Resources of Resistance:
Production, Consumption,
Transformation
The Postcolonial Studies
Association Postgraduate
Conference
University of York, 24-25 July 2014
Conference Programme
Organised by
Hannah Boast, Rebekah Cumpsty, Lucy Potter, Nicola Robinson
Thanks
We would like to thank the Postcolonial Studies Association and the Centre for
Modern Studies, University of York, for their support and funding.
Special thanks go to Claire Westall and Jason Edwards for intellectual support and
encouragement and Helen Jacobs and Cathy Moore for their help in organising this
conference.
Travel and Accommodation
Location
The conference will take place in the Berrick Saul Building (BSB), located on York’s
Heslington West campus. The building is fully accessible for disabled visitors, and
visitors with mobility difficulties can drive or be dropped off at the door of the BSB.
An interactive map of the campus is available on the University of York website.
Travel Directions
By Bus
The numbers 4 and 44 buses depart from the railway station at frequent intervals
(usually no longer than every ten minutes). The journey time from the railway
station to the university campus is around 20 minutes and a single ticket costs £1.50.
The timetables are available here and here. The closest bus stop to the BSB is the J.B.
Morrell Library Stop on University Road. Cross the road under the bridge to reach
Market Square, from where you will see signs to the conference venue.
By Taxi
A journey by taxi from the railway station to the University takes approximately 15
minutes and costs about £8. There is a taxi rank just outside the station. Other taxi
companies in York include Ebor Taxis (01904 641441), Fleetways Taxis (01904
645333) and 659 Taxis (01904 659659).
By Car
The easiest route to the University is to take the outer ring road (A64 on the south
and east sides of the city, A1237 around the north and west) to the junction with the
Hull/Bridlington roads (A1079/A166). Turn off at the exit marked University and
follow the signs past Grimston Bar and down Field Lane to University Road. This
route avoids the city centre and known traffic black spots. The nearest Park and Ride
to the University is Grimston Bar, off the A1079, or limited pay-and-display parking is
also available on campus. The closest car parks to the BSB are the Central and South
lots. More information can be found here.
Accommodation
Given York’s popularity as a tourist destination during the summer, we recommend
that you book your accommodation well in advance. Here are some suggested
options. More can be found on http://www.visityork.org/book/
College rooms on campus are available for conference attendees, from £24 p/n.
Tel: 01904 328431 / http://yorkconferences.com
Ace Hostel Micklegate House, 88-90 Micklegate, York, YO1 6JX. From £16 p/n.
Tel: 01904627720 / http://www.acehotelyork.co.uk/
The Fort 1 Little Stonegate, York, YO1 8AX. From £18 p/n. Tel: 01904 620 222 /
http://www.thefortyork.co.uk/
York International Youth Hostel (half a mile from the City Centre) Water End,
Clifton, York YO30 6LP. From £15 p/n.
Tel: 01904653147 / http://www.yha.org.uk/hostel/york
York Central Travelodge 90 Piccadilly, York YO1 9NX. From £22 p/n.
Tel: 08719846187 / http://www.travelodge.co.uk/
Contact Details
Conference email: worldresources2014@gmail.com
Hannah Boast: hannah.boast@york.ac.uk
Lucy Potter: lep502@york.ac.uk
Rebekah Cumpsty: rllc501@york.ac.uk
Nicola Robinson: nicola.robinson@york.ac.uk
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PocoResources
If you need to contact an organiser on the day, please call Hannah Boast on
07743399136. If unavailable, you can also call or text Lucy Potter on 07854572742.
Programme
24th July
9:00 – 9.30
Foyer
Registration and Coffee
9:30 – 9.45
The Treehouse
(first floor)
Welcome
9:45 – 10:45
Keynote Lecture: Dr. Sharae Deckard – Tea Barons and
Coconut Kings: Sri Lanka, Commodity Frontiers, and the
World-Ecology
10:45 – 11:00
B/S/008 (ground
floor)
Coffee break
11:00 – 12:00
The Treehouse
Panel 1: Extraction, Exploitation and Exhaustion in
Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds
Ben Holgate – “A war for money”: neocolonialism,
environmental apocalypse, and Alexis Wright’s reassertion
of Indigenous knowledge in Australia
Jay Parker – “The supreme importance of material
interests” – ironising silver and territory in Joseph
Conrad’s Nostromo
12:00 – 1:00
The Treehouse
Panel 2: Hydropolitical Resistance
Saira Fatima Dogar – Water “Matters”: Exploitation and
Resistance in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing
Christine Gilmore – Narrating a Nubian ‘Nile World’:
Hydropolitics, Hegemony and Resistance in Yahya
Mukhtar’s Jibāl al-Kohl (2001)
1:00 – 2:00
B/S/008
Lunch
2:00 – 3:00
The Treehouse
Panel 3: The Consuming Imagination
Bürge Abiral – Urban Permaculturists in Istanbul:
Challenges and Strategies for Action
Hugh Crosfield – Don’t Squeeze A South Africa Dry!:
mobilizing the orange as anti-apartheid antiracist
resistance (1972-1974)
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay – An Uneven Modernity: Famine
in the Colonial Imagination
3:00 – 4:20
The Treehouse
Panel 4: Flows of Resources, Flows of Power
Hannah Boast – Pipelines: water infrastructure and the
construction of Palestinian communities in Tawfik Abu
Wael’s Atash (Thirst)
Treasa De Loughry: Plasticide and Petro-Modernity
Amber Murrey – Land, Place and Violence in ‘Narratives of
Loss’ Along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline
4:20 – 4:45
B/S/008
Coffee break
4:45 – 6.00
The Treehouse
Keynote Lecture: Professor Jennifer Wenzel – 'To Begin
Everything All Over Again': Fanon, Resource Sovereignty,
and Contrapuntal Environmentalism
Respondent: David Attwell
6.00 – 7.00
Foyer
Wine reception
7:30
Conference dinner
25th July
9:00 – 9:30
Foyer
Registration and Coffee
9:30 – 10:30
The Treehouse
Keynote Lecture: Dr. Anthony Carrigan – Compound
Disaster, Uneven Recovery: Reading the Catastrophic
Legacies of 1970–71 in Bangladesh
10:30 – 10.45
B/S/008
Coffee break
10.45 – 11.45
The Treehouse
Panel 5: Appropriating Conservation
Annette LaRocco – The comprehensive hunting ban:
conservation, resource-use, and contestation in
postcolonial Botswana
Sam Perks – Representing Homo Oeconomicus: Capitalist
Relations in Planet Earth
11:45 – 12:45
The Treehouse
Panel 6: Human and Nonhuman Selves
Frances Hemsley – Human hides, Animal skins: Marechera
and Zimbabwean Environmental Policy
Margot Young – Decolonising Subjectivity and Intolerable
Bestial Others
12.45 – 2.00
Multiple locations
Lunch, B/S/008
Postcolonial Studies Association AGM, The Treehouse
2.00 – 3.00
The Treehouse
Panel 7: Land, Environment and Resistance in Urban and
Rural Spaces
Rebekah Cumpsty – Locating the Sacred in the City:
Conceptual Mapping as Resistance in Johannesburg and
New York
Puneet Dhaliwal – Zapatista Autonomy: Land and
Indigenous Resistance
3.00 – 3.15
B/S/008
Coffee Break
3.15 – 4:45
The Treehouse
Panel 8: Aesthetics of Resistance and Resistant Reading
Practices
Karen Jackson – Modes of Revealing and Rupturing the
Rhetorical and Cognitive Routines of Consumer Culture in
Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s long poem sybil unrest
Rebecca Duncan – Visceral Fiction: Rerouting Affective
Economies in Contemporary South African Literature
Dominic Davies – Infrastructural Reading: How to Critique
Cross-national Capital in Colonial Literature
4.45 – 5.00
The Treehouse
Closing Remarks
Keynote Lectures
Dr. Sharae Deckard – Tea Barons and Coconut Kings: Sri Lanka, Commodity
Frontiers, and the World-Ecology
School of English, University College Dublin
According to Jason Moore, the environmental history of colonies and postcolonies
throughout the Global South is characterized by periodic reorganizations and phases
of nature-society relations, which he terms “ecological regimes” and “ecological
revolutions.’ Ecological regimes are the “relatively durable patterns of class structure,
technological innovation and the development of productive forces…that have
sustained and propelled successive phases of world accumulation.” Within the 50-75
year periodic cycles of commodity frontiers, when biophysical webs of life are
exhausted and particular ecological regimes are no longer able to produce evergreater ecological surpluses for capitalist cores, thus failing to maintain the
conditions of profit accumulation, then ecological revolutions occur, characterized
by the extension of exploitation to new geographies, the intensification of existing
forms of extraction, and the production of new technologies and modes. Moore
points to sugar plantation monocultures in the Caribbean as the most salient
example of the extreme socio-ecological violence perpetrated by ecological
revolutions and commodity extraction, but in Sri Lanka, socio-ecological relations are
just as indelibly marked by the experience of the commodity regimes corresponding
to rubber, coconut and tea, originating in colonial plantation but continuing into
independence, and by the subsequent reorganizations of society-nature manifested
during the civil war and its ongoing conflict over territory, labour and resources.
Anglophone Sri Lankan literature is saturated by spatialised registrations of ecology
on the “fractured island.” Gothic eco-topoi such as that of the spectral waluwe
(plantation house) and estate garden, the threatening, almost eco-phobic fecundity
of the jungle, and the toxic gothic of militarized waste-scapes, recur throughout the
literature of writers such as Punyakante Wijenaike, Jean Arasanayagam, Ameena
Hussein and Roma Tearne, mediating the history of the socio-ecological production
of nature through plantation monocultures, paradise tourism and military
territorialisation. These eco-tropes figure ecologies subjected to multiple
reterritorializations, so that literary representations of landscapes become
palimpsests of multiple socio-ecological histories and boom-bust cycles, saturated in
accumulated violence. Reading through Moore’s world-ecology framework, this
paper will explore how contemporary Sri Lankan writers represent the ecological
regimes in irrealist aesthetics corresponding to plantation and to civil war:
registering the collapse of coconut, rubber and tea commodity regimes; the
desacralization, deforestation and toxification of jungle and dry zone ecologies
through militarization; the slow violence of environmental refugeeism and stationary
dispossession; and the complex restructuring of new regimes (such as mass
aquaculture, gem and graphite mining, and tourism) through collaboration between
multinational corporations and both state and guerrilla factions.
Dr. Anthony Carrigan – Compound Disaster, Uneven Recovery: Reading the
Catastrophic Legacies of 1970–71 in Bangladesh
Department of English, University of Leeds
Despite contributing to the nation’s status as disaster icon, the events surrounding
one of the twentieth century’s worst environmental catastrophes, the Bhola Cyclone,
and the subsequent bloody liberation war have received sparse treatment from
postcolonial researchers.
In this presentation I will consider the socio-ecological and generic implications of
reading across a number of reflective works produced in the last decade or so by
writers and filmmakers such as Tahmima Anam, Manzu Islam, Sorayya Khan, and
Tareque Masud. These depict 1970–71’s catastrophic events as being
environmentally embedded yet operating across borders through diaspora, sociocultural and bioregional affiliations, and multidirectional memory, and through
globalised circuits of production and consumption.
They also raise a series of critical questions that are at the heart of this conference’s
interests: the status of East Pakistan/Bangladesh as ‘resource periphery’; the
transformations and foreclosures that accompany mass resistance; tensions
between independence and interdependence; contested relations between disaster
mitigation, development, and vulnerability reduction; and the power of historical
and aesthetic texts to help us think through long-term and deeply uneven processes
of recovery.
Professor Jennifer Wenzel – 'To Begin Everything All Over Again': Fanon, Resource
Sovereignty, and Contrapuntal Environmentalism
Departments of English and Comparative Literature, and Middle Eastern, South
Asian, and African Studies, at Columbia University
In this talk, I reread Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth with an eye toward his
analysis of the role of nature and natural resources in colonialism and anti-colonial
national liberation, with particular attention to the concept of resource sovereignty
as an important if under-analyzed aspect of postcolonial sovereignty. I propose
contrapuntal environmentalism (modeled after Edward Said's "contrapuntal
reading") as a methodological imperative for postcolonial ecocriticism as it enters its
third wave. To be able to reckon with EuroAmerican environmentalist figures, and to
understand their myriad, complex relations to the traditions constellated around the
environmentalisms of the poor, without anxieties of influence or accusations of
derivativeness or belatedness is crucial, I argue, for the future of postcolonial studies
in an era of resource wars and climate change.
Abstracts
Panel 1: Extraction, Exploitation and Exhaustion in Colonial and
Postcolonial Worlds
Ben Holgate – “A war for money”: neocolonialism, environmental apocalypse, and
Alexis Wright’s reassertion of Indigenous knowledge in Australia
PhD Candidate, Faculty of English, University of Oxford
benjamin.holgate@wolfson.ox.ac.uk
Indigenous Australian author Alexis Wright’s fiction critiques the environmental
consequences of neocolonialism and global capitalism. This is set against the
Indigenous Australian Dreamtime, a complex philosophy that incorporates ecology
and an inextricable connection with the land but which has been marginalised along
with Aboriginal Australians since British colonisation in the eighteenth century. This
paper explores Wright’s use of magical realism to depict the clash of oppositional
systems, as critic Stephen Slemon identified typically occurs in the narrative mode,
that are locked in a continuous dialectic with one another, creating gaps in
knowledge. Wright develops magical realism in new directions by drawing on both
Indigenous and non-Indigenous mythology, in order to reinstate the marginalised
autochthon and present an alternative world view to capitalist materialism.
Moreover, Wright’s fiction emanates from the perspective of a “fourth-world,” using
Robert Young’s definition of colonised first inhabitants in an officially decolonised
country. This paper discusses these themes in regards to two of Wright’s novels. The
Swan Book (2013) is an allegory that portrays an environmental post-apocalypse in
the near future in Australia. Global warming has displaced millions of people
worldwide, causing environmental refugees to flee to Australia even though the
country has been ravaged by extreme drought and torrential rains. Carpentaria
(2006) dramatises a contemporary war by Aboriginal guerrilla activists fighting
against the colluding neocolonial powers of politicians and a multinational mining
company that ride roughshod over Indigenous land rights.
Jay Parker – “The supreme importance of material interests” – ironising silver and
territory in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo
PhD Candidate, School of English, University of Leeds
mail@jay-parker.co.uk
Silver looms large in the history of capitalism. It is also the central image of Joseph
Conrad’s great deconstruction of liberalism and capitalism, Nostromo (1904), which
casts silver ironically as both the saviour and corruptor of the novel’s nascent
fictional nation of Costaguana. The potential for this text to interrogate these
systems is well established, and interdisciplinary work such as Houseman and
Johnson’s examination of the political, metallurgical, and literary dimensions of silver
in relation to Conrad’s novel (1991) make a strong case for these connections.
This paper extends this work to engage with this novel’s awareness of the
interdependence of environmental factors, such as terrain, and social factors, such
as class and ethnicity. Conrad displays a remarkable prescience in his fiction, which
enables it to be read productively into a postcolonial context. Nostromo particularly
examines how the colonial South American setting of the novel interrogates a
complex geo-political relationship between colonies and home, where ideological
and territorial proximities and distances interact to problematize binaries of nature
and society. A reading of how Nostromo negotiates and traverses these boundaries
will be used to engage with the notion of ‘capitalism as world-ecology’ (Moore,
2011), suggesting that in the complex interdependencies of the socio-ecological,
there are important social dynamics alongside capitalism which mediate the
production of society and nature.
Panel 2: Hydropolitical Resistance
Saira Fatima Dogar – Water “Matters”: Exploitation and Resistance in Uzma Aslam
Khan’s Trespassing
PhD Candidate, School of English, University of Leeds
ensfd@leeds.ac.uk
My paper focuses on water’s simultaneous portrayal as a material resource of
exploitation and resistance in Uzma Aslam Khan’s 2004 novel Trespassing. Reading
the presence of foreign trawlers in Karachi’s seas at the beginning of the novel as an
instance of “geographical expansion” as conceived by Jason Moore (2012), and the
grave consequences of this exploitative “trespassing” on the lives of displaced local
fishermen communities, I will show how water also inspires creative modes of
resistance in the form of truck art and silkworm breeding. Exploring the genesis of
the Sindh separatist struggle and the ethnic riots that have been wreaking havoc in
Karachi for over two decades, Khan relates the phenomena directly to the unequal
distribution of water between the provinces of Pakistan. Water is also, however,
seen as an element calling attention to the need to belong to the land rather than
having the land belong to any one ethnic community. One way of forging this sense
of belonging with the land is evidenced in the fostering of human- animal bonds
between the protagonist figure and marine life at the start of the novel, and those
between silk worms and the women responsible for raising and tending them locally
in the Thatta region of Sind. From water’s divisive role in inciting separatist ethnic
orientations to its fostering of deeper human and animal connections, and the role
of the sea space as an impetus to aesthetic and poetic transformation of city space,
the novel opens itself up to provocative readings in the domain of hydropolitics,
ecocriticism and human geography. My paper will offer an analysis of Khan’s
evocation of water’s dual potentialities as a resource of exploitation and resistance
in the context of Pakistan’s current political crisis.
Christine Gilmore – Narrating a Nubian ‘Nile World’: Hydropolitics, Hegemony and
Resistance in Yahya Mukhtar’s Jibāl al-Kohl (2001)
PhD Candidate, School of English, University of Leeds
chris8tine80@gmail.com
As Terje Tvedt has observed "The River Nile serves as an example by which to
explore various uses and meanings of water: how rivers have influenced policy and
how they in turn have been shaped by politics; how concepts of nature develop, and
how these concepts or particular social constructions of nature can have impacts on
both river development and politics." (The River Nile in the Age of the British:
Political Ecology and the Quest For Economic Power (London: IB Taurus, 2004, p.3).
During the age of British colonialism in Egypt a hegemonic Nile discourse emerged
that conceived of the river as little more than a 'drainage ditch' to feed the irrigation
economy of the north and facilitate industrial development and paid scant attention
to the perspectives and priorities of the 'people in the way'. This utilitarian approach
to Nile waters continued to influence hydrological developments into the
postcolonial era, notably construction of the Aswan High Dam which flooded all of
ancient Nubia and displaced its' inhabitants in the name of national(ist) development
priorities. Whereas Nubian perspectives towards the Nile and its development have
remained marginalised in Egyptian official discourse, this paper will re-centre our
attention onto the marginalised Nubian 'Nile World' which attaches alternative
meanings and value to the river and its resources. Through analysis of Muhammad
Khalil Qasim's novel Ash-Shamandoura (The River Gauge, 1968) I will examine how
changes to the Nubian 'Nile World' which accompany the raising of the Aswan
Barrage in 1933 are represented within the text and how Nubian strategies of
resistance to the raising of the Aswan Barrage in 1933 contribute to the critique of
the inequities of modernist hydrological development in the Nile Basin.
Panel 3: The Consuming Imagination
Bürge Abiral – Urban Permaculturists in Istanbul: Challenges and Strategies for
Action
MA Student, Sabancı University, Istanbul, Turkey
burgeabiral@sabanciuniv.edu
Introduced as a science of ethical design in the 1970s by Bill Mollison and David
Holmgren, permaculture aims to provide an alternative integrated system of
livelihood which cares for all beings. Even though it is concerned with ethical and
eco-friendly design, use, and distribution of resources, Mollison’s description of the
system places permaculture outside the political field. In other words, concerned
with personal and local responses for change, permaculture is not launched as a
political project. In my thesis research, I’m interested in the denial of the political by
permaculturists and in the ramifications of this denial. More specifically, I’m
exploring how this post-ideological language finds its niche within the specific
context of Turkey, especially after the Gezi uprisings when more and more people
have been showing interest in permaculture.
For this specific paper, I will draw from my current fieldwork with permaculturists
who live in metropolitan Istanbul and, always cognizant of the question of the
political, focus on the challenges of practicing and organizing around permaculture in
an urban setting. The loose structure of permaculture enables a diversity of
approaches and allows for a wide range of participation; ecovillages, community
gardens, and personal initiatives such as growing herbs in the balcony, can all be
seen as equally creating alternatives to capitalism. Yet this flexibility runs the danger
of incorporation into the capitalist economy. Bearing this in mind, I ask how urban
permaculturists integrate the ethical principles put forth by permaculture into their
daily lives. What practices and discourses develop, sustain, and change their
“ecological habitus” in the city (Haluza-DeLay 2008)? Are their lifestyle choices
simply a cooptation of dissent by neoliberal ideology? Or are they strategic actions
for change while urban permaculturists navigate the ethical contradiction of
envisioning a new world and functioning within the paradigm of capitalism?
Hugh Crosfield – Don’t Squeeze A South Africa Dry!: mobilizing the orange as antiapartheid antiracist resistance (1972-1974)
Hugh.Crosfield.2009@live.rhul.ac.uk
In this paper I focus on the Dutch anti-apartheid and antiracist organization, Boycott
Outspan Action (BOA) and their boycott of apartheid citrus. Based in Leiden, Holland,
the organization were unique among five very different Dutch anti-apartheid
organizations of the 1970s and 80s in interpreting apartheid as the hard edge of
European racism. The BOA encouraged Dutch public, corporations and government
to withdraw from complicity with the "bouwstenen voor apartheid" (building blocks
for apartheid), and to "see themselves whitely" (Hooker, 2009:6). Chiming with
Jason Moore's (2003) 'four cheaps' of capitalism's unsustainable world ecology, the
building blocks for South African apartheid, they argued, were international trade
and migration, South African-Dutch/British cultural ties, and the procuring of cheap
land and labour.
Drawing from interview data with activists and archival research, the paper traces
the redeployment of somatic markers of famine from media reports of the South
African resettlement areas, to the front-line of the BOA's Outspan boycott. The BOA
positioned Outspan oranges as ubiquitous and tangible building blocks for apartheid
and initiated a nationwide boycott of the South African citrus exporter in 1973.
Expanding on Timothy Morton's (2000) writing on the blood-sugar topos (as the
'guilt trope' of eighteenth century British antislavery), the paper forwards my
concept of activist bodywork to demonstrate the utility of Outspan oranges to antiapartheid. By performing activist bodywork the BOA harnessed specific emotions
and mobilized the orange's socio-material properties and histories to parody the
'blood-ties' between apartheid South Africa and Holland. The expansion of white
frontier colonialism and citrus capitalism were indelibly linked by the organization.
As the BOA's remarkable 'Inspan Girls' demonstrated, familiar borders between
South Africa and Holland, black and white, oppressed and liberator, were made to
seem uncomfortably fragile by the BOA and their philosophy 'racism here apartheid
there'.
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay – An Uneven Modernity: Famine in the Colonial
Imagination
DPhil Candidate, Faculty of English, University of Oxford
priyasha.mukhopadhyay@wolfson.ox.ac.uk
The focus of this paper is Harriet Tytler’s An Englishwoman in India and J E Scott’s In
Famine Land, both of which discuss the experience of famine in late colonial India.
While the nineteenth century was the first period in English history untainted by
domestic famines, the threat of hunger continued to be a haunting presence in the
Victorian imagination. This was largely because of the alarming number of famines in
India at the time, leading to several million deaths in a 130-year period. With
economic policy and grain distribution patterns implying that “Londoners were in
effect eating India’s bread” (Davis 26), modernity at home thus came at the cost of
modernity abroad, India England’s ”[u]tilitarian laboratory” (Davis 31).
In this paper, I am particularly interested in the manner in which questions of food
and consumption economy are quickly replaced by the need to create an alternative
spiritual economy, drawing on the altruistic bent of the colonial ideological project. I
will demonstrate how the narratives my paper will deal with use famine and
starvation as a means of rethinking subject-formation, suggesting that the act of
both experiencing as well as witnessing hunger, particularly the hunger of others,
becomes a central part in the consolidation of often unstable, errant colonialist
identities. This, I will argue, is partly fuelled by the manipulation of narrative form –
the new documentary genres of the autobiography, report, photograph and realist
short story – that enables vicarious witnessing for readers at home. Alongside these
texts, I will examine two tracts written by Indians that address the question of
famine, RC Dutt’s Open Letters to Lord Curzon on Famines and Land Assessments in
India (1900) and Dadabhai Naoroji’s Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901),
arguing that their alternative deployment of statistical methods and rhetoric stands
as the beginnings of anti-colonial material practices in India.
The paper will thus be a reminder that perceptions of progress are ultimately
dependent on the indefinite production of otherness that must persist for
colonialism to sustain itself. The starving Indian at the periphery of the world
becomes then, both the victim and the impetus for resistance.
Panel 4: Flows of Resources, Flows of Power
Hannah Boast – Pipelines: water infrastructure and the construction of Palestinian
communities in Tawfik Abu Wael’s Atash (Thirst)
PhD Candidate, Department of English and Related Literature, University of York
hannah.boast@york.ac.uk
Over the last twenty years, the right to water has become increasingly cited as a
major contributing factor to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, as well as
a key aspect of any potential resolution (Allan 2002; Zeitoun 2011). Much
scholarship and political speculation has centred on the idea of “water wars” (Starr
1988; Shiva 2002). This focus on water conflict within Israeli and Palestinian politics
follows a shift in popular and academic political discourse more generally, the two
mantras of which have become the claim that “water has become as important a
commodity as oil”, and the 1995 statement of former World Bank Vice-President
Ismail Serageldin that “many of the wars of this century were about oil…wars of the
next century will be over water” (in Selby, 2003).
In this paper I engage with the discourse of “water wars” through exploring Arab
Israeli director Tawfik Abu Wael’s film Atash (2004), arguing that the film
demonstrates the ways in which control of water has become an Israeli means of
exercising a form of biopolitical control over Palestinian society and a way of
restricting Palestinian economic development (Alatout 2006; 2008). At the same
time, I show that Wael’s film illustrates the inadequacies of discussing water conflict
in terms of grand geopolitical scales. In contrast, I argue with Selby (2003) that water
conflict is more likely to manifest in terms of low-level conflict between local
communities, and control of water supplies can, as in the patriarchal family depicted
in Atash, become a means of reinforcing structures of social power within Palestinian
society. Finally, I argue that the film illustrates an important point about water
conflict which is often absent from debates, which is that the right to water is
worthless without the political and financial means to put in place a system of water
infrastructure. This shows that, as a number of critical geographers have highlighted,
water is a resource which undermines the separation of the “human” and the
“natural” (Kaika 2005; Linton 201; Swyngedouw 2004).
Treasa De Loughry: Plasticide and Petro-Modernity
PhD Candidate, UCD's Humanities Institute and School of English, University College
Dublin
treasa.de-loughry@ucdconnect.ie
This paper examines plastic as an index of petro-modernity despite its strangely
distant relationship from its origins in crude oil. As Barry Commoner notes in The
Closing Circle, by its own internal logic each new petrochemical process generates a
powerful tendency to proliferate products and displace pre-existing ones. While oil is
embedded in our energy intensive culture and is described as the “ur-commodity,”
we have accultured energy’s role in determining material and social life, in part due
to the immediately alienating affects of dispersed petro-cultures (Graeme
MacDonald, 2013). The profusion of derivate products, like plastic, operates at a
remove from such energy ontologies and how we think about the production, use
and disuse of global plastic commodities relies on geographic and temporal
displacements and appeals to consumerism and individual ethical choices. Yet
petro-modernity is at the heart of neoliberalism and what Jason Moore calls the
frontier-led appropriations of cheap nature and unpaid work which are central to the
strategic expansions of commodity capitalism.
In this paper, I firstly examine plastic as toxic waste or “plasticide”: as
documented by Chris Jordan in his 2006 Midway project, which chronicled the
harmful affects of plastic ingestion on an isolated albatross population near the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I suggest that by reifying plastic as waste we risk
removing it from larger material and social relations, and in this talk I suggest the
need for a systemic critique of firstly, plastic’s material contiguity with the petroleum
industry, and secondly, the uneven registration of plastic as both hazardous waste
and desirable modern commodity. The second half of this paper discusses Karen Tei
Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest and its depiction of environmental
degradation, commodity frontiers and speculative frenzy in Brazil’s Amazon
rainforest. Throughout this paper, aesthetic forms, from the toxic sublime to the
telenovela, problematize future effective action against a material that is indefinitely
enduring, infinitely transmutable and systemically entangled in wider energyconsumption networks.
Amber Murrey – Land, Place and Violence in ‘Narratives of Loss’ Along the ChadCameroon Oil Pipeline
DPhil Candidate in Geography, University of Oxford
amber.murrey-ndewa@jesus.ox.ac.uk
In this presentation, I will explore everyday life in two Cameroonian towns, Kribi and
Nanga-Eboko, which are being reshaped by intersecting resource extraction projects.
I argue that structural violence is a powerful conceptual framework for illustrating
the intersections between discrete patterns of violence, including the ways in which
disparate violences are compounded as they are experienced in people’s everyday
lives. A multidimensional structural analysis attuned to agency is necessary to
analyse these rural areas, which are at the centre of an exploitative global matrix
composed of concurrent extractive projects. I analyze the multitude of corporate
and economic interests that convene and intervene in these ‘local’ spaces: In NangaEboko the matrix is composed of oil extraction, land acquisition for a rice-for-export
plantation, sugar cane plantations and illegal logging. Kribi is shaped by a matrix of
oil extraction, land grabs for tourist projects, commercial fishing and the
construction of the Kribi Deep Sea Port. In such settings, a focus on 'just one'
extractive project fails to illustrate the ways in which people's livelihoods and lives
are being simultaneously affected by multiple and overlapping large-scale capitalist
projects.
Drawing from Rob Nixon’s ‘slow violence’ and Paul Farmer’s articulations of
‘structural violence’, I focus on people’s interpretations and experiences of structural
violence. In this case study, I highlight two manifestations of structural violence
along the pipeline: land dispossession and ‘displacement in-place’. Displacement inplace is a form of abandonment displacement through the destruction of local
livelihoods and large-scale ecological damage, which destroy people’s home
landscapes without displacing them far from it (physical displacement did happen in
some places, but only at short distances). Instead of displacing people from their
land, these projects transform landscapes, leaving people displaced at-home with
contaminated water sources, soil and coastal erosion, deforestation and oil spill
pollution. People’s narratives of the experiences of living alongside multiple
extractive projects provide nuanced insights into the material production and
contestation of structural violence in local spaces.
Panel 5: Appropriating Conservation
Annette LaRocco – The comprehensive hunting ban: conservation, resource-use,
and contestation in postcolonial Botswana
PhD Candidate in Politics, Trinity College, University of Cambridge
aal33@cam.ac.uk
Contestations over conservation have emerged as key fault lines between the
state, citizens and economic actors operating in Botswana. Beginning in January
2014, the Government of Botswana announced there would be an indefinite, nationwide ban on hunting. This transition away from a consumptive‐use model indicates a
significant shift in the country’s long‐term conservation and land--use strategies,
altering who may profit from conservation spaces and how conservation is made
lucrative for the state.
This paradigm shift brings into focus the ways the creation and maintenance of the
conservation estate can function as a process of postcolonial state formation, as well
as a site of resistance to such endeavors. Unfolding conservation processes, like the
hunting ban, evoke the relationship between the state and rural space, highlight the
manner in which a state’s authority over land is contested, negotiated or imposed,
underscore contentious notions of resource ownership, access and use, and draw
attention to the state’s (in)capability to enact coercive control over citizen behavior.
This paper draws on over eight months of empirical fieldwork in Botswana’s
Okavango Delta and Central Kalahari ecological and conservation areas, as well as in
the capital, Gaborone. Its findings are informed by interviews with key stakeholders,
including government officials, elected representatives, civil society, private sector
operators in both the tourism and cattle industries, and most importantly, among
rural dwellers living adjacent to large conservation spaces.
By examining the hunting ban, this paper is a timely contribution to the study of
contemporary (re)negotiations and contestations regarding the conservation
paradigm. This process speaks to the larger role of conservation as a state-‐‐building
mechanism in postcolonial Botswana. The strategic use of conservation policy may
be employed by the state in attempts to promote particular land uses, lifestyles, and
identities among rural citizens, as well as in efforts secure the state’s economic and
territorial integrity, coercive and enforcement power, profit-‐‐generating capability
and international prestige.
Sam Perks – Representing Homo Oeconomicus: Capitalist Relations in Planet Earth
MA Student, University of York
sp698@york.ac.uk
Planet Earth is one of dozens of BBC nature documentaries that present non-human
nature to a mass audience – an audience that has grown exponentially with the
successful export of this documentary product to countries around the world. This
paper will ask: what sort of natural world does Planet Earth envisage? What roles are
played by the camera-operators who glory in their capture of footage, and the
editing team who arrange shots to fit the overlying narrative to be purred by
Attenborough? Where do humans – and, specifically, documentary-makers – fit in
the grand classificatory depiction of life on planet Earth?
This paper argues that the Planet Earth production team regulate perceptions of
non-human animal behaviour to fit widely-comprehensible capitalist terminology,
whilst neglecting to explain their own behaviour in the same terms. Their reasons for
doing this are twofold: the existing naturalist, ethological and sociobiological
discourses of animals describes non-human animal behaviour in economic language,
and Planet Earth cannot help but replicate this outlook by adhering to the
evolutionary narrative. In addition, economic language is immediately accessible, as
it offers a rational explanation for animal activity in terms that apply to human
behaviour in the capitalist system.
By exploring the tenets of the nature documentary genre, in conjunction with the
economic discourse of the evolutionary narrative, this paper will show the contrast
between the technically-oriented representations of non-human animals and the
jovial, inclusive tone of the Diaries segment of Planet Earth episodes. Scrutinising
the nature documentary-makers through their own systematising lens reveals an
editorial decision to obscure the ultra-rational homo oeconomicus as manifested in
the camera-wielding humans of Planet Earth.
Panel 6: Human and Nonhuman Selves
Frances Hemsley – Human hides, Animal skins: Marechera and Zimbabwean
Environmental Policy
PhD Candidate, University of Leeds
en12fch@leeds.ac.uk
This paper reads figurations of the psychical skin in Marechera, a concept I adapt
from Anzieu’s psychoanalytic theory of the skin ego and its auxiliary psychical
envelope. In Marechera, psychical envelopes are often continuous with acute animal
suffering, while psychical skins are not exclusively anthropomorphic. I suggest that
histories of settler racism affect the fantasies and figurations of psychical skins,
particularly their animalisation. In Zimbabwe wildlife, and the environment it
inhabits, is a lucrative resource. It is the focus of a growing tourism industry, while
particular conservation and sustainable development policies (which often operate
to the exclusion of local peoples and knowledges) attract funds from aid donors.
Conservation policy in Zimbabwe has often had to adapt with little modification
colonial forms of land management (the creation of reserved lands and waterways,
centralization, the perceived need to address ecological degradation by de-stocking
the Communal Lands). Thus, asking how histories of settler racism affect the
fantasies and figurations of psychical skins enables me to consider how these
psychical skins might relate to future environmentalisms. In other words, I ask what
implications there might be for postcolonial eco-critical theory if the construction of
a psychical skin, which has the structure of an envelope or even an interface, is
inflected by settler racism and colonial socio-spatial assignments. The ego, in
Anzieu’s theory, constitutes itself, first and foremost, on a tactile foundation so the
notion of the skin ego provides a plausible link between the psyche and the sensate,
the self and its tactile environments. With Marechera, I suggest that we can read
beyond the biological bedrock of the psychical container, for a psychical ecology that
links skin experience (never exclusively ‘human’) to postcolonial environmentalisms.
A psychical ecology that moves beyond a specifically human skin and a biological
bedrock can contribute to interdisciplinary research on Zimbabwean environmental
policy (Bassett and Crummey 2003, Keeley and Scoones 2003). This work has
identified in particular the need to move beyond any straightforward assumptions of
an apolitical scientific approach to conservation and resource management.
Margot Young – Decolonising Subjectivity and Intolerable Bestial Others
Psychoanalyst, independent scholar and author
margotyoung@regent.plus.com
In History of Madness Foucault identified a shift in conceptions of animality, which
had been synonymous with madness and deviance during the “great confinement”,
but which became increasingly associated with “harmonious” nature during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even while real nonhumans were becoming
subject to regimes of industrial scale confinement, consumption and reproduction.
In this paper I will argue that shifting conceptions of animality were bound to the
emergence of specifically human subjectivities that were intrinsic to agricultural,
colonial and biopolitical government of land, and of the living as exploitable
resource. Agro-colonial subjectivity has instituted an interiorised norm predicated on
separation from rather then being situated amongst other beings. Nonhumans thus
become fantasmic psycho-bio-political objects, inhabiting a space beyond the
horizon of interior human psychic landscapes.
Those who would not, or could not, become the subjects of colonial domestication;
who were deemed inassimilable to agricultural and later, to agro-industrial resource
exploitation were marginalised and extirpated. Native peoples and territorial
nonhumans such as wolves were particular targets. Their demonization relates not
only to their being seen as competitors for resources but to their signifying a trace of
non-agricultural, or pre-agricultural, life. In this sense they came to represent the
disavowed uncanny; the intolerable bestial other to colonial agriculturalism as
normalisation.
However colonial genocides and ecocides have not erased these traces. Resistances
to the dualisms which cohere within discourses of ecological separativity, including
primitive/civilised, animal/human, interior/exterior, deviance/normalcy can be
found in indigenous and postcolonial reclamations which challenge normalised agrocolonial identities and the eco-bio-political government of the living and the land. I
will illustrate my argument with specific reference to changing attitudes to wolves in
North America and the significance of indigenous resistance to the reinstitution of
government sanctioned wolf-hunts.
Panel 7: Land, Environment and Resistance in Urban and Rural Spaces
Rebekah Cumpsty – Locating the Sacred in the City: Conceptual Mapping as
Resistance in Johannesburg and New York
PhD Candidate, Department of English and Related Literature, University of York
rllc501@york.ac.uk
This paper is concerned with how the tensions of diasporic non-belonging have led
to the streets increasingly becoming a contested site of resistance, reappropriated
through pedestrian mapping, as discussed in my roundtable paper, but further
through the transposition and integration of African epistemologies within the
modern, globalised, urban environment.
In Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow and Teju Cole’s Open City pedestrian
mapping is deployed alongside references to the ancestors and the Yoruba aegis, as
a means of resisting the alienation, isolation and marginalisation experienced within
the globalised cities of Johannesburg and New York respectively. Yet they go further
by traversing, naming and narrativising the territory that has been covered, the
protagonists of these two novels assert a hard-won knowledge of the streets,
establishing a point of identification and belonging in the otherwise sprawling,
anonymous mass of the city. Enacting an inversion of the colonial mapping and neocolonial/neoliberal restructuring of these global metropoli, the two protagonists
deploy conceptual and pedestrian mapping in order to individually claim an area of
the city as their own.
Moreover, in these two distinct globalised cities, representations of African belief
systems firmly position the sacred within the city, this coupled with the considered
repetition of walking and obsession with locality offers the potential for
understanding this process as a ritualised reclamation and sacralisation of territory
that is twice defamiliarised, once as a result of migration into the area and once as a
consequence of urban restructuring. Thus, the sacralisation of the streets can be
conceptualised as a strategy of resistance undertaken by the protagonists,
reappropriating and resignifying urban spaces as particular localities capable of
providing a new physical and ontological ‘home’ to their diasporic inhabitants.
Puneet Dhaliwal – Zapatista Autonomy: Land and Indigenous Resistance
Dphil Candidate, Department of Politics & International Relations, University of
Oxford
puneet.dhaliwal@stx.ox.ac.uk
The implementation of the NAFTA in 1994 heralded the intensification of historical
processes of capitalist accumulation, which continue apace today, particularly
through the dispossession and commodification of indigenous lands by multinational
corporations (Harvey, 2003; 2005). For such reasons, the Zapatista movement
denounced the NAFTA as a ‘death sentence’ for Mexico’s Indian population, and
initiated a struggle for land and autonomy for indigenous communities.
In this paper, I will explore the political character and transformative potential of the
Zapatistas’ struggles over land, with the aim of accentuating the double-edged
nature of local autonomy as a practice of resistance against neoliberal globalization. I
will draw on primary fieldwork in Chiapas as well as theoretical literature on the
movement in order to argue that autonomous communities, despite functioning as
bulwarks against capital’s encroachment, may also permit the extension of
neoliberal hegemony. On this basis, I will suggest that local struggles over land are
best conducted under the aegis of a broader structural transformation of the
capitalist world-system.
I begin by sketching Zapatista autonomy as an experiment in local indigenous
democracy that impedes land grabs by ecotourism developments and extractive
industries, particularly mining. Nevertheless, these local efforts to ‘de-link’ from
colonial and capitalist power structures (Mignolo, 2007) exhibit significant
limitations in their emancipatory potential, both internally and externally. The
persistence of repressive gender hierarchies within Zapatista communities, for
instance, undercuts their integrity as liberated spaces beyond state and capital
(Mentinis, 2006). Moreover, contrary to romanticized readings of the Zapatistas’
revolutionary or anti-imperial impact (Holloway, 2002; Tully, 2008), the dispersed
nature of local autonomy may leave it vulnerable to containment and co-optation by
neoliberal hegemony. Accordingly, I conclude that effective resistance to neoliberal
globalization requires that practices of local autonomy be integrated into a broader
project for the structural transformation of the capitalist world-system.
Panel 8: Aesthetics of Resistance and Resistant Reading Practices
Karen Jackson – Modes of Revealing and Rupturing the Rhetorical and Cognitive
Routines of Consumer Culture in Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s long poem sybil unrest
PhD Candidate, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
jacksokl@mcmaster.ca
My paper examines Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s collaborative long poem sybil unrest
(2008) as a text that rhetorically operates to resist capitalism’s routinized temporal
rhythm in order to dismantle the restrictions its mechanistic propulsion imposes
upon processes of critical reflection. I argue that rather than yielding to dominant
discourse’s system of signification in order to articulate their critique, Lai and Wong
reject its prescribed meaning by constructing an aberrantly ordered language that
challenges and impairs interpretative impulses and anticipations of the poem’s
narrative trajectory. Consequently, Lai and Wong dislocate language and
interpretative practice from the dominant flow of time, and, in doing so, they at
once expose and reject the prescriptions of meaning that circulate within that
temporality. Ultimately, I argue that Lai and Wong’s poem works to activate the
critical processes of consciousness necessary for resistive or transformative social
and political intervention that the routines of capitalist social life work to suspend,
and that Lai and Wong work to recuperate the capitalist subject’s agency within the
present and establish a viable terrain upon which to critique and contest the
prescriptive forces of capitalism’s routinized temporality.
Rebecca Duncan - Visceral Fiction: Rerouting Affective Economies in Contemporary
South African Literature
PhD Candidate, Gieβen University
rebeccaduncan001@gmail.com
In this paper, I consider a selection of texts belonging to the still-amorphous – and
not uncontentiously titled – ‘post-transitional’ South African canon that, over the
past two years, has been increasingly identified with a turn to the popular in the
country’s cultural production. Such texts, significantly, tend not lack political agenda.
The work of Lauren Beukes, for example, the music of Die Antwoord and the films of
Neil Blomkamp: all might be read as engagements with post- apartheid South
Africa’s globalist faith in neo-liberal capital, and with the economic perpetuation of
divisions that characterised the country under its old, oppressive administration. As
such, these texts situate themselves in a precariously entangled position, critiquing
the ebb and flow of global commodities even as they inhabit thoroughly
commoditised generic forms.
My paper interrogates this complex, complicit stance, and suggests that, in the rise
of the politically engaged popular, we might begin to discern the shape of another
especially critically productive inclination; one that might well be considered South
African fiction’s ‘affective turn.’ After all, many of the forms cropping up in the postmillennial nation deal in – and are marketed for – their capacity to engender visceral
reader reaction. Drawing on Hardt and Negri’s thinking around Empire as a world
ambivalently underpinned by ‘affective labour,’ I venture that it is in the purposeful
manipulation and activation of feeling in the reader – of horror, for example, disgust
or tenderness – that recent productions seek to mobilize resistance. These fictions
work towards an egalitarian, affirmative reconfiguration of exploitative relationships
delineated in-text, doing so in a way that makes of readers themselves a resource,
and they insist, too, that dissent remains possible, even under the universal, neocolonial reach of global capital.
Dominic Davies – Infrastructural Reading: How to Critique Cross-national Capital in
Colonial Literature
DPhil Candidate, University of Oxford
dominic.davies@st-annes.ox.ac.uk
This paper develops a critical methodology built on the material and conceptual axis
of World-Systems Theory as outlined by Wallerstein and others. The paper shows
how world-systems’ analysis of an economic terrain can be translated into a cultural
one. It then seeks to collapse what some have found to be reductive materialist
divisions onto one another, answering Raymond Williams’ call ‘to replace the
formula of base and superstructure with the more active idea of a field of mutually if
also unevenly determining forces.’ The textual excavation of this ‘uneven field’ of
‘forces’ (an unevenness that recalls the analyses of cross-national capitalist
development of Lenin and Trotsky) can, this paper will argue, be undertaken through
a reading practice rooted in a dualistic, yet connected use of the word
“infrastructure”. Infrastructure operates as a critical tool for opening up and
comprehending a mutually sustaining relationship embedded within literary
narratives, especially those concerned with colonial, postcolonial, and cross-national
capitalist geographies: the use of infrastructures in the text, both metaphorically and
symbolically, and the infrastructures of the text, be they geographic, social or
economic.
Infrastructural routes are not only a loci of economic capital investment abroad.
They are also invested with, to take Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology, ‘symbolic capital’.
Literary representations of infrastructure can thus be read as cultural equivalents of
a networked economic ‘core’ in relation to the peripheral zones that lie beyond their
borders. The translation of the dynamic relationality and interdependence between
core and periphery from an economic into a cultural terrain reveals the way in which
literary texts register varying degrees of ‘alterity’: a cultural and geographic space
that contains, nested within it or gestured to by it, the capacity for resistance. The
traces of peripheral resistance to networks of capital—from the imperial webs of the
British Empire to the informal, de-centred circuits of neoliberal globalisation—thus
shadow the infrastructures of textual productions. Through the development of this
methodology, the paper looks toward an assessment of the impact that a cultural
strata might have upon economies of world-systems.
Biographies
Bürge Abiral
I am currently pursuing a Masters in Cultural Studies at Sabancı University in
Istanbul, Turkey. I received my BA from Williams College, USA, in 2011 with Honors
in Anthropology and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa Society. I have recently
worked on the written memories of politically active women who were incarcerated
during the 1980-1983 military junta in Turkey. My article named “Silencing Sexual
Violence and Vulnerability: Women’s Narratives of Incarceration during the 19801983 Military Junta in Turkey” will be published in Gendered Wars, Gendered
Memories (eds. Andre Petö and Ayşe Gül Altınay, Ashgate Publishing). I am a
member of the organizing committee of Gendered Memories of War and Political
Violence Young Researchers Conference, to be held in Sabancı University in April
2014. Also working as a translator, I recently finished translating Toward an
Anthropology of Women (ed. Rayna Reiter, 1975) to Turkish. I’m currently doing
fieldwork for my MA thesis research in which I focus on permaculture as a social
movement and ethical practice, and investigate how permaculture practitioners
define the political.
Hannah Boast
Hannah Boast is a third year PhD Candidate in the Department of English and
Related Literature at the University of York, co-supervised in the Department of
Geography at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on representations of
water and ecological crisis in contemporary Israeli and Palestinian literature, and her
work has been published in Green Letters, Jewish Quarterly, and is forthcoming in
Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She coordinates the AHRC-funded research
network Imagining Jerusalem, c. 1099 to the Present Day, and is a member of the
White Rose Research Network on Hydropolitics.
Hugh Crosfield
I studied for my BA in human geography and MA in cultural geography at Royal
Holloway University of London, where I remained for the duration of my doctorate.
In February 2014 I successfully defended my PhD entitled 'Commodity boycotts,
activist bodywork and race'. To date my empirical focus has been on Dutch antiapartheid activism and contemporary anti-trafficking advocacy, but my research is
more broadly concerned with understanding how activists 'do work' to particular
bodies and commodities in order to engage different audiences and produce a range
of emotions, solidarities and responsibilities. I am also interested in the 'work'
achieved by the materiality of particular commodities in relation to social movement
politics. The recent neoliberalization and 'responsibilization' of consumer morality
has meant interrogating the meaning of these coalitions of materiality, affect and
philanthropy with a critical approach to the goods and values added to antislavery.
Rebekah Cumpsty
Rebekah Cumpsty completed her NRF funded MA at the University of Cape Town. She is
currently a PhD researcher at the University of York, supervised by David Attwell and
partially funded by the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust. She is researching constructions of
the sacred in African postcolonial literature. Her research offers a transnational comparative
analysis of the production and construction of postsecular sacred spaces.
Dominic Davies
Dominic Davies is currently a third-year DPhil student at the University of Oxford
under the supervision of Professor Elleke Boehmer. He is researching the way in
which colonial literature set in the geographies of South Africa and South Asia at the
height of the British Empire configure the relationship between imperial
infrastructure and various forms of anti-imperial resistance. He is the Network
Facilitator for the Leverhulme-funded Network, “Planned Violence: Post/colonial
Urban Infrastructures and Literature”.
Treasa De Loughrey
Treasa De Loughry is a third-year Irish Research Council postgraduate scholar
(comparable to AHRC), based in UCD's Humanities Institute and UCD’s School of
English. Her research is supervised by Dr Sharae Deckard and Dr John Brannigan.
Treasa's thesis examines how global fictions by Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell and
Rana Dasgupta register world-systemic economic and ecological crises. Treasa is the
recipient of the 2014/2015 Fulbright-National University of Ireland Humanities
Student Award and will complete her PhD in University of California, Los Angeles.
She is also a tutor on UCD’s “Critical Theory” module, a co-organiser of the 2013
“World-Ecology, World-Economy, World-Literature” symposium, and a co-organiser
of the Dublin “Left Reading Group.”
Puneet Dhaliwal
Puneet Dhaliwal is a scholar-activist and DPhil candidate in Political Theory at the
University of Oxford. His doctoral research addresses global democratic theory from
a de-colonial standpoint that challenges Eurocentric accounts of democratic politics
and instead foregrounds the perspectives and practices of Third World resistance
movements. He has published on the Zapatista movement, radical democratic
theory, and the Spanish indignados movement. Prior to his doctoral studies, he
worked as a campaigns officer at War on Want, campaigning for the regulation of
private military and security companies. He has also conducted fieldwork and
solidarity work in Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico.
Saira Fatima Dogar
My name is Saira Fatima Dogar and I am a postgraduate research student in the
School of English at the University of Leeds. I did my masters in Twentieth Century
Literature from University of Sussex at Brighton. Before joining Leeds, I was working
as an Assistant Professor in Department of English at Government College University,
Lahore, Pakistan. I have taught courses in Postcolonial Literature and Modernist
British Fiction to postgraduate classes for many years. I am currently on a study
leave to pursue doctoral studies at Leeds. My research involves an analysis of spacebody dynamics in Pakistani Writing in English in the works of Uzma Aslam Khan and
Kamila Shamsie. My abstract proposes an analysis of water’s simultaneous evocation
as a resource of exploitation and resistance in Uzma Aslam Khan’s novel Trespassing.
Rebecca Duncan
Rebecca Duncan holds a DAAD doctoral fellowship at the University of Gieβen in
Germany, where she is completing a PhD on the Gothic as a literary discourse of
postapartheid anxiety. She is currently also a research fellow at the University of
Stirling and has published work on post-millennial South African writing. Her
research interests focus on contemporary South African cultural production,
especially in relation to biopolitics, affective economics, and neo-liberalism and
postcoloniality.
Christine Gilmore
Christine Gilmore is a third year PhD student at the University of Leeds where she is
researching the impact of the Aswan High Dam and subsequent displacement on the
Nubian community in Egypt through analysis of Nubian literary displacement
narratives, employing an interdisciplinary approach which combines insights from
the fields of literary studies, political ecology and development studies. Her thesis is
provisionally titled 'Dams, Displacement and Development in Narratives of the
Nubian Awakening'.
Frances Hemsley
Frances Hemsley is a first year PhD student at the University of Leeds. Her research
interests are in postcolonial African and South Asian literatures, eco-critical theory
and the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche and Didier Anzieu.
Karen Jackson
Karen Jackson is a Ph.D. candidate in her third year of study at McMaster University
in Hamilton, Ontario Canada. Her dissertation research is on how American writers in
the post-9/11 era conceive of government and politics as penetrating and
manipulating everyday life through the notion of a national trauma and a
consciousness of terror and risk.
Annette LaRocco
Annette has just returned from nearly nine months of fieldwork in Botswana,
Conducting data collection in the Okavango Delta and Central Kalahari
Conservation areas. In addition to her research, Annette is involved with the student
group of the Centre of Governance and Human Rights and is an assistant editor for
the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. Before coming to Cambridge she
worked as a researcher in human rights policy in Washington, D.C. She also holds an
MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford, where she was a Clarendon
Scholar.
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is a DPhil candidate in English at the University of Oxford,
where she is an Ertegun Scholar. Her thesis focuses on the role of the book as a
material object in the construction of colonial readerships in South Asia. She also has
a long-standing interest in the history of science and technology in the colonial
period.
Amber Murrey
Amber Murrey is a PhD student in the School of Geography and the Environment at
the University of Oxford. She will be completing her PhD thesis, "Lifescapes of a
Pipedream: A Decolonial Mixed-Tape of Structural Violence and Resistance in Two
Towns Along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline", during the 2014/15 academic year as
a Dissertation Write-Up Fellow in the Department of African and African Diaspora
Studies at Boston College. Her research interests include decoloniality,
PanAfricanism, militarism, structural violence, resistance and filmmaking.
Jay Parker
My work focuses on exploring the potential for creative conversations across
political and literary boundaries. Supervised by Graham Huggan, my thesis stages a
conversation between modern liberalism and four key political novels by Joseph
Conrad, Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under
Western Eyes (1911). Specifically, it examines the ways in which these novels deploy
violence, and uses this to critique recent liberal understandings of self-actualisation,
community, and nation, to show how class, imperialism, and gender are the unlikely
challenges that emerge from the interaction between Conrad and liberalism. I won
the Juliet McLauchlan prize in 2012, awarded by the Joseph Conrad Society (UK).
Before starting my thesis, I worked as a teacher of literature, film, and theory of
knowledge in Hong Kong, where I also coordinated educational action research in a
range of schools across the territory. I continue to work in education, and am
currently leading a public engagement project, working with the Brigshaw Trust and
CapeUK to support teachers’ action research into creative learning.
Sam Perks
Sam Perks is a student on the MA Culture and Thought After 1945 at the University
of York. He has won an Anniversary Research Scholarship from the University of
Leeds and will work towards a PhD on Malaysian and Singaporean novels, under the
supervision of Professor Graham Huggan and Dr Anthony Carrigan.
Lucy Potter
Lucy Potter is an AHRC funded PhD researcher working within the Department of
English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her research focuses on
readings of food and foodways in world-literature, with a particular eye to questions
of world-ecology in relation to agro-food regimes of accumulation. She has a longstanding interest in neoliberalism, particularly the significance of food in the context
of neoliberalism's ongoing crisis. In 2013 she published an article in New Formations,
co-written with her supervisor Dr Claire Westall, investigating ‘Neoliberal Britain’s
Austerity Foodscape’.
Nicola Robinson
Nicola Robinson is a final year PhD candidate and part-time tutor in the department
of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her thesis is entitled
“Resisting Development: Land and Labour in Israeli, Palestinian and Sri Lankan
Literature.” She currently serves on the Editorial Board for the journal Postcolonial
Text and her publications include articles in South Asian Review and Green Letters
and book reviews for other refereed journals.
Margot Young
Margot Young is a practising psychoanalyst, independent scholar and author. She
developed and taught ecologically-oriented courses for psychoanalysts in training for
the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, most recently on Judith Butler and queer
ecologies. Her work questions psychoanalysis as an exclusionary discourse of the
specifically human, and the sustainability of psycho-practices which re-iterate
normalising and exclusionary spaces and boundaries. She is interested in the spatial
and temporal delineations which structure psychological discourses, genealogies of
animality and decolonising subjectivities. She has published papers on the ‘WolfMan’, eco-psychology and the human/animal divide, and Foucault and queer
ecological critique. In collaboration with artist Sarah Hall she performed a piece at
the Cosmopolitan Animals International Conference in London in 2012 entitled
“From Wolf-Man to Dog-Woman: Psychoanalytic Boundary Crossings”, and has been
working on chapters for edited collections on Queer Landscapes, and Wolves
Werewolves and the Gothic.
Conference Participants