Postdoctoral Project (Habilitation): “Black Atlantic Ecologies: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Black Life Writing beyond the Colonial Anthropocene”
This project attends to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of Black life writing as they merge and meld with different ecosystems and ecological communities across the globe. It reads anew the early canon of Anglophone Caribbean and Black Atlantic life writing to draw attention to the immense critical and creative potential of the environment for the formulation of Black self-hood. Examining how a specific corpus of texts (slave narratives, autobiographies, recorded speeches, archival fragments) reflects the entanglements of Black and colonial ecologies from an ecocritical position, helps me to point towards the prevalence and vitality of Black ecological projects and thought experiments, and adds a literary studies perspective to the growing school of thought on Black geography and Black ecology.
Considering a range of authors – spanning from Moses Bon Sàam, Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince to Mary Seacole – allows me to locate different Caribbean and Black Atlantic environments as relational transfer sites for navigating both environmental and racial injustices and conceptions of Black ecological belonging beyond the colonial anthropocene. Each chapter intervenes into a prevalent debate in the environmental humanities (fugitive/maroon ecologies; geology and extraction studies; the polar/oceanic humanities; critical plant studies and the vegetal turn), while foregrounding Black ecological modes of theorizing, relating to and subverting local as well as global ecosystems. Each chapter ends with a section focusing on contemporary re-imaginations and echoes, offering the opportunity to understand these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ecological inter-dependencies as woven into our present environmental crisis.
Workshop: Maroon Ecologies, Maroon Imaginaries
2024
Funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation). With Henry Ivry (School of Critical Studies and the Beniba Centre for Slavery Studies, Glasgow University).
Project description: The aim of this project is to critically and creatively engage with the figure of the maroon, i.e. the runaway slave, and attendant practices of marronage, i.e. of escaping slavery. Along two lines of inquiry, ecology and imagination, we will trace alternative maroon worlds and worldviews that have long occupied a vital place in Black thinking. To this end, a group of scholars working across geography, archaeology, anthropology, literary history and musicology will probe different environmental and cultural contexts of marronage. Exploring a variety of geographical and historical sites of marronage, we want to develop a set of (heuristic, pedagogical, methodological) tools for thinking about the radical possibilities available in the long history of marronage. Our goal is to engage with marronage as an ecological, political, and creative practice, underlining how Black ways of engaging with the environment provide a conceptual and practical reorientation to anthropogenic climate change.
Workshop (Bonn, July 2024), with Farai Chipato (Glasgow), Justin Dunnavant (UCLA), Olívia M. Gomes da Cunha (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), Isis Semaj-Hall (UWI Mona), Celeste Winston (Temple University).
Water as Method: Reading the Hydrocolony in Global Literature
2023-2024
Collaborative research project. Funded by the Bonn-Melbourne Research Excellence Fund. Principal Investigator. With Co-PIs Tyne Daile Sumner (University of Melbourne), Keyvan Allahyari (University of Melbourne) and Katharina Fackler (Bonn University).
Project Description: The primary objective of this project is to articulate the significance of water, not only as encompassing settler-colonial politics, but also as a cultural, technological, and aesthetic formation with its own mobile and diverse permutations. With a comparative geographical focus, the project introduces water as a modality for reading global literature. By considering internal waterways as well as surrounding waterscapes, Water as Method offers innovative ways for reappraising works by authors from Australia, the Indian Ocean region, and the Pacific Ocean.
Workshop I: Water as Method: Conceptual and Theoretical Avenues (Bonn, July 2023), with Peri Sipahi (Bonn) and Jacky Kosgei (Tübingen).
Workshop II: Water as Method: Literary, Artistic and Activist Avenues (Melbourne, September 2023).
Open Access Annotated Bibliography (2024, with student assistant Ipek Kayaalp).
Collaborative research and teaching project. Funded by the DAAD Programme for Project-Related Personal Exchange (PPP) with the Republic of India. Affiliated Postdoctoral Researcher. PIs: MaryAnn Snyder-Körber (JMU Würzburg) and Simi Malhotra (Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi).
Project Description: This project aims to explore the rich interconnections between online and particularly social media affordances, on the one hand, and feminist activism and creative practices, on the other. In online media, words, images, and ideas connect with each other within and across platforms, thereby connecting individuals as well as communities through sharing, commenting, and simply consumption. What we are able to observe particularly well in online interactions on platforms with commenting, tagging, and/or reposting functions such as YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, are the processes of transformation and transcoding long highlighted by scholars of globalization.
With Zeynep Y. Gökce. This working group takes as its starting point the Environmental Humanities as they intersect with the study of slavery and asymmetrical dependencies. The field of the Environmental Humanities addresses a wide array of ecological and environmentally oriented issues concerning climate change, the weather, environmental pressures, sustainability, globalization, environmental justice and ethics, resource policy, extraction logics, infrastructure and agrarian politics, land ownership, and many more. An engagement with ecological dependencies offers a valuable critical perspective on questions of strong asymmetrical dependencies.
With Pia Wiegmink. The working group aims at bringing together scholars working in different fields of dependency and slavery studies interested in questions pertaining to issues of life writing: in order to provide a generative interdisciplinary framework, the group proceeds from an expansive definition of life writing comprising a broad range of texts and media (autobiographies, letters, travel reports, testimonial records, diary entries, court documents, tomb inscriptions, archives, clothing as well as other textual, material practices involved in recording and navigating lives).
Diego Schibelinski: “Regimes of Labor Commodification in Slave Trade Crews’ Testimonies.” 04/2024.
Kofi Asihene: “Slavery, Disability and Africa: Interrogating the Effect of the Transatlantic slave era on the Concept of Disability in Africa.” 03/2024.
Cristina Mocanu: “Marriage, Enslavement and Agency: How a Roma Woman Came Under the Rule of an Orthodox Hieromonk.” 01/24.
Carolina González: “Enslaved Women in Latin American Colonial Court Records: On Testimonies, Biographies, Life Trajectories.” 11/23.
Sunčica Klaas: “Technological (Un)Freedoms in the Post-Reconstruction Slave Narrative.” 09/23.
Jutta Wimmler: “The European “Explorer” of the West African Interior as Captive and Witness: The 1799 Travelogue of Mungo Park.” 06/23.
Pia Wiegmink: “The Protocols of Dependency in 19th-Century African American Life Writing/the African American Slave Narrative.” 04/23.
Elena Smolarz: “Being a Serf in the Russian Empire: A Life between Accepting and Struggling. Based on the Memoirs of Savva D. Purlevskii (1800-1868).” 02/23.
Lewis Doney: “Imperial and Religious Dependency in Tibetan Medieval (Auto)hagiography.” 01/23.
Emma Kalb: “The Case of an ‘Elite Slave’: Norms of Respectability and Narrating the Self in Early Modern South Asia.” 11/22.
Amalia Levi: “Silences And/In Archives: Epistemological and Methodological Challenges of Retrieving Enslaved Lives.” 10/22.
Mary Afolabi:“Written Narratives of Nineteenth Century Recaptured West Africans.” 09/22.
John Chuchiak: “Testimonials in Colonial Yucatán.” 06/22.
Josef Köstlbaur: “The ‘Lebensläufe’ of Enslaved Moravians.’” 05/22.
Jennifer Leetsch and Pia Wiegmink: “The Slave Narrative: Agency and Dependency in Life Writing.” 03/22.
Jennifer Leetsch and Pia Wiegmink: “An Introduction to Life Writing: Reading the Basics.” 02/22.
Past:
Panel Discussion “Diversity in German Academia”
2023
In the panel discussion “Diversity in German Academia - A Reflective Look at the Current State,” scholars and activists took stock of how German universities and research institutions currently attend to the matter of equal opportunities and diversity. The panel discussion was designed to provide a space for the exchange of experience and knowledge: the panelists (Robel Afeworki Abay, Paul Mecheril, Heike Pantelmann and Anne Waldschmidt) critically considered measures and processes of change within institutions and reflected on how to further strengthen diversity awareness. The panel was organized in collaboration with the Equal Opportunity and Diversity Unit; it was part of the Germany-wide Diversity Days (23-24 May 2023) at Bonn University.
The workshop contributed to the newly emerging field of Victorian ecocriticism by exploring the intersections of literature and culture with the environment in the nineteenth-century world, and by bringing socio-political and ethical concerns for the environment to the fore of Victorian studies in the DACH community. Organised with Stefanie John (Braunschweig). See also our subsequent research cluster on Ecocritical Perspectives on the Long Nineteenth Century: Form, Materiality, Politics (Anglia: Journal of English Philology, 2024, 142: 1).
International and Interdisciplinary Conference, Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg. With an artist intervention by Charl Landvreugd (Rotterdam, NL), a keynote by Ananya Jahanara Kabir (King’s College London, UK) and a reading by Olumide Popoola (London, UK). See also our subsequent open-access edited volume on Configurations of Migration: Knowledges – Imaginaries – Media (De Gruyter, 2023).
Department of English Literature and Cultural Studies, JMU Würzburg, in collaboration with the Jawaharlal Nehru University Delhi, India. Funded within the DAAD framework Indo-German Partnerships in Higher Education. Project Assistant. PIs: Isabel Karremann (Zurich University) and Saugata Bhaduri (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi).
Summer School 2018: Africa in a Globalized World. (Würzburg) With keynotes and workshops by Isabel Hofmeyr (Witwatersrand, SA), Frank Schulze-Engler (Frankfurt), David Peimer (Liverpool, UK) and Ralf Schneider (Bielefeld).
Winter School 2016: Literature and Globalization. (Delhi) With keynotes and workshops by Ranjan Ghosh (University of North Bengal), Sumana Roy (author and poet), Saikat Majumdar (Ashoka University), Jonathan Gil Harris (Ashoka University), Madavi Menon (Ashoka University) and Isabel Hofmeyer (Witwatersrand, SA).