Black Atlantic Ecologies

Project Co-Directors: Vanessa Agard-Jones, Marisa Solomon
Project Coordinator: Chazelle Rhoden

The waters are rising. The earth is warming. Species are perishing. The world is ending.

Apocalyptic pronouncements about the refiguring of the Earth are everywhere around us. Now commonplace, predictions and pronouncements about the era that geologists have called the Anthropocene remind us that we are at the end of the world as we know it, and that global warming, rising sea levels, the acidification of the oceans, crisis-rates of species extinction and ever-escalating social disasters masked as natural ones are but some of the more visible markers of the imperilment of this planet. Though they have pretensions to inclusion, many of these emergent narratives mobilize ideas about the human, the animal and the environment that universalize rather than particularize, occluding the fact that these categorizations have long been shot through with histories of normative violence.

The Black Atlantic Ecologies group supports and elaborates scholarship that centers the enduring effects of coloniality and the dynamic power of protest in African diasporic confrontations with environmental crisis. Taking as our provocation the refiguring of human and nonhuman ecologies occasioned by the transatlantic slave trade, we seek to understand what Nadia Ellis has called, riffing on José Muñoz, “the queer work of raced survival” as we come to grips with contemporary dimensions of anthropogenic climate change. As inspiration for the work that we undertake together, we ask after visions for survival and justice that are grounded in Black queer, Black feminist, and antiracist responses to the subjugation of the earth as well as of our human and nonhuman cotravelers. And given the crossing of linguistic and imperial zones that the transatlantic slave trade occasioned, we pay particular attention to the divergences and synergies among anglophone, francophone, hispanophone, and lusophone analyses of our predicament as we articulate our conditions as well as the political possibilities on our horizons. This group poses a single central question: How might Black Atlantic experience with peril, with perishment and with premature death offer a rubric for thinking futurity, including reproductive futurity, in a moment of environmental collapse?