36th Annual Mardi Gras Conference

Postcolonial Environments: Re-Grounding the Discipline in the State of Emergency

Date: February 12-13, 2026

Location: Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

In an age marked by ecological collapse, planetary precarity, and proliferating states of emergency, how might postcolonial studies respond to the crises shaping our shared environmental and socio-political futures? This conference seeks to reimagine the intersections between postcolonial theory and the environmental humanities by asking how postcolonial frameworks—rooted in histories of displacement, extraction, and resistance—can be re-grounded within the urgent material realities of ecological disaster.

This conference invites participants to think about the critical relationships between environmental humanities and postcolonial studies, but it also seeks to reconsider and reground postcolonial studies as a scholarly field in other ways. Postcolonial Environments engage with conversations linking the planetary to the postcolonial, material ecocriticism, and ongoing decolonial and Marxist thought, as well as other theories and disciplines.

We especially invite papers and panels that draw from and rethink postcolonial ecocriticism through lenses attentive to the entanglements of climate catastrophe, resource extraction, and imperial infrastructures. How have theoretical vocabularies of the postcolonial evolved and adapted to address the global climate crisis? What new solidarities, imaginaries, and epistemologies might emerge when we read the state of environmental emergency alongside histories of empire, migration, and survival? As we explore the connections between environmental humanities and postcolonialism, how might we also map other critical intersections? For instance, how do shifting planetary and political boundaries open new relationships between postcolonial studies and gender and sexuality studies, diaspora studies, race and Indigenous studies, or studies of phenomenology and materiality? How might these transformations further extend to studies of literary genre or film, for example, where questions of representation and form gain renewed significance?

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Postcolonial ecologies and environmental emergencies

• Disasters, extractive capitalism, and imperial infrastructures

• Bare life, precarity, and the politics of planetary survival

• Indigenous epistemologies and modes of re-grounding

• Migration, borders, and ecological displacement

• Petro-modernity, slow violence, and decolonial futurities

• Literary and visual cultures of the Anthropocene

• Feminist, queer, and intersectional approaches to postcolonial environments

We welcome proposals from graduate students and early-career scholars across disciplines including literature, geography, anthropology, history, and cultural studies. Submissions may take the form of individual papers (15–20 minutes), organized panels or roundtables, or creative-critical engagements.

Although this will be an in-person conference, we are open to requests to present virtually. Please indicate your request with your proposal.

For individual papers, please submit a 250-word abstract (max.) and a 150-words biography (max) of all the contributing authors to the conference co-chairs Mohammad Zahidul Islam and Ibrahim Nureni at mardigrasconference@lsu.edu by December 31, 2025. For organized panels, write a summary of what this panel is about and how it plans to contribute to the intended topic, along with biographies of all the participants. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by January 15, 2026.