Summer Reading Group 2020 and MLA working group papers 2021
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.
“Time and Tide: Planetary Temporalities in Crisis” Conference Panel, April 2024
Members of the Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network will be speaking at the conference “The Aesthetics of Geopower: Imagining Planetary Histories and Hegemonies” at the University of Amsterdam in April 2024.
The panel, which focuses on crisis time in the Postcolonial Anthropocene will examine a recurring problem in cultural work on the Anthropocene, which concerns the limits of existing representational strategies in conveying the severity of the planetary climate crisis (e.g., Chakrabarty, Johns-Putra, Bould). It will add to existing conceptualizations of this problem by combining a postcolonial perspective with the study of time and temporalities. In other words, the panel’s concern is not only the geographical scale of the hyperobject that is the Anthropocene (cf. Morton 2013), but the relation between past, present, and future that is also at stake in environmental collapse and the relationship between humans and planet. Writing about locations as diverse as India, Nigeria, and Europe, the speakers in this panel will think through what it means to inhabit the radically changing time that is our contemporary postcolonial moment.
The experience of time across these locales is out of joint and in crisis: as anthropogenic climate change announces the return of past emissions, the stability of the future is cast in doubt.
Whether it is sentient life only slowly catching up with planetary changes (in C. S. Bhagya’s paper), time becoming material in undersea cables (Siddharth Soni), or Europeans confronting the possibility of becoming climate migrants (Jesse van Amelsvoort), the panel will examine the ways in which aesthetic representations rush to catch up with changing planetary tides.
The panel is scheduled for 15:30 – 17:00 (Doelenzaal), at the UB Singel, University of Amsterdam, on 5 April 2024.
“Representations of The Climate Emergency in Literature and Culture: Guest Lecture, March 2026”
As part of their Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) programme, our member and convenor, C. S. Bhagya, delivered a guest lecture at the Education University of Hong Kong on representations of the climate emergency in literature and visual culture. Bringing together examples from climate fiction, speculative fiction, documentary film, and literary texts, the lecture considered not only how cultural forms represent ecological crisis, but also how they might complicate the very idea of a “climate emergency.”
The lecture began by examining climate fiction (cli-fi), which often imagines climate change through narratives of apocalypse, ecological collapse, and radically transformed futures. While such fiction can make the risks of climate change more imaginable than conventional forms of journalism, much influential cli-fi has emerged from developed-world perspectives. This raises questions about whose experiences of environmental crisis become representative of “the future,” particularly when climate change is already an everyday reality for many communities across the Global South and for Indigenous and historically marginalised populations.
C. S. Bhagya therefore turned to writers such as N. K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor, alongside the growing corpus of African, Afrodiasporic, Indigenous, and Aboriginal speculative fiction. These traditions expand the sociological imagination of speculative fiction, offering alternative ways of thinking about ecological crisis, survival, and futurity from the margins of modernity.
The lecture then considered documentary as a form capable of representing climate change through its slower, less spectacular temporalities. Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes (2022) provided an example of how environmental crisis can be represented as a continuous and uneven process rather than a singular catastrophic event. The film was read alongside Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence”—violence that unfolds gradually, accumulates over time, and remains unevenly distributed across communities, often without being immediately recognised as violence.
Drawing on Sarah Nuttall’s work on planetary literature, C. S. Bhagya also proposed a “sustained practice of rereading” earlier literary texts for their representations of the nonhuman world. A close reading of the river in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things illustrated how the environment might be approached not simply as setting or metaphor, but as an “agentive nonhuman form.”
Taken together, these examples suggested that there is no singular way of representing the climate emergency. Apocalypse, speculative futurity, slow violence, documentary observation, and literary attention to the nonhuman each illuminate different dimensions of ecological crisis. The lecture therefore sought to complicate the category of “emergency” itself: what appears as a sudden catastrophe from one perspective may be the culmination of a much longer history of extraction and environmental injustice from another.
The session concluded with a discussion led by our member, Kelly Tse, on the challenges of representing and teaching climate change, and on the possibilities offered by different literary and visual forms. At its centre was a broader question: how might cultural texts help us move beyond a singular imagination of climate catastrophe towards a more historically situated, geographically diverse, and politically attentive understanding of the Anthropocene?
For an overview of the talk, also see here.
