Programme

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UPDATED 07/06/23, 11:46 am

 

The European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies

Triennial Conference 2023

 

Imagining Environmental Justice in a Postcolonial World

 

Programme

 

Paris, 6-10 June 2023

 

Table of contents

DAY 1 / Tuesday 6 June. 2

DAY 2 / Wednesday 7 June. 4

DAY 3 / Thursday 8 June. 7

DAY 4 / Friday 9 June. 10

DAY 5 / Saturday 10 June. 12

 

Links for hybrid sessions will be posted on the conference website, under “Links to online sessions”:

https://eaclals2023.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/18

DAY 1 / Tuesday 6 June

 

Registration opens – 9:30-10:30am – entrance hall, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, 8 avenue de Saint-Mandé, 75012 Paris

 

Conference opens – 10:30-11am – amphi BR03

Addresses by Radhika Mohanram, Chair of EACLALS, Daniel Mouchard, President of Sorbonne Nouvelle University, and Christine Lorre, convenor of the Paris 2023 conference

 

 

 

Lunch 12-1:30pm – Cafeteria, room A609

 

 

1A. Intersection #1 “Decolonial Solidarities: Challenging Environmental Injustices in Chicanx and Indigenous Speculative Fiction” – room C209

Chair: Miasol Eguibar-Holgado

- Isabel PÉREZ-RAMOS, “Wasting relations and decolonial solidarities in Chicanx speculative fiction”

- Miasol EGUÍBAR-HOLGADO, “Re-writing the history of colonial genocide and ecocide through decolonial solidarities”

- Fernando PEREZ-GARCIA, “World-building solidarities: Decolonial cosmologies against ecological collapse”

 

1B. “Poetic imaginaries of extractive violence and Black feminist registers of repair” – room C210

Chair: Uhuru Phalafala

- Uhuru PHALAFALA               

- Bibi BURGER 

- Jolyn PHILLIPS

 

1C. Artistic strategies – room C211

Chair: Pauline Amy de la Bretèque

- Ana Cristina GOMES DA ROCHA, “Epistemologies of care: An ecopoetic conversation between Craig Santos Perez, Jamaica H. Osorio and Sia Figiel”

- Gabriela Alexandra BANITA, “To write or not to write? The ethical implications of writing about the devastation of the Niger Delta from the perspective of the transnational writer”

- Alexandra POULAIN, “‘Beyond the World’s End’: Environmental counter-visuality and the plea for climactic justice in contemporary South African art”

 

1D. Places and spaces: the forest and the city – room C212

Chair: Dalia Sbitan

- Somdatta BHATTACHARYA, “Colonial paradise gone wrong: Reading The Girl From Nongrim Hills through an ecocritical lens”

- Kathie BIRAT, “Forests and the future: Environmental justice and postcolonial fictions of the forest”

 

Coffee break 3-3:30pm – served in room C208

 

 

2A. [Online / American time zones] Slow violence– room C209

Chair: Sneharika Roy

- Munasir KAMAL, “Bringing visibility to victims of slow violence: Three works on Kaptai Dam”

- Aparajita NANDA, “Octavia Butler’s ecocritical antidote to ‘toxic’ colonial/neo-colonial politics”

- Chiara LANZA, “For the land has eyes: Soils and bodies in Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poetry”

 

2B. [Online / American time zones] – room C210

Chair: Cédric Courtois

- Kritish RAJBHANDARI, “The smell of rain and timely disasters: Oceanic environments in South Asian fiction”

- Corinna MCLEOD, “Haunting as environmental action in Edgar Mittleholzer’s My Bones and My Flute and Agymah Kamau’s Flickering Shadows”

- Francesca MUSSI, “Settler-colonialism, kinship, and reciprocity in Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow”

 

2C. [Online / American time zones] – room C211

Chair: Fiona McCann

- Sandhya SHETTY, “Dying across the human / nonhuman border:  end of life / end of worlds”

- Florian WAGNER, “Disrupting the global: The planetary poetics of Kaie Kellough’s Magnetic Equator”

- Brendon NICHOLLS, “Indigenous Poetry and Environmental Justice”

 

2D. Caribbean ecologies, past and future – room C212

Chair: Robert Young

- Michael MITCHELL, “Wilson Harris and environmentalist traditions”

- Kasia MIKA-BRESOLIN, “Ordinary Caribbean futures in the meantime: Beyond a tropical apocalypse”

 

2E. Animals – room C213

Chair: TBC

- Maria Sofia Pimentel BISCAIA, “Follow his endangered nose: The postcolonial animal in Lawrence Norfolk’s The Pope’s Rhinoceros”

- Phoebe CHETWYND, “Transgressive consumption: Animality and intersectionality in Joseph D’Lacey’s MEAT”

- Jason SANDHAR, “Animal’s lament: Deep adaptation and failed climate justice in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People”

 

 

 

 

DAY 2 / Wednesday 7 June

 

 

3A. [Online session / Asian time zone] Otherness – room C209

Chair: Sandrine Soukaï

- Muneeza SHAMSIE, “Beyond the Black Waters: Race, feminism, colonialism and ecology”

- Shefali BANERJI, “Making a difference: Marginalised identities, spoken word poetry and environmental justice in the UK”

- Nilanjana CHATTERJEE, “Eco-alterity and Indigenous Naga food utopia for the dystopian world: Reading Easterine Kire”

 

3B. [Online session / Asian time zone] Conflicts – room C210

Chair: Kathie Birat

- Shriya DASGUPTA and Oyeshi GANGULY, “‘Jungle Chorab Nahi’ (We will not leave our forests): Locating the Indian Adivasi in postcolonial environmental movements”

- Antara CHATTERJEE, “Eco-precarity: Conflict and environmental crisis in Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir”

- Laura SINGEOT, “Utopia and dystopia in Enclave by Claire G. Coleman: Re-imagining social and environmental justice”

 

3C. [Online session / Asian time zone] Water and land – room C211

Chair: Alexandra Poulain

- Vandana MATHUR, “Killing me softly: Of murdered streams and ecosystems”

- Doris HAMBUCH, “Water worship by Kayo Chingonyi and by Roberta Hill”

 

3D. [Online session / Asian time zone] – room C212

Chair: Kerry-Jane Wallart

- Silvia GERLSBECK, “Ghostly environments and colonial revenants: Questioning ecological guilt and (in)justice in Guyanese speculative fiction”

- Tonisha GUIN, “From abject to opaque: Border dwelling in Bhadralok-Sunderbans dichotomies of agency/abjection”

- Anusuya PAUL, “Documentary media and petro-cultural discourse in a democracy: understanding environmental injustice through Baghjan Reels and Inside the Burning”

 

3E. “Postcolonial Justice, Environmental Temporalities” (I) – room C213

Chair: Delphine Munos

- Bénédicte LEDENT, “Snow and the Black British imaginary in Caryl Phillips’s writing”

- Delphine MUNOS, “From Santo Domingo to Parlin, New Jersey: Toxic dumps in Junot Díaz’s short fiction”

- Bastien BOMANS, “Wild queerture: The unnaturalness of binary divides in Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020)”

3F. “Environmental Displacements: Form, Genre, and Audience” – room C214

Chair: Matt Whittle

- Matt WHITTLE, on Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) and John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019)

- Hannah BOAST, on Palestine+100, the films of Larissa Sansour, and Vivien Sansour’s Palestine Heirloom Seed Library

- Sophia BROWN, on El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise (2021)

 

Coffee break 10:30-11am – served in room C208

 

 

Lunch 12-1pm – Cafeteria, room A609

Roundtable for Post Graduate Researchers and Early Career Researchers (hybrid), room A610

Moderators: Devika Sharad Karnad (online) and Carla Martínez Del Barrio (in person)

 

 

 

4A. “Postcolonial Justice, Environmental Temporalities” (II) – room C209

Chair: Delphine Munos

- Shannon LAMBERT, “Ethics, experimentation, and containment in Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees”

- Marc DELREZ, “A sense of blaze: Solastalgia in Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020)”

- Marie HERBILLON, “Behrouz Boochani’s not so Pacific Islands in No Friend But the Mountains: Debunking Australian myths, from spatial misrepresentations to simplistic Pacific solutions”

 

4B. Shifting focus – room C210

Chair: Marie Mianowski

- Melissa KENNEDY, “Indigenous knowledge in/as environmental justice: The role of postcolonial studies”

- Chris PRENTICE, “One planet, many worlds: Questions of justice in reading Indigenous ‘environmental’ fiction”

- Robert YOUNG, “Frantz Fanon: Black ecology in the time of the Anthropocene”

 

4C. Extractivism – room C211

Chair: John Ball

- Asis DE, “Extractivist colonial economy and environmental justice in Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse and The Living Mountain”

- Carole FERRIER, “Some Indigenous Australian women’s fictional depictions of struggles and resistance against oppression, exploitation and genocide”

 

4D. Reimagining landscapes – room C212

Chair: Kathie Birat

- Mattia MANTELLATO, “Re-imagining Landscapes for a Partnership World in Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound”

- Kerry-Jane WALLART, “Re-thinking landscapes in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Olive Senior’s ‘Boxed-In’”

- Maitrayee MISRA, “The gardener’s calendar: Eco-injustice, Indigenous resistance and vigilant environmentalism in Siddhartha Sarma’s Year of the Weeds”

 

4E. The politics of environmental justice – room C213

Chair: Suhasini Vincent

- Otilia TEODORESCU-STADLER, “The natural condition of the world'? Postcolonial politics and the road to environmental damage in Dave Eggers’ The Parade”

- Suhasini VINCENT, “Distribution, recognition and participation: The paradigm for eco-justice in Mahasweta Devi’s eco-critical writing”

- Simran CHADHA, “Ecocriticism in the novel of terror: A case study of Romesh Gunesekera and Mirza Wahid”

 

On Wednesday 7 June, between 2:30 and 3:30, we’ll go on RER A2 (going in the direction of Boissy-Saint-Léger) from the University campus (departing from RER station: Nation) to the Jardin d’agronomie tropicale at the Cité du Développement Durable, in the Bois de Vincennes (arriving at RER station: Nogent-sur-Marne). Members of our local committee will lead participants to the venue. Once at the garden, Sneharika Roy will give a keynote lecture inside the Pavillon d’Indochine (3:30-4:30 pm). It will be followed by a reading session with five poets (4:30-5:45), after which drinks and food will be served. Guests will be able to stay until 8:30 (then the team will clean up and return the keys by 9 pm). Please note that seating inside the Pavilion is limited to 120 so participants need to register in advance by sending an email to <EACLALS2023@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr>.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Food and drinks will be served at Pavillon de l’Indochine.

DAY 3 / Thursday 8 June

 

 

5A. “Speculative futurism from the margins: Climate justice and the counterfactual” – room C209

Chair: Louise Bethlehem

- Louise BETHLEHEM, “Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney: Between colonial modernity and the Anthropocene”

- Ruth WENSKE , “‘The rains are refusing to come’: Climate change and Yoruba cosmology in Efua Traoré’s Children of the Quicksand (2019)”

- Norma MUSIH, “Crafting the seeds of the future: Sansour and Lind’s In Vitro”

 

5B. Coming of age in times of ecological crisis – room C210

Chair: TBC

- Eva Ulrike PIRKER, “Art and discontent – Literary framings of narratives of growth: A reading of David Chariandy’s novel Brother”

- Sarah DIMICK, “Juvenilia and climate justice”

- Antara CHATTERJEE, “Eco-precarity: Conflict and environmental crisis in Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir”

 

5C. Islands – room C211

Chair: Ruta Slapkauskaite

- John C. BALL, “Gun Island v. Blaze Island: Improbability, risk, and eco-cosmopolitanism in two recent climate-change novels”

- Arunima BHATTACHARYA, “Anthropology, time, and island ecologies in two novels of the Andaman Islands”

- Klara MACHATA, “Imperial exploitation and toxic legacies in the island imaginaries of The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali”

 

5D. Disputed territories – room C212

Chair: Melissa Kennedy

- Felicity HAND, “People versus turtles and coral reefs:  The dilemma of the Chagos archipelago”

- Briar WOOD, “Writing Ihumātao and poetic imaginations”

- Alex Nelungo WANJALA, “Postcolonial ecofeminist perspectives in the study of East African literature”

 

 

Coffee break 10:30-11am – served in room C208

 

 

 

6A. “Translating environmental justice through Patricia Grace’s Potiki” – room C209

Chair: Camille Biros

- Camille BIROS, “The Spanish, Italian and French translations of Potiki and their paratext”

- Emanuela NANNI, “The translation of varying voices in Potiki”     

- Aurélien TALBOT, “The translation of heterolingualism in Potiki”

 

6B. “Navigating Petrocultures: Representations, Infrastructures, Conflicts” – room C210

Chair: Gigi Adair

- Gigi ADAIR, “Petromasculinities and extractivist cultures in Canada and Scotland”

- Kylie CRANE, “Shifting terrains: Energy cultures, infrastructures, and the Marshall Islands”

- Ellen GRÜNKEMEIER, “Visual art: Representing petrocultures and infrastructures in the Niger Delta Region”

 

6C. “Animal remains – feather – shell:  Rethinking the intersections of ecological and imperial injustice in the Metropolitan Museum” – room C211

Chair: Lars Eckstein

- Fogha Mc Cornelius REFEM, “Shell: Ecologies of colonial injustice and the ethnological museum”

- Lars ECKSTEIN, “Trails of feather: Ecologies of the Tahitian chief mourner costume in Berlin”

- Anja SCHWARZ, “‘Brother belonging to black fellow’: Recontextualising the Australian mammal collection in Berlin’s Museum of Natural History”

 

6D. Performances and practices – room C212

Chair: Mathilde Rogez

- Gerald GAYLARD, “The eco-flaneur with “internal GPS”: The culture of greening the city in Ivan Vladislavić”

- Sibendu CHAKRABORTY, “Performing postcolonial ecocriticism in Wesley Enoch’s and David Milroy’s Aboriginal theatre”

- Durba MUKHERJEE, “Is Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish a literature of small things, or a postcolonial-ecocritical warning?”

 

6E. Decoloniality – room C213

Chair: TBC

- Siobhan BROWNLIE, “Robert Sullivan as evolving decolonial ecopoet”

- Megan FOURQUREAN, “‘There will never be no more River’: The decolonial possibilities of Mami Wata in Los Angeles”

- Elisabeth KNITTELFELDER, “Water as archive: Towards a decolonial tidalectics in recent African fiction and artivism”

 

Lunch 12:30-2pm – Cafeteria, rooms A609 & A610

 

 

 

7A. [Hybrid] “Mahasweta Devi, Literary Environmentalist” – room C209 *NB: This panel will start at 1:30pm*

Chair: Sourit Bhattacharya

- Lucio DE CAPITANI, “Adaptation (In)justice: Interrogating Resilience through Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Pterodactyl’”

- Alessandra MARINO, “Bitter soil: Mahasweta Devi’s geographies of unequal development”

- Arka CHATTOPADHYAY, “The Non-Human and Ethics in ‘Pterodactyl’”

- Sayan CHATTOPADHYAY, “Untranslatability as environmental justice: Planetarity, sacredness, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s translation of Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Pterodactyl’”

 

7B. “Raw Materialities: Africa and Eco-injustice” (I) – room C210 *NB: This panel will start at 1:30pm*

Chairs: Louise Green & Eckard Smuts

- Louise GREEN, “Unsettled background”

- Maria OLAUSSEN, “Materialities of bondage: The animal figure in African narratives of slavery”

- Eckard SMUTS, “Animated terrain: From allegory to eco-materialism in Karen Jennings’s An Island”

- Gabeba BADEROON, “Sand poetry”

7C. Slow violence – room C211 *NB: This panel will start at 1:30pm*

Chair: TBC

- Mitia NATH, “‘Slow Violence’ of the manmade famine in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers”

- Victoria HERCHE, “Representations of slow violence in Anglophone coal mining fiction”

- Petra TOURNAY-THEODOTOU, “Ecopolitics and the poetics of slow violence in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were”

- Gugu HLONGWANE and Khondlo MITSHALI, “The madman’s keys: New scrambles and routes to ecological justice in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were”

 

7D. Perceptions and sensations – room C211

Chair: Jaine Chemmachery

- Teresa BOTELHO, “Toxic transnational encounters and the vulnerable body:  Writing environmental justice in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021)”

- Stephanie OLIVER, “Smell as relation: The scents of energy intimacy in the work of Warren Cariou”

- Helen STRAUSS, “Breathing with trees: Towards decolonial embodied learning”

 

 

 

 

Coffee break 3:30-4pm – served in room C208

 

 

 

                                                        

 

DAY 4 / Friday 9 June

 

 

8A. Intersection #2 “Afro-Environmental and Eco-Cosmopolitan Solidarities: A Comparative Approach to Post-Anthropocentric Diasporic Fiction” – room C209

Chair: Rosa María Moreno-Redondo

- Ángela SUÁREZ-RODRÍGUEZ, “Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria: A literary gesture of Afro-environmental solidarity”

- Carla MARTÍNEZ DEL BARRIO, “A Literary Response to Migration: Refugees as Eco-cosmopolitan Strangers in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West”

- Rosa María MORENO-REDONDO, “Africanfuturist Landscapes and Indigenous Knowledge in Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti Trilogy”

8B. River, sea, desert – room C210

Chair: Sandrine Soukaï

- Elspeth TULLOCH, “Articulating the ethics of beholding the Columbia River and its complex life relations in Fred Wah’s and Rita Wong’s beholden: a poem as long as the river”

- Eugenia OSSANA, “The desert: An ambivalent locus of capitalist domination and communal re-imaginings in Nnedi Okorafor’s Noor (2021)”

- Moumita ROY, “Expelled by nature: Maritime migration and climate affect in Amitav Ghosh”

 

8C. Consumption and colonisation – room C211

Chair: Corentin Jégou

- Astrid SCHWEGLER-CASTANER, “‘At the back of our apartment there is a pig, sinking’: Desanitizing Anthropocentric consumption in Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City”

- Pauline AMY DE LA BRETÈQUE, “Monoculture narratives: Writing colonization through stories of opium and sugar cane”

- Indrajit MUKHERJEE, “Magical realism as a critique of environmental plunder through the Aboriginal Dreaming in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book”

8D. Environmental Justice in the Pacific– room C212

Chair: Elsa Lorphelin

- Michelle KEOWN, “Imagining environmental justice in Micronesia: US colonial legacies, Indigenous Pacific praxis”

- Juan Ignacio OLIVA, “Environmental justice for oceanic identities in Craig Santos-Pérez’s ecopoetry”

- Joan Chia-en CHIANG, “Rising islands: The video poetics of Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna”

 

 

Coffee break 10:30-11:30pm – served in room A609

EACLALS AGM – room A610

 

 

 

Lunch 12:30-1:30pm – Cafeteria, A609

Roundtable discussion on Academic conferences and climate change – Cafeteria, A610

Moderator: Fiona McCann

 

 

 

Coffee break 3-3:30pm – served in room C208

 

 

 

9A. Intersection #3 “Reinscribing Black and Brown Body Matters: Pedagogies of Planetary Solidarities” – room C209

Chair: Elena Igartuburu García

- Emilia María DURÁN ALMARZA, “Of women, rivers and trees. Engaging Janani Cooray’s Planetary Matter(s)”

- Elena IGARTUBURU GARCÍA, “Strange fruits: Re-inscribing the Black body in nature through African dance”

- Óscar ALONSO ÁLVAREZ, “Engaging planetary solidarity through English language teaching”

 

9B. “Raw Materialities: Africa and Eco-injustice (II)” – room C210

Chairs: Louise Green & Eckard Smuts

- Simon VAN SCHALKWYK, “Environment and environmentality in recent South African fiction”

- Fred ALUOCH, “Hydrocolonialism, toxicity and Slow Violence in Dayo Ntwari’s ‘Mother’s Love’”

- Philip AGHOGHOVWIA, “Radical corporealities: Water and Black ecopoetics”

 

9C. Human and non-human interactions – room C211

Chair: Siobhan Brownlie

- John C. HAWLEY, “Postcolonial Ecocriticism and the Recovery of Hope: Okri, Dangarembga, and the Spiritual”

- Robin BELINGHAM, “Toward decolonial reimaginings of the life/non-life binary, working with the vitality of gold”

- Alfie HOWARD, “Wendigo stories for a postcolonial world: Re-imaginings of an Indigenous figure”

 

9D. Environmental justice and theory – room C212

Chair: TBC

- Jill PLANCHE, “‘Learning to breathe with the lungs of the world’: The potentiality of Gilles Deleuze’s affective relationships in Nwabisa Plaatjie’s 23 Years, a Month and 7 Days”

- Sirui ZHU, “Ghosts from nature and the releasement toward things: A Heideggerian reading of The Satanic Verses’”

- Susan ANDRADE, “Making visible a genealogy of environmentalism and history”

 

9E. Global Capitalocene – room C213

Chair: Jason Sandhar

- Megan JONES, “Plastic: A comparative analysis of waste in South Asia and South Africa”

- Laëtitia SAINT-LOUBERT, “Dismantling the global literary Capitalocene from the Caribbean”

- Dominic DAVIES, “Graphic Capitaloscenes: Drawing infrastructure as historical form”

 

 

 

 

DAY 5 / Saturday 10 June

 

 

10A. Intersection #4 “Transnational Solidarities, Migrancy and Non/Human Suffering” – room C209

Chair: Isabel Carrera Cuarez

- Patricia BASTIDA RODRÍGUEZ, “A Future through solidarity? Migrant communities, sustainability and the environment in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West”

- Paola PRIETO LOPEZ, “Environmental justice, solidarity and the legacies of colonialism in Mojisola Adebayo’s plays”

- Isabel CARRERA SUAREZ, “Christy Lefteri’s Songbirds: Transnational care plots and antispeciesist feminism”

 

10B. “Environmental Postcolonial Formalism” – room C210

Chair: Ryan Topper

- Ryan TOPPER, “The Problem of Form: Amos Tutuola’s Environmental Gothic”

- Arthur ROSE, “The Limits of Form: Shame and J.M. Coetzee”

- Dominic O’KEY, “Recognising Form: Aminatta Forna’s Animals”

           
10C. Ecofeminism – room C211

Chair: TBC

- Eléonore LAINÉ FORREST, “To save the people and the land in Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things”

- Ruta SLAPKAUSKAITE, “Maternal ecolects of violence and vulnerability in Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron”

- Nibedita MUKHERJEE, “Indigenous women sing for nature: Goddess myths of the Ajodhya Hills ecosystem”

 

10D. Settler colonialism – room C212

Chair: Marc Delrez

- Emma PARKER, “Contested seas, housing developments, and colonial settlement in Janet Frame’s The Rainbirds (1968)”

- Mathilde ROGEZ, “A South African New Jerusalem in a post-apocalyptic world? Environmental justice and the resurgence of the plaasroman in Deon Meyer’s Fever”

- Kata GYURIS, “Re-examining the land in White South African writing – An ecocritical and gendered approach”

 

 

Coffee break 10:30-11am – served in room C208

 

 

Conclusions and conference closure – 12-12:30 pm