[AIW] CFP: Climate Fictions / Indigenous Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge/UK, 24-25 January 2020

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Call for Papers

Climate Fictions / Indigenous Studies

University of Cambridge, Cambridge/UK

24-25 January 2020

https://www.climatefictions.info/call-for-papers 

 

Critical Indigenous studies can neither be perceived as niche, nor
trivialized as topical. In the way climate-capitalism has become an
existential threat, a sincere engagement with Indigenous knowledges has
become ineluctable. This conference seeks to initiate a multidisciplinary
conversation on climate change, as conceived by, and re-inscribed within,
Indigenous literatures. So far within the small domain of English
Humanities, contemporary climate fiction by Indigenous authors have
presented an urgent need to converse with scientific and social-scientific
approaches to climate change. Centring these literatures, especially at a
University such as Cambridge that is itself implicated in climate
capitalism, is vital to confront the racial nature of climate change
discourse which overlooks those who are leading the resistance in theory and
praxis. These literatures tie the material to the literary, forging new
links between resurgence movements and academic scholarship. These
literatures also provide a narrative space for the local exigencies of land
to feature within a global discourse on climate.

 

Climate fictions by writers like Alexis Wright, Linda Hogan and Leanne
Betasamosake Simpson, among others, have shone critical light upon the
effects of slow violence of climate change and the global political nexus of
extractive governments and industries on the ecology and human lives. Within
Indigenous climate fictions, much as within academic, journalistic and new
hybrid forms of writing, long entrenched binary between the 'human' and
'nature' is itself reshuffled, just as existing anthropocentric anxieties of
climate change are destabilized by the re-interrogation of the place of the
human within the ecological.

 

At the same time, the change in climate is not in postponement, making it
predictive, but in continuum with human history's interaction with nature,
tying settler-colonialism and resource-capitalism to catastrophes like flash
floods, melting glaciers, and rising temperatures. Indigenous populations
around the world are affected through forced dispossessions, that, in turn,
have had a profound impact on their politics, cultures, languages, and
literatures. The complicity of governments and academic institutions in
abetting the ramifications of capitalism induced climate change has brought
together an allied community of writers, scholars, activists, artists and
filmmakers to form a network of strength and solidarity across nations.
Several movements and landmarks like Idle No More, Dakota Access Pipeline
Protest, Niyamgiri, and Uluru Statement from the Heart, builds upon a strong
culture of protest within and outside the realm of Indigenous fictions.

 

Some questions:

How have path-breaking Indigenous fictions extended a tradition of
storytelling that has shaped contemporary modes, genres and critical
paradigms of fiction?

 

What critical, formal and generic relationships do climate fictions, or
cli-fi, bear with established literary traditions of dystopia, Anthropocene
and science-fictions? In what ways do contemporary Indigenous writers resist
or respond to western academic paradigms of knowledge?

 

How do modes and materialities of Indigenous expression, like oral, written,
performative, digital and multimedia, intersect and affect the social,
political and cultural dimensions of protest and resistance? How do these
dimensions treat ecologies of time and space?

 

What is the relationship between critical Indigenous studies and
decolonization? How does the Indigenous transnational imaginary (as
understood within literary studies) consolidate the plurality of Indigenous
identities and relate not only to the national imaginary, but also to
radical imaginaries that stem from race, gender or caste oppression? What
would a critical comparativism look like?

 

How do Indigenous fictions by and featuring female and/or Queer protagonists
speak to the global issue of gender violence against Indigenous women and
non-binary persons? In what ways do the fields of feminism, Indigenous
Studies, and Queer Theory intersect through climate fictions?

 

How do conceptions of land and 'country' respond to the traditions of
landscape in English and Euroamerican canons? How do genre-defying
Indigenous literatures re-envision the meanings of land rights,
repatriation, and sovereignty?

 

In what ways do emergent Indigenous fictions problematise and rethink ideas
of sustainability and development? How do these literatures rewrite and
project anti-capitalist forms, aesthetics, geographies, and economies?

 

How do Indigenous short forms, like short fictions, memoirs,
life-narratives, songs, travelogues, and testimonies, often collected and
anthologised as part of the colonial archive, resist and recreate the idea
of 'archive' itself? How does the Indigenous archive relate to technologies
of memory and memory-making for Indigenous people?

 

How does the conscious use of Indigenous vocabularies, grammars and
syntactical forms within these fictions "re-invent the enemy's language"
(Joy Harjo, Gloria Bird) to affect a dialectic between English and
Indigenous languages? What political purpose do these dialectics serve?

 

We call for participation by writers, artists, scholars, researchers,
activists, and dissidents. Please apply by submitting upto 500 word
abstracts (in case of papers), portfolio of art (for exhibition), upto
5-minute trailers (for films and documentaries) and upto a page-length
proposal (for presentations showcasing collaborative research). Artists who
wish to exhibit are encouraged to get in touch before applying to discuss
costs of installations. Travel bursaries are available for Indigenous
scholars travelling from abroad.

 

Applications are invited via email until 10 September 2019. Please send your
material to climatefictions at gmail.com <mailto:climatefictions at gmail.com> 

 

URLs:

https://www.climatefictions.info/ 

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/28580 

 

Contact Info: 

climatefictions at gmail.com <mailto:climatefictions at gmail.com>  

Ananya Mishra (am214 at cam.ac.uk <mailto:am214 at cam.ac.uk> )

Siddharth Soni (ss2388 at cam.ac.uk <mailto:ss2388 at cam.ac.uk> )

 

Contact Email: climatefictions at gmail.com <mailto:climatefictions at gmail.com>


 

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