This seminar approaches anticolonialism as an episteme that can be situated within the axes of matter foundational to anticolonial movement (such as soil and salt); as a method of political organizing and collectivity; and as an international movement intrinsic to imagination of freedom and liberation. Taking environments as the heart of anticolonial imagination, this seminar asks: how does the traffic between matter, method and movement produce anticolonial imaginaries that enable a radical envisioning of the future? What forms of aesthetics and politics are enabled by environmentalisms of the anticolonial movements across South Asia, Latin America, Caribbean and Africa? 

This seminar is anchored around two primary intellectual commitments. The first is to identify the reasons that enabled the discourse around environmentalism to move from holding empires accountable for their exploitation of the environment to diverting the blame on impending doom of an unsustainable future because of climate emergency. How can revisiting the resistant ecologies of anticolonial movement provide a grammar of resistance for the climate movement of the present? What forms of anticolonial reading (Elam) and writing practices can be actively nurtured in the present to imagine alternatives to the current practices and modalities of the climate justice movement? 

The second goal is an explicit focus on tracing the small, everyday (Puri), ordinary and mundane forms of anticolonial politics that distilled around the environments alongside the insurgent mobilizations (Gopal). Whether it is understanding of the ordinary manifestations of environmentalism in the writings and work of anticolonial intellectuals (such as Gandhi’s focus on the seed in Hind Swaraj) or lesser legible forms of contributions , this seminar pays attention to radical and the ordinary simultaneously. This seminar is a call to be attentive to the feminist, anti-caste and indigenous anticolonialism environmentalisms and the legacies of these contributions.

This seminar intends to not only revisit the contribution by anticolonial writers, thinkers and intellectuals such as Fanon, Césaire, Trouillot, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Cabral, Angela Davis, Said, Du Bois, Luxembourg and many more, for whom environmentalism is at the core of empire’s domination but also think through the alternative epistemologies that their writings offers for the present. 

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

1. Genres of anticolonial environmentalism
2. Geographies of anticolonial environmentalism
3. Commodities and anticolonial environmentalism
4. Radicalism and ordinary in anticolonial environmentalism
5. Organizing and anticolonial environmentalism
6. Pedagogy and anticolonial environmentalism
7. Martyrdom and anticolonial environmentalism
8. Freedom and anticolonial environmentalism
9. Performance and anticolonial environmentalism
10. Labor and anticolonial environmentalism
11. Indigeneity and anticolonial environmentalism
12. Caste and anticolonial environmentalism