- 23 April 2024
- 3:00 – 4:00 pm
- Online
The Climate & Colonialism Reading Group is part of the multi-year Climate & Colonialism project led by Dr Sria Chatterjee at the PMC.
Event hosted by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in collaboration with Anisha Palat (PhD scholar in history of art at the University of Edinburgh).
In this session, we will draw from and think with The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh. Amitav traces the story of nutmeg and draws parallels to human histories and their entanglements with the spice trade, opium and fossil fuels. Through the book, we will connect the contemporary climate crisis to colonial histories, trade routes, the COVID-19 pandemic, protests and resistance movements.
To Read
- Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022.
The book is available at the Paul Mellon Centre library. Some extracts from the text are available on Google Books. If you have any questions or have difficulty in accessing the text, 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 credit: Image courtesy of the University of Chicago Press.