Javier Arbona-Homar

After explosivity, what remains?
Javier Arbona-Homar will draw from his new book, Explosivity: Following What Remains, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025, as well as present his new research, to critically examine deeply held assumptions about appearance and disappearance in landscapes. More than an academic book, Explosivity is “a vital guide to confronting the latent violence embedded in our environments,” according to artist and geographer Trevor Paglen. It’s a call for slowing down, sensing, and remembering what remains of historical explosions. Explosivity is grounded and written in the unceded Ohlone lands of the so-called San Francisco Bay Area. As a city of explosivity, this urban region is shaped by the industrialization of geophysical combustion fixed into place. Based on five major explosions in the Bay Area between 1866 and 2011, this experimental and creative book proposes explosivity as a novel lens to study the everyday racialized exposure to volatile chemicals. But how to sense explosivity? Created with eclectically mixed field methods—from oral histories to landscape traverses, and more—the text is collagist, weaving stories of the five main explosions throughout, and augmented with vignettes from many more explosive moments in Bay Area history. Arbona-Homar reveals a persistent risk of blowing up, centering the lives of Chinese migrant explosives workers in the nineteenth century, followed by Black munition loaders in the twentieth century World War II “home front.” Over time, idyllic urban parks, transport infrastructures, and security assemblages successively develop on top of the same geographies of storing, moving, and testing explosive substances. The placement and sensorial suppression of explosivity locks-in risk, and entangles the lives of environmentalists, anti-war protestors, and even residents exposed to neighboring media productions with explosive stunts on police ranges. Arbona-Homar applies a set of theoretical approaches from feminist technoscience, critical military studies, radical geographies, and political ecology, to spend time with the mobilized remains of explosions and their toxic byproducts, bringing attention to the logistical tendrils of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. The outcome recognizes the radical politics of interrupting the logistics of explosivity, in part, by following what remains. Explosivity is a call for radical memory, detached from staid landmarks, fixed memorials, and historical preservation. Arbona-Homar will also gesture toward new research on what remains of the United States’ colonial wars of 1898. Can urban visibility bring decolonization and freedom? Could memory landscapes forensically unearth past injustice?

Javier Arbona-Homar is a Puerto Rican geographer and an Associate Professor with a dual appointment in the departments of American Studies and Design at the University of California, Davis. He was previously a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in American Studies at Davis, a UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Residential Research Fellow on Civil Wars, and a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow at UC Berkeley. He received a PhD in geography from UC Berkeley (with training in oral history), a master’s in urbanism and architecture studies from MIT, and a professional undergraduate degree in architecture from Cornell University. Arbona-Homar focuses on the emerging field of explosivity studies (how, when, and where things do, or do not, blow up—and why). He researches the spatial politics of landscapes shaped by explosions—or the latent potential thereof—and the racial conditions of explosions. For over a decade, he has also collaborated with the Demilit collective on geofictions, soundscapes, and critical walking tours. His new research dives into topics such as: explosive atmospheres, the historical geography of dynamite logistics, the mobility of remains and memory from the so-called Spanish American War, and the theorization of transoceanic coloniality. He co-leads Critical Military, Security, and Policing Studies, a Davis Humanities Institute-funded working group that brings together graduate students, faculty, and community members to dissect myriad forms of violence and securitization. His writing and collective contributions have also appeared in the Harvard Design Magazine, Landscape Journal, Places Journal, and Volume, as well as in curated exhibitions and various edited collections.