Deadline: 12 December 2022
Contact: Michael Boyden, Professor of English, Radboud University Nijmegen
Email: michael.boyden@ru.nl

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

As Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021) has noted, many recent critical reflections on the Anthropocene fail to consider the perspective of anticolonial modernization movements. Irreducible to mere mimicries of western modernity, such movements display an emancipationist – even spiritual – impulse that continues to shape political and economic aspirations across the “global South,” where the idea that the larger project of modernity ought to be abandoned is finding little purchase. The hopes and desires of anticolonial modernity must be accounted for if we are to develop a concerted response to our warming planet. This is especially pertinent to the question how the Earth can be reconceived as a global commons – a question arguably essential to meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene, but at the same time fraught with issues of epistemic pluralism, sovereignty, and self-determination. In this panel, we explore how such tensions and contradictions might inform a new kind of hermeneutics for Anthropocene fictions. As a number of critics have noted, many climate change novels draw on tropes and narrative procedures that are narrowly “western” in scope even as they claim to speak for the globe in its entirety. Some recent fiction (think, for instance, of Omar El Akkad’s American War), however, does thematize the discrepancies between planetarity, locality, and coloniality in interesting ways. We invite proposals for papers that specifically address the relation between the global commons and anticolonial modernity in recent climate fiction.

Please send proposals (no more than 300 words) to Michael Boyden (michael.boyden@ru.nl) and Hannes Bergthaller (hannes.bergthaller@gmail.com) by December 12.

Posted on October 23, 2022