This presentation explores the nexus between the delta regions of the Niger and the Mississippi rivers from the repopulation of the New World with enslaved Africans to the extant ecological devastation of petrocapitalism. It seeks to amplify the heuristic force of these water bodies in not only unravelling their implications in the labour and resource extraction-based traffic that has linked Africa and the Americas for centuries, but also the historical continuities enlivened by the Black residents of these deltas. Although the nature/culture duality in modern imagination has arguably driven a wedge between the human and the non-human, and thus exacerbated the Anthropocene, these rivers negate this duality. Through a brief critique of historical records, literary and artistic traditions of the Niger and the Mississippi deltas, I will demonstrate how these water bodies blur this distinction, and chart a path into the toxic temporalities of enslavement, colonialism, and petrocapitalism bodily experienced across these deltas. This talk hopes to contribute to the evolving eco-populism of the Black Atlantic worlds, and advance a transdisciplinary dialogue between Postcolonialism and American Studies.
Der Vortrag ist auf Englisch. Diskussion ist auf Englisch und Deutsch möglich.
Kontakt:
Prof. Gesa Mackenthun
gesa.mackenthununi-rostockde