Friday 23 May 2025, Buckingham House, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, 10am-5pm
Call for Papers
Colonial toxicity and ecologies of empire
Keynote speakers:
Clare Finburgh Delijani (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Aedín Ní Loingsigh (University of Stirling)
The 2025 SFPS annual postgraduate study day provides an opportunity to present research emerging at the intersection of Francophone postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities. In the recent work of scholars and thinkers including Malcom Ferdinand and Françoise Vergès, new and challenging contributions to debates about decolonial and intersectional ecologies are emerging in the French-speaking world. These interventions extend also to the interconnections of postcolonial studies with the history and philosophy of science, evident for instance in Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher’s history of climate change, Les révoltes du ciel (2022), which includes discussion of nineteenth-century Algeria.
These debates are complemented by the creative outputs of authors, filmmakers and artists working in French and other languages in a broad range of locations. Their works span the Francosphere, from the writings of the activist Innu poet Joséphine Bacon in Quebec to the Saharan “furigraphies” of the Tuareg poet Hawad. They include other works such as Yamen Manai’s L’amas ardent (2017), a literary response to intersecting ecological and political crises in the Maghreb.
Such creative work evokes specific environmental crises – such as the Chlordecone scandal in Martinique (represented in Tropiques Toxiques: le scandale du chlordécone, a graphic account by Jessica Oublié) – but also engages in broader debates about the toxic and radioactive afterlives of empire, evident notably in reflections on the plantationocene. At the same time, as the growing interest in a “green Negritude” reveals, there is a need to challenge presentism and to analyse the proto-ecological sensibilities or earlier Francophone intellectual movements.
We invite proposals for fifteen-minute papers from all postgraduates in Francophone Postcolonial Studies. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
- Decolonial ecologies
- Eco-poetics
- Eco-feminism
- Intersectional approaches to the environment
- Indigenous knowledge
- Anthropocene and plantationocene
- Colonialism’s environmental legacies and their representations in literature and culture
- Nuclearity
- Waste
- Animal studies
- Environmental futures
- Ecocide and linguicide
We also invite poster submissions from postgraduate students. Poster submissions are not necessarily required to fit with the conference theme to offer the opportunity to present work in the earlier stages of research.
Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to the organisers at sfpsstudyday2025@gmail.com, by 18 April 2025 (please indicate if your abstract is for a paper or a poster).
If you have any questions or enquiries, please feel free to get in touch.
The participation fee is £10, and an optional membership registration fee of £20 into SFPS. Tea/coffee and lunch will be provided.
Organising Committee:
Hugo Azerad; Tobias Barnett; Doyle Calhoun; Leyla Chery; Charles Forsdick; Sura Qadiri; Weibing Ni
