Environmental Humanities South (EHS), together with the Planetary Portals Collective, made up of Casper Liang Ebbensgaard, Kathryn Yusoff, Kerry Holden, and Michael Salu is excited to announce the African, post-colonial, and black ecologies reading group set to begin on 2 May 2024, running until October 17 2024. In the inaugural session, this gathering will focus attention on the work of Hugo ka Canham's Riotous Deathscape (Wits/Duke University Press, 2023).

The reading group is the culmination of a long-term partnership between EHS and the Planetary Portals Collective, aiming to think about infrastructural politics and the legacies of colonialism on the African continent. By thinking about the afterlives of the empire on the continent, this collaboration seeks to make interventions that are grounded on the emerging scholarship whose concern, amongst others, is the relationships people have with nature, in the wake of climate change and the ecological crisis globally. Other critical themes set to be explored in the reading group are the effects of expulsion from the land, extractive politics, mining, racial capitalism, and the making of the empire. 

Reading list

As a way of preparing well in advance, the key texts that will be explored are Gabrielle Hecht's Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures (Duke University Press, 2024); Aime Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; Quantum Black Creative Geographies: Embodiment, Coherence, Transcendence in a time of Climate Crisis by Patricia Noxolo; I See the Invisible by Nnimo Bassey; Ritual Geology + Gold in Spirit: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa by Robyn d'Avignon and Janet Adomako; and African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke University Press, 2016) by Iheka Cajetan.

For more info, email lesley.green@uct.ac.za and/or k.yussof@qmul.ac.uk