Alison Hirsch, associate professor at USC and the Shapiro Center for American History and Culture Fellow, discusses the history and future of Tulare Lake, which reemerged after multiple atmospheric rivers hit California in March 2023.
The story of Tulare Lake is a cultural and environmental history of violence and vast inequality created by 150 years of capitalist agriculture, as well as a story of resistance that has set the foundation for liberated futures.
As a historian and landscape designer, Hirsch will present her work in Allensworth—the town founded, financed, and governed by Black Americans in 1908—as a lens through which to understand the larger landscape and how to support radical change at a pressing moment.
Denny’s pocket map of Kings County, California, showing wagon roads, railroads, trails, etc., compiled from latest official and private data. Edward Denny & Co., 1912, 63 x 60 cm. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
About the Speaker
Alison B. Hirsch is a landscape historian and designer. She is associate professor in the USC School of Architecture and director/founder of the Landscape Justice Initiative. Dr. Hirsch was the 2017–2018 Prince Charitable Trusts/Rolland Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and directed the Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program at USC from 2019 to 2023.
Author of books and publications primarily on urban landscapes and spatial politics, Hirsch’s fellowship year at the Huntington Library will be focused on a forthcoming book, titled The Other California: Land, Labor, and Liberated Futures along Phantom Shores, that builds on five years of action research in design, planning, and community history work in the Tulare Lake Basin, the lower third of the Great Central Valley.
After 14 atmospheric rivers hit California in March 2023 as another expression of climate whiplash, Tulare Lake reemerged, provoking new imaginaries for the future of its existence and the existence of those who call the lake home. Materially and culturally shaped by the geographic condition of this endorheic basin and its disappeared lake that haunts the land by its periodic reemergence, this narrative is a cultural and environmental history of violence and vast inequality created by 150 years of capitalist agriculture, as well as a story of resistance and how land-based practices of insurgent cultural expression have set the foundation for liberated futures.
As a landscape historian and landscape designer, Hirsch will tell this story as a record of human relations to the uniqueness of this physical landscape and a guide on how to support radical change at a pressing moment, as well as provide broader visibility to processes of land loss, structural violence, critical forms of land-based cultural resistance, and methods of repair that have created conditions for the implementation of more just futures.