Anti-Colonial Environmental Studies reading group (ACES)
Image by Maya Gauvin
A space for discussion of explicitly anti-colonial texts relating to the environmental humanities. Our group includes graduate students, post-docs, professors, and non-academics interested in how to understand the intersections and convergences of different planetary crises (ecological, race and anti-blackness, inequity, colonialism, capitalism), and how to imagine worlds otherwise. We meet on a monthly basis to talk about scholarly, speculative, and poetic works to help us think through these questions collectively. Together, we talk, think, and learn about questions like:
What, when and where is the “Anthropocene”? How do “we”—as scholars and individuals interested in issues of environmental justice— situate ourselves in relation to this universalizing term?
How are people in different situated communities around the world envisioning and creating alternative futures? How do they envision alternative futures whilst grappling with and resisting the oppressive and discriminatory structures of the past and present?
How does speculative storytelling serve as a tool for making new worlds in the present? How do Afrofuturisms, African futurisms, Indigenous futurisms, and Desi futurisms help us imagine how to live within and beyond the so-called apocalypse? What alternatives visions of time, space, being, and community do these speculative projects put forth?
How does grappling with situated histories and presents help us understand the world differently? For instance, how does thinking with colonial-inflected histories of botanical gardens and plantations help us understand the combined crises of carcerality, dispossession, and ecological crisis differently?
If you are interested in joining this reading group, please reach out to Hannah Tollefson (hannah.tollefson@mail.mcgill.ca) and Ayesha Vemuri (ayesha.vemuri@mail.mcgill.ca).
What we’ve read:
Davis, Heather, and Zoe Todd. “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16, no. 4 (2017): 761–80.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222.
“Make Rojava Green Again” by the Internationalist Commune of Rojava.
Badami, Nandita. 2018. "Solarpunking Speculative Futures." Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, December 18.
Whyte, Kyle P. “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 1–2 (March 1, 2018): 224–42.
Boetzkes, Amanda. 2017. “Solar.” In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, edited by Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger. New York: Fordham University Press. 314–17.
Skawennati, “She Falls for Ages,” Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace/Obx Labs, 2017
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2017. “Akiden Boreal,” from This Accident of Being Lost. Astoria. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press.
Vandana Singh. 2014. “The Woman Who Thought she was a Planet,” from The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories. New Delhi: Zubaan Books.
Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Forerunners. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Octavia Butler. 2005. “Bloodchild,” from Bloodchild and other stories (2nd ed.). New York: Seven Stories Press.
Octavia Butler. 2019. The Parable of the Sower (Reprint edition). New York: Grand Central Publishing.
Ytasha Womack. 2013. Introduction and Chapter 1 from Afrofuturism : The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha's “Children Who Fly” from Octavia’s Brood: p. 259-254.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs's “Evidence” from Octavia's Brood, p. 33-42
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Never Silenced” on Weapon of Choice (podcast). 2018.
Mitchell, Audra, and Aadita Chaudhury. “Worlding beyond ‘the’ ‘End’ of ‘the World’: White Apocalyptic Visions and BIPOC Futurisms.” International Relations 34, no. 3 (September 1, 2020): 309–32.
New York Botanical Garden: "First Nations: Ethical Landscapes, Sacred Plants," with excellent speakers including Zoe Todd, Kyle Whyte, Joe Baker, Jannelle Marie Baker, and Linda Black Elk.
Jill Didur, “‘Gardenworthy’: Rerouting Colonial Botany in Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya.” Public: Art, Culture, Ideas 41 (2010): 172-185.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore. 2007. “Crimes, Cropland, and Capitalism,” from Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.