Heather Davis "Decolonizing the Anthropocene"

Visiting Scholar at Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill University, Heather Davis introduced the opening keynote titled "Decolonizing the Anthropocene" at Ruderal Ecologies: Grounds for Change at The Sanctuary for Independent Media on April 13th, 2018.

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Heather Davis is an itinerant researcher and writer. Her current book project, Plastic: The Afterlife of Oil, traces the ethology of plastic and its links to petrocapitalism. She is the editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015) and Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill Queen’s UP, 2017).

More on “Decolonizing the Anthropocene” (Heather’s Friday Keynote Talk)

The story we tell ourselves about environmental crises determines how we understand how we got here, where we might like to be headed, and what we need to do. Given this weight, it is imperative to bring together the insights from Indigenous and Black Studies to bear on the conversations surrounding the Anthropocene. Engaging with these long and rich scholarly traditions is necessary not only to avoid repeating the same Eurocentric logic that lead to the Anthropocene in the first place, but also because the Anthropocene is not a novel event. Rather, it can be understood as the after-shock of the seismic catastrophe that was settler colonialism in the Americas. Understanding our current era not as a break with the past, but as the cumulative force of hundreds of years of history refigures the Anthropocene as a problem not just of environmental, but of racial justice.

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