Living Embodiments of Place and Power: The Transformational Poetics and Politics of Alai’s The Song of King Gesar, the Three Sisters Mountain myth, and the avatars of New York City in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became.

This paper brings three narratives of sacred landscape and place-based personhood into conversation, exploring how the poetics and politics of imagination engage human and more-than-human powers of cultural memory and resistance. In Alai’s novel A Song for King Gesar, the events of the epic intersect with the present-day story of a young Tibetan man navigating a time of cultural erasure. In the myth of Three Sisters Mountain, the mountain’s female-gendered body enacts a multidimensional protective relationality with the masculine bodies of mountains in Eastern Tibet, as well as with Padmasambhava and Gesar. In N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, each borough of New York City takes embodied form as a more-than-human being tasked with defending the city from destruction. Evoking anthropologist James C. Scott’s ideas of the “hidden transcript,” this paper explores how speculative fiction and place-based chronicles of more-than-human relationships engage multiple registers of meaning-making and truth telling.