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36th LSU Mardi Gras Conference : Postcolonial Environments: Re-grounding the Discipline in the State of Emergency
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In an age marked by ecological collapse, planetary precarity, and proliferating states of emergency, how might postcolonial studies respond to the crises shaping our shared environmental and socio-political futures? This conference seeks to reimagine the intersections between postcolonial theory and the environmental humanities by asking how postcolonial frameworks—rooted in histories of displacement, extraction, and resistance—can be re-grounded within the urgent material realities of ecological disaster.
This conference invites participants to think about the critical relationships between environmental humanities and postcolonial studies, but it also seeks to reconsider and reground postcolonial studies as a scholarly discipline and field in other ways. Postcolonial Environments engage with conversations linking the planetary to the postcolonial and material ecocriticism to ongoing decolonial and Marxist thought. We invite approaches that draw from and rethink the legacies of postcolonial ecocriticism through lenses attentive to the entanglements of climate catastrophe, resource extraction, and imperial infrastructures. How have the theoretical vocabularies of the postcolonial evolved and adapted to address the global climate crisis? What new solidarities, imaginaries, and epistemologies might emerge when we read the state of environmental emergency alongside histories of empire, migration, and survival? As we explore the connections between environmental humanities and postcolonialism, how might we also map other critical intersections? For instance, how do shifting planetary and political boundaries open new relationships between postcolonial studies and gender and sexuality studies, diaspora studies, race and Indigenous studies, or studies of phenomenology and materiality? And how might these transformations further extend to genre and film studies, where questions of representation and form gain renewed significance?
File Attachments: Mardi_Gras_Conference_2026_CFP