Cultivating the Caribbean: Ecologies of Land, Text and Vision

This symposium explores ecological and environmental ways of thinking about Caribbean spaces from colonisation to the present day. We will focus on agricultural spaces and other forms of cultivation arising from, and in resistance to, slavery’s many infrastructures and cultural imprints. Case studies include work on ecological ways of thinking about particular sites and spaces and the labour patterns constructed within them: botanical gardens and the enslaved people who cultivated them; African diasporic naturalists and collectors working with plant and animal specimens; enslaved people’s burial grounds; vegetable plots, and more. Topics and themes under discussion include: deforestation; natural extraction; raw materials; the plantation carbon complex; the ‘plantationocene’ as a model of global environmental shift; multispecies relations and ecological justice; folk knowledge. Considering the organisational forms and composite orders of geography, landscape, agricultural spaces and natural knowledge, the symposium will ask after the relationships between race, space and ecology. The day will include a screening of the short film Sweet Sugar Rage by the Sistren Theatre Collective (1985).

The full programme for this event will be availble on CRASSH's website.

Host or Publisher CRASSH