The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, but So Is Care

Abstract

Every year they recede: the glaciers that once carved the mountains of the French Alps now stand as a prime exhibit of global warming. I contemplate the shrinking patch of snow and ice as another danger zone, an inanimate but living reminder of the age of destruction, what the earth would call our energy-consuming AI resource-grabbing economy where the rich get more and most of us make do, inhaling the toxic fumes of so-called progress. But some of us long have lived in the food deserts and notorious landscapes of shelter-less(er) spaces, banished to such places from lack of resources, magnified by discrimination, racism, anti-Blackness—name your poison of the body and soul.

I look at the distant mountain while reading George Lipsitz’s The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, and when the sun goes down I am absorbed with M. E. O’Brien and Eman Ahdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, a utopian fiction of sorts explicated through constructed interviews with representative participants of revolutionary change that came from the collapse of the global capitalistic order. I had just dipped into Shirin M. Rai’s Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring, a critique of the all-too-rosy portrait of care in some feminist literature from the perspective of the women migrants and those left behind who do the reproductive labor for more prosperous households, using up their vitality in the process of ensuring that others can go out and labor, attend school, or engage in the myriad activities that confirm higher status. Putting Lipsitz in conversation with these feminist, queer, decolonial, and intersectional works illuminates his achievement and reminds us how much further we have to go in order to move from critique to revolution.