EHS hosts Dr Uhuru Phalafala
Environmental Humanities South (EHS) is excited to kickstart our seminar series for 2025 academic calendar, hosting Dr Uhuru Phalafala from Stellenbosch University's English Department. In this talk, Dr Phalafala will be discussing the concept of the "Black Eco", drawn from her upcoming book project.
Abstract:
If geography is socially produced[1], then geography is a praxis. When geography’s frames of legitimacy and legibility, its cartographical logics, are hacked and hexed, made and unmade, then insurgent geographies are produced. This insurgency is waged through performative collaboration with earth, forests, mountains, bodies of water, celestial bodies, ancestors, and animals, which I refer to as black ecological practices. In this presentation I dance, move, prostrate, grieve, and sing with contemporary black creative and philosophical ecological praxes as they inhere in the black feminist imagination, through the modality of jazz, poetry, visual arts, and lived experience. These imaginaries, I argue, are rooted and grounded in local cosmologies that uphold social-cosmological-ecological integrity, which I call the Black Eco. They challenge the overdetermined script of settler colonial space and place, producing coordinates to other liberatory geographies available for our habitation.
[1] As argued by Black feminist geographers Katherine McKittrick, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Patricia Noxolo.
DATE: 6 March 2025
TIME: 11 AM - 12:30 PM
VENUE: EHS Seminar room, Humanities Building, Room 4.19 Upper Campus
Online attendance (Zoom): Meeting ID: 930 1172 8856 | Passcode: 420515
BIO: Uhuru Phalafala is a writer, researcher, archivist, and scholar, with research interests in critical race studies, indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies, social movements, and jazz. She is a senior lecturer in Literary Studies at Stellenbosch University, and is the author of Mine Mine Mine (2023); The Collected Poetry of Keorapetse Kgositsile, 1969-2018 (2023); and Keorapetse Kgositsile & the Black Arts Movement: Poetics of Possibility (February 2024). In 2021 she rematriated and republished Malibongwe: Poems From The Struggle By ANC Women (uHlanga, 2020), through her project ‘Recovering Subterranean Archives’. She is currently working on a book project on black ecological practices.
Register to attend: To RSVP, email zainab.adams@uct.ac.za
About EHS Fortnightly Seminar Series: EHS Seminar Series serves as a platform for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary engagement, aligning with EHS's mission to reconceptualize and pursue justice in African environmentalism and climate interventions amidst the ongoing poly-crises across the continent. Understanding that these crises necessitate transcending academic, departmental, and societal boundaries, the EHS Seminar Series aims to support generative dialogue across all faculties—sciences, engineering, health, law, economics, social sciences, and humanities.
The seminars will take place fortnightly on Thursday mornings and are open to all. Each session will feature a guest presenter paired with an EHS researcher. The guest presenter will introduce their topic and work, while the participants will explore points of connection and seek clarification based on their own work as activists, practitioners, and researchers. Following these presentations, the audience will be encouraged to ask questions and share comments.