Talk: Anchoring the Climate Commons: Slave Ship Earth

Speaker: Dr. Diana Leong (Assistant Professor, San Diego State University)
March 6th, 3.00-4.30 PM, Senate Chamber (3-26 Arts & Convocation Hall)

Abstract: 
Environmental scholars, artists, and activists have increasingly evoked the global imaginary of the climate commons to generate public interest in the causes and consequences of anthropogenic climate change. This talk will explore how the afterlife of slavery might productively inform the political, intellectual, and aesthetic work of the climate commons by examining the environmental cinema of Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) and Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013). Both films underscore the difficulties of pursuing climate justice without acknowledging the pervasive investments in the abjection of racial blackness that drives even some of the most radically transformative creative projects.
Speaker Bio: Diana Leong is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. Her research interests include environmental justice, contemporary black literature, and the environmental humanities. She is currently completing a monograph, Against Wind and Tide: Toward a Slave Ship Ecology, that theorizes the slave ship as a site for the material and imaginative convergence of environmental justice and abolitionism.
 
This event is generously sponsored by the Department of English and Film Studies, the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Dr. Julie Rak (Henry Marshall Tory Chair), the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Peter Lougheed Leadership College. Co-organized by the Feminist Research Speaker Series and Just Powers/Sustainability Council

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