Resisting Otherwise: Mobilizing Submerged Perspectives in Global Social Ecologies--ASLE 2019 Panel

deadline for submissions: 
December 15, 2018
full name / name of organization: 
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), June 26-30, 2019
contact email: 

Resisting Otherwise: Mobilizing Submerged Perspectives in Global Social Ecologies

Ends on December 15, 2018

 

Organizers:  Katherine Hummel (hummel@umich.edu) and Constanza Contreras (cbcontre@umich.edu), University of Michigan

Planned Format:  Roundtable (5-6 Presenters) 

For decades, indigenous-led activist groups in the Américas have challenged extractivist logics and practices of multinational corporations and governments seeking to commodify resource-rich, biodiverse environments. As Macarena Gómez-Barris reminds readers in The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017), these conflicts are historically rooted in settler colonialist regimes which “normalized an extractive planetary view” at the expense of indigenous epistemologies, territories, and lives (6). To write against these totalizing views of social and material environments, Gómez-Barris advocates shifting our attention to “submerged perspectives”: ways of seeing, knowing, and inhabiting environments that emphasize place-based, non-hierarchical modes of relation. By foregrounding submerged perspectives and subjugated knowledges, Gómez-Barris focuses explicitly on extractive capitalism’s contributions to our current ecological crisis, seeking to “decolonize the Anthropocene by cataloguing life otherwise” (4). Our purpose in this roundtable is to demonstrate how decolonial methodologies move the environmental humanities forward and offer localized strategies for imagining alternative futures to the catastrophic, extractive capitalist present. Drawing, as Gómez-Barris does, from new materialisms, critical indigenous studies, women of color feminisms, and queer of color critique, we raise questions about alternative ways forward, including:  How do submerged perspectives reshape our understandings of solidarity, collaboration, and collective resistance?  How might submerged perspectives work toward indigenous, multispecies, and planetary justice within extractive zones?  What imaginative genres, forms, and modes emerge as particularly effective in decolonizing the Anthropocene and creating space for submerged perspectives in global ecologies? By mobilizing submerged perspectives, how can we re-envision scholarly work to cross borders between academia and activism?  

We invite scholars, activists, and artists working at the intersections of these topics to submit 250-word proposals for 10-12 minute roundtable presentations. Additionally, we are thrilled to welcome Macarena Gómez-Barris (Pratt Institute) as our respondent and chair for this roundtable. By taking submerged perspectives as our starting point, we hope this conversation generates productive strategies for imagining alternative futures beyond the extractive zone. Please contact Katherine Hummel (hummel@umich.edu) and Constanza Contreras (cbcontre@umich.edu) with any questions about proposals. Papers can be submitted at: https://asle.submittable.com/submit/126084/resisting-otherwise-mobilizin...