CfP: Resisting Nature: European Imperial Projects and the Limits of Environmental Knowledge

Panel Resisting Nature: European Imperial Projects and the Limits of Environmental Knowledge

This panel explores the limits of colonial projects, whose plans and propositions often ran up against environmental realities and human resistance. By definition, colonial environments were contested epistemological and material sites whose ecologies were the fault line of conflict and violence. All colonial empires shared the goal of transforming natural environments to fit their own economic interests and cultural imaginaries. Yet they also triggered processes of reckoning and resistance. Colonial societies confronted the colonizers with their own epistemic regimes and material knowledge. Non-human actors, ranging from animals to epidemic diseases, escaped Europeans’ control and sabotaged their enterprises. Foreign climates remained a shifting and unpredictable challenge for any project of environmental management by colonial states. This confrontation produced migrations, epidemics, epizootics, catastrophic environmental failures, state breakdowns, and violence. In short, this panel focuses on the cultural, material, and ecological conflict embodied in colonial contexts and examines the role of imperial environmental knowledge in shaping the colonial project and its breakdown.

Please email Angelo Caglioti (Barnard College, Columbia University) and Philipp Lehmann (UC Riverside) a short abstract of your proposed contribution by July 1, 2022 

The deadline for panel submissions is July 15, 2022.