Blog

Organizing a summer reading group was part of our effort to collect our research network together before actually meeting for the sessions of the MLA 2021 convention, planning for which had initially introduced many of our members to each other. Since we are a group of scholars who work in different disciplines—literature, art history, legal studies, among others—the reading list we wanted to work with had to reflect our diverse interests and orientations to the ‘Postcolonial Anthropocene.’ We therefore collated a reading list after sourcing suggestions from different members and by grouping different texts according to important thematic clusters. The reading group also became a way of keeping abreast with members’ individual research and, quite serendipitously, became a form of support during the height of the pandemic and lockdown as we signed in from different locations.

We met for four sessions over July and August 2020, and read excerpts from work by a variety of thinkers including Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, Elizabeth DeLoughry, Amitav Ghosh, Timothy Morton, Anna Tsing, Alison Bashford, and Sarah W. Tracy. The pivotal questions we returned to over these meetings included thinking about the genealogy of the Anthropocene, especially in relation to the emergence and global expansion of capitalism and colonial enterprises. As our concern was to examine the relationship of the colonial, decolonial and postcolonial as temporal markers and ongoing processes, we frequently touched upon questions pertaining to how we could define ‘the Postcolonial Anthropocene’ and why ‘the post/colonial’ was an important category to highlight in discussions of the Anthropocene.

Given the high interest amongst our network members in literary representations of environmental issues and climate change, besides dedicating a session entirely to literary forms and mulling over their importance in staging or intervening productively in ecological crises, we also thought about what it is that fiction does or could do to arbitrate these questions in ways that are unique and distinct from other forms of writing and theory. This was also a question that was vigorously debated during our working group meetings during the MLA sessions. The reading group meetings helped establish a foundation of theory for members and clarified key questions we expect to take forward in exciting ways in future meetings of the network.