Thinking with Animals: Climate & Colonialism Reading Group

Event hosted by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in collaboration with Anisha Palat and Eszter Erdosi (PhD candidates in history of art at the University of Edinburgh).

In this session, titled “Thinking with Animals” we will discuss the following excerpts from Bénédicte Boisseron’s 2018 book Afro-Dog, and Cajetan Iheka’s 2021 book African Ecomedia:

• Boisseron, Bénédicte, "Introduction" (available via Columbia University Press) and “Chapter 1: Is the Animal the New Black?”, in Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question, Bénédicte Boisseron, ix-xxvii and 1-36. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2018.
• Iheka, Cajetan, "Chapter 4: Human Meets Animal, Africa Meets Diaspora: The Conjunctions of Cecil the Lion and Black Lives Matter", in African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics, Cajetan Iheka, 152–185. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.

Additional resources:

• Edge Effects, “Why Animal Studies Must Be Antiracist: A Conversation with Bénédicte Boisseron”. Podcast audio. March 26, 2019.

Transcript and audio available: https://edgeeffects.net/afro-dog-benedicte-boisseron/

and here https://open.spotify.com/episode/5

• Iheka, Cajetan, "Introduction", in African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics, Cajetan Iheka, 1–25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Available via Duke University Press

This interdisciplinary Reading Group aims to provide a space for discussion and reflection about the role of the arts and visual cultures in discourses around climate and colonialism. It hopes to foster a dialogue that begins to question systems of oppression that have contributed to the colonial project and its relationships to ecology. The selection of texts for the Reading Group will foreground ecofeminist, Black, Brown and Indigenous scholarship that focuses on the intersections between the environment, extraction and colonial systems and also histories of decolonisation and speculative imaginaries of human and more-than-human ecologies. The Reading Group will meet once every two months. It is open to everyone.

This event will be online only.

For further details, and to hear about future Reading Group events, please sign up to the mailing list here.

All readings are available at the Paul Mellon Centre library. If you have any questions, please write to the organisers: [email protected] or [email protected]

Listing image credits: Cajetan Iheka, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics.  © 2021, Duke University Press.  All rights reserved.  By permission of the publisher.

Bénédicte Boisseron, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question. © 2018, Columbia University Press / Photo © Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images. All Rights reserved. By permission of the publisher.