Toxic Tales from the African Anthropocene

Toxic Tales from the African Anthropocene

Gabrielle Hecht (History, University of Michigan)
Friday, February 20, 2015 / 9:30 am
Student Resource Building Multipurpose Room

The Anthropocene has become a rallying point for interdisciplinarity across the humanities, arts, and natural and social sciences. Yet these conversations easily falter, especially when critics observe that the notion can obscure massive inequalities by attributing the unfolding catastrophes to an undifferentiated “humanity.” The Anthropocene thus poses significant conceptual and methodological challenges to the humanities and qualitative social sciences. How can we theorize temporal and spatial scales that allow us to hold the planetary and the particular in the same frame? How can humanists gain purchase on the nexus of waste, toxicity, and violence that forms the core of the Anthropocene? This talk tackles these questions by exploring material histories of toxic waste in and beyond Africa. This talk is part of the workshop “Energy Challenges in the Developing World,” which will consist of two panels following the talk in which scholars will present their latest research on efforts related to a global transition towards cleaner forms of energy.

Sponsored by the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies, the College of Letters and Sciences, the IHC’s Energy Challenges in the Developing World RFG, and the IHC series The Anthropocene: Views from the Humanities.