Imagining environmental justice in a postcolonial world. Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, France.
The 18th triennial conference of the European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (EACLALS), takes place in Paris, 6-10 June 2023. The initiative is supported by the French Society for Postcolonial Studies (SEPC/Société des Études Postcoloniales) and Sorbonne Nouvelle University, which will provide the venue for the event. The EACLALS conference was last held in France in 1988, in Nice.
Further information can be obtained here and from: EACLALS2023@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
Registration details are available here.
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Amanda Boetzkes (University of Guelph, Canada)
Elizabeth DeLoughrey (University of California, Los Angeles, US)
Graham Huggan (University of Leeds, UK)
Claire Omhovère (Université Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3, France)
Imre Szeman (University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada)
The conference theme for 2023, Imagining Environmental Justice in a Postcolonial World, invites delegates to bring postcolonial literatures and arts into conversation with environmentalism; investigate the power of narratives in all literary genres, as well as images and artistic performances, to evoke environmental injustice; and explore the breadth of what environmental justice may mean in postcolonial contexts.
The global ecological and climate crisis is strongly linked to modernity and its history of imperialism, colonisation, capitalism, and exploitation of resources. Postcolonial literatures
foreground these connections: key texts include Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974),
Judith Wright’s “For a Pastoral Family” (1985), Patricia Grace’s Potiki (1986), Thomas King’s
Green Grass, Running Water (1999), Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005), Alexis Wright’s
Carpentaria (2006), Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011), Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s “Tell Them”
(2012), Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner than Skin (2012), and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We
Were (2021). These powerful stories reveal the colonial origins of ecological devastation and its
dramatic consequences for the Global South. These texts have also prompted new theoretical
concepts such as the “slow violence” of delayed destruction (Nixon 2013) and the
“plantationocene” (Haraway 2015).