Dancing Stone: Texture, Gesture, and Non/Human Sociality

Dancing Stone: Texture, Gesture, and Non/Human Sociality seeks to reconceptualize the interface between human beings and lithic beings as a social encounter. This paper makes the following assertions: that the belief that rocks are inanimate is a myth as old as that of the Enlightenment human subject as scientific agent; that human beings and lithic beings are co-made across intervals of time and space; that there is an irreducible, though frictitious, relationship between the objectification of rocks and the dehumanization of minoritarian subjects; and that the production of lithic knowledge and the enactment of lithic desire are modes of imagining an otherwise futurity. These assertions are developed across the calling of indigenous stones artifacts from Wesleyan University's archive and the response to and interplay with stones in Laura Aguilar's photography and Ashima Shiraishi's practice of rock climbing.