Environmental (In)Justice in African Literatures & Popular Culture
Description
This seminar seeks to examine how African literatures, film, arts, and cultural practices address instances of ongoing environmental degradation, anthropogenic violence, and the lived effects of environmental in/justice in Africa; how they portray indigenous environmentalisms, survival tactics, mitigation efforts, or resilience measures; and how they contribute to the construction of a sustainable and inclusive environmental justice agenda in the global commons. Papers might consider, inter alia:
- The historical, geopolitical, and economic factors that contribute to the persistence of environmental injustice in African societies;
- The human effects of environmental degradation, climate change, and “slow violence,” including the effects of pollution, deforestation, mining, agrobusinesses, e-waste etc.;
- Social and psychological impacts of disasters, displacements, homelessness, injury, chronic illness etc. produced by extractive industries, agrobusinesses, or climate change
- Necropolitical regimes and the production of systemic environmental inequality;
- Economic and political conflicts over resource control or indigenous communities’ assertions of rights over land, water, or mineral resources;
- The role of “development” programs in exacerbating or ameliorating environmental degradation;
- Health impacts of environmental inequalities on humans and other animals;
- Innovative survival and resilience strategies adopted by particular communities;
- Social, political, or activist programs aimed at building and enhancing environmental justice; or
- Theorization of relevant key concepts such as extraction, toxicity, degradation, precarity, restitution, sustainability, environmentalism, or eco-poetics.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dr Paul Ugor is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo, Canada. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of Modern African Literatures and Cultures, Anglophone Postcolonial World Literatures, Cultural Studies, Environmental humanities, Global Black Studies, and New Media Cultures in the Global South.
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Suchetana Sarkar is a PhD candidate in the department of English at the University of South Carolina, where she also works as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, climate fiction, cultures of extraction, and global Anglophone literature.
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Delali Kumavie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Syracuse University. Her forthcoming book, Aerial Imaginaries: Aviation and Flight in Global Black Literature examines aviation technology, imaginaries flight across African and African Diasporic Literature.
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Supriya M. Nair is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She is the author of two monographs, Caliban's Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History and Pathologies of Paradise: Caribbean Detours. She is also co-editor of Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism and editor of Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature. She is working on a book project in postcolonial environmental humanities.
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Sandrine Uwase Ndahiro is a Rwandese-Irish early career researcher who holds an English PhD from the University of Limerick, Ireland. Sandrine’s research employs theoretical frameworks associated with post-colonial studies to read the environmental crisis unfolding in Africa using literature and art from an Africanist cultural perspective. Sandrine’s research interest also includes African and Black writing, specifically Black and Irish culture.
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Rebecca Saunders is Professor of Comparative Literature at Illinois State University, the author of books on Lamentation and Modernity, and the Concept of the Foreign, and of numerous articles on human rights, transitional justice, sustainability, and sound. She is currently working on a book on 21st century novels by African women entitled "African Women Rewrite War & Peace."
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Samuel Chinaza Ikueze (he/him) is a PhD student of English & Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. He is interested in African literature, decolonial studies, cultural studies, and environmental humanities. Ikueze’s research combines his knowledge of African literature and politics, Igbo Indigenous knowledge (of Southeastern Nigeria), cultural studies, and decoloniality. His PhD research explores the implications of artistic installations made with garbage by West African artists.
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Sule E Egya is a professor of African literature and environmental humanities
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Sheilla A. Nelson dreams, thinks, writes (as Aisha Nelson), and currently studies, teaches and lives in Normal, Illinois. Her creative and academic interests often explore the silences and intersections between literary and other art forms, song and symbol, oral traditions and other cultural artifacts—and the questions that these raise about meaning, identity, gender, reality. When she is not writing or minding the lives she signed up for, Sheilla reflects on her ancestry or slips into daydreams
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