are very, there are various conflicting reports about what set off, right. What set off the explosion. And this really interested me in kind of unpacking, right. Like so in 1898, when Western fuse goes off, it takes with it the lives of five police officers. There was a standoff at the factory with one of the Chinese workers. And this had very, this had very much a racialized dimension to it of blaming the Chinese worker of setting off these explosives to kill these police officers that had quartered him in this factory. Right. But the larger kind of story and the court records reveal that Western Fuse had stored dynamite, black powder, a number of explosive substances without like unlocked in, in this site. Right. And so, and so people, people at the time, witnesses described how the police maybe barged into, into the, the hideout and the, in the explosive magazine. And some people claimed that. One of the witnesses claimed that the police knocked over like a plank of wood and set off the explosion themselves accidentally. One presupposes. There's no, there's no final narrative. And I don't seek out like my role as a researcher is not to find like the kind of capital T truth to the story. I'm more interested in the way in which suspicion and various kinds of counter narratives weave their way through right. This whole narrative about the explosion. But what I'm really fascinated by is the fact that out of all of this the corporate manufacturer kind of skates off without responsibility, even though they get found repeatedly in court to have stored explosive materials unsafely under no guard, no lock on the door. And so again, like, the kind of, the constructiveness of the accident is something that, especially in chapter five of the book, is something that I deal with and think through all of these dimensions of kind of what are the conditions that repeatedly give rise to the whole setup for an explosion to happen. Right. Call it accidental or not. And last thing I'll say to, to that question and we can talk about, you know, whatever else you'd like. But the, yeah, the amazement of the archaeologists also really struck me as telling and really captivated me. And I don't mean to, I don't mean to kind of question or make fun of their discipline. You know what, really, what I'm more interested in is that even though San Francisco, the San Francisco Bay area was this hub of explosives manufacturing and was just like, I mean, at every single mile there was some kind of chemical maker. And you know, from, from the, roughly from the third, the fourth, the fourth quarter of the 19th century, well into well past World War I, the San Francisco Bay Area being this hub of explosives manufacturing, like it is part of the archeological fabric of the region, particularly the eastern part of the bay. So I was really kind of, I was really captivated by how for archaeologists, this held a surprise. Right. Because there was this contradiction of this being, this having been such an important explosive manufacturing region. How could they express amazement in their words and express. Right. And put the explosion in quotation marks as something that they sort of almost doubted, you know, how it had happened here. They, they kind of doubted the narratives of it. And so I take their surprise very seriously, right. As evidence of the ways in which landscapes oftentimes overwrite this history and conceal it again and again.
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I think there's so much there to think about with word choice, with places, with spaces, with what is seen, with what isn't seen.
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Yeah. Oh, and can I interrupt really quick for one other thing to. Yeah, I mean, the other thing that also, I mean, archaeology, after all, is a discipline that again, like going back to the word explosivity, right. That's tied to volcanology. So archaeologists as a, broadly, as a discipline, right. Study the aftermath of explosions, especially the so called natural explosions. Right. So we think of Pompeii, for example. Volcanic explosions are very much known to archaeology and are central historically to the discipline of archeology. But the, but why is it that, let's say artificial explosions or in other words, industrially Produced explosive materials are still a kind of. Are still in this kind of realm of dread, are in a kind of uncanny realm that is unthinkable to our geographic and landscape disciplines. Yeah.
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So, I mean, I think we could probably talk about this for quite a lot longer, but you have many other things to be doing. So I think this is a good place to draw our discussion to a close with the final question just of what you might be working on now that this book is. Is out in the world. Anything you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?
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I'm really excited about a couple of projects that I'm working on really briefly. One of them is one that there's one I call Explosive Natures. And it kind of draws on the research from this first book. But as I was researching this book, I started to really kind of get really curious and interested in all of the logistics and supply chains for the manufacturing of dynamite. Dynamite, as a manufactured explosive has a number of ingredients that include the diatomaceous clay with which explosive manufacturers pack the explosive material, for example. And this is oftentimes, like, mined from very specific, unique sites of clay production or of, like, earth. Right. But sometimes has been replaced by other kind of nutmeals or other powders from around the Pacific. And so like, that includes harvesting, like the palm nut in the. The archipelagos of, you know, the Micronesian Archipelago in the Pacific and like the Carolinian Islands. And so I've been really interested in kind of trying to follow all of the sort of supply chains of dynamite, even thinking all the way to sort of the origins of these. Of these kind of diatomaceous clays, even going down to, like, the microscopic level of the diatom that fossilizes to become this explosive material that then devastates and consumes the earth itself. And then the other project that I'm working on, and maybe I'm going to actually, perhaps, I guess write first, is one that I call. I'm provisionally calling Echoes of Clutter. It's a project in sort of roughly something I'm calling clutter Studies. And it's a project that also kind of has to do with remnants and remains of wars. And so it ties back to explosions and what they leave behind. But I'm thinking more broadly about the kind of collection and assembly of what remains from wars and what is its visibility or disappearance from landscapes. But more broadly, it's a project about thinking. Thinking about clutter as something that the military has problematized and has at times tried to solve or tried to cut through but other times also weaponizes and uses as a way to mark sovereignty or mark sovereign territory. So I guess that's all I'll say about him for now, but it's a very kind of cluttered method of thinking that I want to also sort of exploit. I guess I would I would say it really helps me make disparate connections between places that are oftentimes not understood as related to each other, and yet I would say they are.
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In many ways, that's similar to I think what the book we've been discussing is doing is making connections between things that may not seem obvious, but for people who want more of what we've been talking about, the book is titled following what Remains, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2025. Javier, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Thanks, Miranda. Yeah, thanks so much. It's a pleasure.
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it with a friend and rate us
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