Please consider submitting an abstract for NeMLA 2026 - (Re)generating Postcolonial Ecologies: Resistance, Restoration, and Relationality

This panel hopes to critically engage with postcolonial environmental literature, art, media, and other cultural forms that perform the urgent epistemic and ethical function of rendering visible the uneven burdens of climate change. Recognizing that the current climate crisis is deeply shaped by the long afterlives of colonial governance, such as systems of extraction, bordering, violence, and dispossession that continue to structure life in the Global South, this panel invites papers that explore alternative modes of resistance, restoration, and relationality. In doing so, such works extend the scope of postcolonial environmental humanities and challenge us to rethink what counts as environmental literature, who gets to produce it, and what social and political function it may serve (Nixon 2011; DeLoughrey, Didur, and Carrigan 2015).

The key questions for potential contributors are: How might we understand climate change not just as an environmental issue, but as an extension or consequence of colonial and postcolonial logics of governance and erasure? In what ways can we make legible the systemic invisibilization of environmental violence? How do postcolonial literary writers, artists, and thinkers register and reimagine a region’s entanglement with colonial violence and postcolonial state-making, coupled with environmental issues that render the survival of humans and nonhumans precarious in such spaces?

This panel invites papers that investigate the intersections of colonialism, environmental (in)justice, capitalism, race, gender, and indigeneity, and that engage with local, place-based, or indigenous ways of knowing to combat environmental crises (Whyte 2018). Contributions are expected in the following areas, but are not limited to: climate narratives and ecocriticism; environmental justice and sustainability; indigenous resistance and epistemologies; extractivism and development; settler colonialism; migration and displacement; gendered ecologies; and the politics of conservation and resource management, among others.

Please submit an abstract of 300 words (max) to the NeMLA portal via this link: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21835.

For questions, please contact Priyanka Sharma (priyanka.sharma@gwu.edu).