Making and Unmaking of Modernity’s Racial Ecologies Across the Caribbean Archipelago
Wednesday, April 10, 2024 4:30 AM – 6:00 PM
Description
The historical geographies of the Caribbean situate the region at the center of the modern world. The region entered the European spatial imaginary as the Antilles, a geographical description for the island archipelago that was tied to the mythologized Antillia. The visualizing practices and religio-cultural vocabulary behind the naming of the region, reflects the broader logics of coloniality that would come to fundamentally remaking the Caribbean. What Europeans did in and to the Caribbean, its Indigenous people, and the people forced into new residence there, provides compelling reason to take racial imaginaries seriously.In this talk, the presenter will use the concept of racial ecologies to read the political ecologies of European world-building in the Caribbean. For all the social, environmental, and cultural violence invested in the creation and preservation of colonial racial ecologies, Caribbean peoples have sprouted rich ecologies that escape these plantationist landscaping. The talk considers some of these insurgent Caribbean ecologies and the alternative vision of Antillia that they grow toward. This discussion will suggest how an Antillean perspective places epistemological and methodological demands on Africana, Latin American Studies, and Environmental Studies.Guest Speaker Information
Alex A. Moulton is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at Hunter College and faculty in the Ph.D. Program in Earth and Environmental Science at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research focuses on Black geographies and ecologies, socio-ecological justice, and political ecology of climate change.