“Where Ghosts Reside at the End of the World”: Choreographies of Steadfastness in the Persistence of Empire

In the 2020 screen-based performance Extraterritorial صوت, artists Dena Al-Adeeb, Sholeh Asgary, Leyya Mona Tawil, and Daiane Lopes da Silva develop a feminist refugee praxis through video, sound, and choreography to reclaim “post-apocalyptic landscapes … where ghosts reside at the end of the world.” Filmed along the San Francisco Bay shoreline, the work brings bodies, rocky terrain, synthetic material, and the spectral into relation with layered histories of displacement, settler colonialism, and (neo)colonial violence. Through an analysis of choreography, cinematic form, and material interaction, the essay develops “steadfastness” as an analytic for examining how performance cultivates practices of remaining within the ongoing coloniality of the postapocalypse. The analysis proceeds across three interrelated dimensions. First, it examines material persistence through the dancers’ sustained contact with shifting ground and Mylar emergency blankets, foregrounding how histories of extraction, Indigenous dispossession, and humanitarian governance endure through embodied and environmental relations. Second, it examines temporal duration, showing how delay and recurrence interrupt accelerative temporalities and cultivate an unfinished present by rendering slow violence discernible as an ongoing condition. Third, it turns to spectral persistence, where ancestral relations and colonial violence continue to inhabit bodies and landscapes while unsettling dominant regimes of visibility. Working within the incommensurable frictions between Indigenous sovereignty and SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) displacement, these dimensions establish steadfastness as a choreographic analytic that foregrounds the labor through which livability is sustained within the postapocalypse.