“Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene”
Elizabeth DeLoughrey
Professor of English, Institute for the Environment and Sustainability
UCLA
10.10.17
6-8pm, Busch 18
This talk outlines the development of the “oceanic turn” and the rise of “critical ocean studies” as vital to figuring the Anthropocene and the Environmental Humanities. It turns to Caribbean poetry and its imagining of the middle passage, and then builds upon this to engage how sea-level rise has been addressed in the region, particularly by focusing on the submarine sculptures of Jason deCaires Taylor. By examining the multispecies collaborations of coral and reef ecologies it suggests a new oceanic imaginary for the more-than-human Anthropocene.
Professor Elizabeth DeLoughrey has appointments in the UCLA English Department and in the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability. She is co-editor of the online open access journal Environmental Humanities. Her scholarship has been supported by institutions such as the ACLS, NEH, Rockefeller, Mellon Foundation, UCLA Global Studies Program, Fulbright, UC Humanities Research Institute, and the Cornell Society for the Humanities. She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Literatures (2007), and co-editor of Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (2005); Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment(2011); and Global Ecologies and theEnvironmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (2015), Her forthcoming book, Allegories of the Anthropocene (2018), examines climate change and empire in the literary and visual arts and is forthcoming from Duke University Press.