Submerged Empire: Racial Grammars of Environmental Governance in Houston, 1900-1939

Abstract

How do histories of colonial and racial dispossession shape contemporary urban environmental injustices? Building on scholarship that examines the legacies and afterlives of empire; I theorize grammars of governance as an analytic to make sense of how shifting discursive paradigms, spatial arrangements, and political subjectivities reproduce inequalities through enduring colonial logics in specific contexts. To do so, I follow the symbolic, discursive, and material dimensions of drainage governance in the city of Houston during the early 20th century, primarily between 1900 and 1939. I show how political imaginaries and economic rationales shifted from being rooted in settlement and plantation agriculture to unevenly developing the city through decentralized drainage districts. After a disastrous flood in 1935, political and economic elites instituted a technocratic mode of governance which fractured environmental management between the city and the newly formed flood control agency. Across these different moments, I uncover how grammars of colonization, territorialization, and modernization shaped governance over time to produce uneven geographies of climate vulnerability.