African Ecologies: Knowledge and Creativity for Sustainable Planetary Futures
In 2011, Rob Nixon proposed that one of the central challenges for addressing human-driven climate change was representational: how to make visible the ecological degradation that occurs gradually and out of sight within communities on the receiving end of global inequality. This symposium revisits Nixon’s provocation 15 years later from the specific vantage point of African environments and cultures. While the African continent makes amongst the least contributions to global emissions, it bears the brunt of climate impacts, from soil erosion, drought, and ...
ASLE 2027: Writing Earth, Unsettling Territory: Geopoetics and the Poetry of Place
How does poetry write Earth, and how might such writing unsettle territory? This panel/seminar brings geopoetics into conversation with ecopoetry and the materiality of writing to explore how language, bodies, and earthly processes participate in the making—and unmaking—of place.
Paul Celan’s poetics offers one point of departure. His notes toward The Meridian associate poetic language with lapidary inscription and the displaced, resistant presence of an “erratic language-block.” Read through this lens, stone, soil, ash, and fossilized traces bear upon poetic form, shaping its fractures, ...