Book Launch - Exhumations: Inside the Body of a Petrostate by Joanne Leow

About the book:

"What unknowable chemical? How slow was this damage, this violence? . . . How might any of us stay uncontaminated by all that was built around us?"

Exhumations: In the Body of a Petrostate oscillates between an unflinching critique of the author’s birth island, Singapore, and a memoir of grief and illness. Seeing our porous bodies as part of a contaminated and compromised system based on extraction, violence, and political repression, the book asks what must be made visible in our current moment. Drawing on her experience as a journalist for state-controlled media, and her current work as a scholar, Leow explores histories of activism, censorship, weapons manufacturing, terraforming, and petroleum refining. In doing so, she traces the networks of power that link Singapore with Canada, Palestine, Israel, England and beyond. Drawing on art, photography, film, and literature, she considers how they exhume truths that cannot otherwise be told.

This launch is supported by Simon Fraser University’s Department of English and the David See-chai Lam Centre, and Alchemy/Knopf.

Professor Leow will be joined by UBC Professors Phanuel Antwi and John Paul (JP) Catungal. (Photo Credits: for Joanne Leow: sweetmoon photography; for Phanuel Antwi: Rachel Topham Photography)

Speaker Bios:

Joanne Leow grew up in Singapore and now lives on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair of Transnational and Decolonial Digital Humanities at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of the academic monograph Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise (Liverpool University Press, 2024) and the poetry collection Seas Move Away (Turnstone Press, 2022). Her creative work and research lie at the intersections of the environmental humanities, transnational and diasporic cultural production, global Asia studies, autotheory, and decoloniality.

JP Catungal (he/him) is Assistant Professor in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, and Co-Director of the Centre for Asian Canadian Research and Engagement at the University of British Columbia. A queer, first generation, Filipinx Canadian scholar , JP’s research, teaching and public facing works are in conversation with critical human geography and feminist and queer of colour theories and methods. He is particularly interested in how migrant, racialized and LGBTQ+ communities address their experiences of marginalization in the fields of sexual health, education and social services. He has served as co-edit of the book Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility as well as special journal issues for BC Studies; ACME: International Journal of Critical Geographies; TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies; and Alon: Journal for Filipino American and Diasporic Studies. He received the Killam Teaching Prize at UBC.

Phanuel Antwi is an artist, an organizer, a curator, and an associate professor of English concerned with race, poetics, movements, intimacy, and struggle. He works with text, dance, film, and photography to intervene in artistic, academic, and public spaces. Dr. Antwi holds a Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. His recent book, On Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace, is from Pluto Press. He’s currently finishing a manuscript called “Currencies of Blackness: Faithfulness, Cheerfulness and Politeness in Settler Writing.”

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