Past Events

Thinking with Meat: Climate & Colonialism Reading Group

Workshop

  • 27 September 2023
  • 4:00 – 5:30 pm

The Climate & Colonialism Reading Group is part of the multi-year Climate & Colonialism project led by Dr Sria Chatterjee at the PMC.

An event hosted by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in collaboration with Anisha Palat (PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh).

In this session, titled “Thinking with Meat”, we will discuss the politics of meat in relation to food and environmental politics, its relationships to gender and asymmetrical power relations. We will use the following texts to “think with meat” as being part of a larger colonial project of circulation.

Readings

• Chatterjee, Sushmita, and Banu Subramaniam. “How to Think with Meat” in Meat! A Transnational Analysis, edited by Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam, 1–15. Duke University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012481-001. (Open access, available via Duke University Press).

• Mannur, Anita. “Eating after Chernobyl: Slow Violence and Reindeer Consumption in the Postnuclear Age” in Meat!: A Transnational Analysis, edited by Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam, 121–38. Duke University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012481-006. (pre-print available, please email).

• Subramaniam, Banu. “The Ethical Impurative: Elemental Frontiers of Technologized Meat” in Meat!: A Transnational Analysis, edited by Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam, 254–78. Duke University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012481. (pre-print available, please email).

Further Readings

• Chen, Mel Y. “Fire and Ash” in Meat!: A Transnational Analysis, edited by Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam, 279–87. Duke University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012481-013.

• Hamilton, Jennifer A. “Reindeer and Woolly Mammoths: The Imperial Transit of Frozen Meat from the North American Arctic” in Meat!: A Transnational Analysis, edited by Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam, 61–95. Duke University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012481-004.

• Chatterjee, Sushmita. “Beefing Yoga: Meat, Corporeality, and Politics” in Meat!: A Transnational Analysis, edited by Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam, 96–120. Duke University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012481.

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

This Climate & Colonialism 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.

Image

Meat!: A Transnational Analysis, edited by Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2021). Image courtesy of Duke University Press.