CFP: The Anthropocene and Race Conference
Feb 5-6 2021
The Anthropocene and Race
University of Central Lancashire, Preston
Hosted by the Institute for Black Atlantic Research, the Asia Pacific Studies Institute and the Centre for Migration, Diaspora and Exile
Image credit: Jade Montserrat. ‘You’ll have to be on your toes to survive these parts.’
ABSTRACT DEADLINE EXTENDED UNTIL 10 Jan 2021
*Note on Covid-19*
We will be running the conference online.
Call for Papers
‘The Anthropocene as a politically infused geology and scientific/popular discourse is just now noticing the extinction it has chosen to continually overlook in the making of its modernity and freedom.’ – Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.
‘If […] we take an environmental justice approach to Anthropocene storytelling, we can better acknowledge the way the geomorphic powers of human beings have involved unequal exposure to risk and unequal access to resources.’ Rob Nixon, ‘The Great Acceleration and the Great Divergence: Vulnerability in the Anthropocene.’
‘[A] buzzing, stinging, sucking swarm now, and human beings are not in a separate compost pile. We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos.’ Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
The University of Central Lancashire is hosting ‘The Anthropocene and Race’ conference in February 2021. The conference explores the connections among geology and culture, environment, ideology and inequality, memory and displacement, deep time and the far future. Keynote addresses will be given by:
Professor Kei Miller, University of Exeter
Novelist, poet, author of Augustown and In Nearby Bushes
Forward Prize and OCM Bocas Prize winner
Syaman Rapongan
Novelist, essayist, Tao culture activist
China Times Prize for Literature and Golden Tripod Award winner
Taiwan Ocean Research Institute researcher
Dr Karen McCarthy Woolf, Fulbright All-Disciplines Scholar, UCLA
Ecocritic, poet, editor
Author of An Aviary of Small Birds and Seasonal Disturbances
We are witnessing climate crisis and mass extinction. The Anthropocene is the proposed name for a new geological epoch, created by human actions. The term encapsulates the total impact of human activities on Earth’s systems. As such, it is a crucial new development for the sciences, humanities and arts.
This conference brings together an international array of thinkers from geography, literature and culture.
The term Anthropocene remains controversial. Discussions among geologists are ongoing. Is the scale of ‘human’ activities really what is at stake here, or the activities of a few individuals, nations, corporations and governments? A subsistence farmer in Africa quite clearly does not have the same impact on the Earth as the chief executive of a coal mining company. Is the very idea of the Anthropocene western-centred – even racist?
The Anthropocene has been critiqued for being Eurocentric, human-focussed, capitalist and white-dominated. Karen Yusoff has challenged the Anthropocene’s ‘white geology’ for ignoring the enslaved and exploited black and brown bodies that the term obscures.
Environmental damage is a major driver of diaspora and new forms of exile, from climate change migration and the flight from polluted cities to ‘solastalgia’ (a feeling of distress caused by environmental damage close to your home.)
Topics will include:
*Theories of the Anthropocene, and what the concept means for different disciplines
*The Anthropocene and race across visual art, literature, music, social sciences and related narratives
*African Diasporan, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and LBGTQ+ perspectives on the Anthropocene, across disciplines
*Ecological imperialism, globalisation and capitalism, the ‘Capitalocene’
*Multi-species communities of resilience and resistance, the ‘Chthulucene’
*Geology, geological narratives, and what they imply for human beings
*Boundaries and border-crossings, human and nonhuman; migration of people, animals and plants (forced or voluntary)
*Oceanic studies and wider Pacific cross-cultural currents
*Cultural narratives about extinction, climate change, oceanic impacts
Provisional programme:
Feb 05 (Friday)
09.15-9.30
Opening Remarks
09.30-11.00
Panel A
Chair: Niki Alsford
The Anthropocene and Race: Creative and Practice-Based Research
Helena Wee – ‘Five Elemental Mythologies’
Sarah Hymas – ‘Invisible Violences of Ocean: A creative response’
Robert Wally – ‘The Big Steppe: Causes and effects of the rural to urban migration in Mongolia’
11.00-11.15
Coffee break
11.15-12.45
Panel B
Chair: Raphael Hoermann
Borders, Displacement, Crossings and Timescales in the Anthropocene
Karen Siu – ‘Climate Change Migration, Displacement, and Diaspora in the “Neo-Eocene’
Daniel Harrison – ‘Resisting the Necrocene: Borders, Biopower and the Body-in-Between.’
Kate Lewis Hood – ‘Chasms and currents: M Archive, the Anthropocene, and queer Black feminist time’
12.45- 13.30
Lunch Break
13.30- 14.30
Keynote: Syaman Rapongan (recorded interview)
Chair: Ti-Han Chang
N.B. AI2500 Taiwan in the Asia Pacific module students will be attending
14.30-15.00
Coffee Break
15.00- 16.30
Panel C
Chair: Nicole Willson
Fiction, Science Fiction, Climate Change and the Future
Chiara Xausa: ‘Climate disaster and social justice in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy’
Nigel Clark – ‘Race and Planetary Multiplicity: NK Jemisin meets GWF Hegel on a Broken Earth’
Andrea Sillis: Toni Morrison’s Jefferson Lecture ‘The Future of Time’
Feb 06 (Saturday)
10.30-12.00
Panel D
Chair: Ti-Han Chang
The Anthropocene, Posthumanism and Race
Dang Trang – ‘Colonialism, Racism, and Anthropocentrism: A Critical Survey of the Anthropocene’
Stephanie Polsky – ‘The Dark Posthuman: Social Reproduction, Social Justice, and Artificial Ecology’
Sabine Broeck: ‘Posthumanism, the Anthropocene and Anti-Blackness: Engaging Rosi Braidotti’s Work Critically’
12.00- 13.00
Lunch Break
13.00- 14.30
Keynote: Karen McCarthy Woolf
Q&A session
14.30-15.00
Coffee Break
15.00- 16.30
Keynote: Kei Miller
Q&A session
16.30-16.45
Closing remarks (Alan Rice)
16.45-17.30
Informal networking to close the conference
Fees:
£25: waged
£15: concessions (postgraduates, self-employed arts practitioners, lower income)
Undergraduates: free (please email ibaruclan@uclan.ac.uk to register your interest).
Registration deadline: 3rd Feb 2021.
Register here: https://onlineshop.uclan.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/school-of-humanities-language-and-global-studies/conferences/the-anthropocene-and-race-conference-56-february-2021
