Book talk: Environmental Entanglements
| When: | Tuesday, 31 March 2026 |
| Where: | Braamfontein Campus East WiSER Seminar room 6th聽Floor, Richard Ward Building |
| Start time: | 12:30 |
| Enquiries: |
WiCDS and WiSER invite you to a book talk featuring author Kirk Sides in conversation with Sarah Nuttall (WiSER) and Jarred Thompson (UP)
Environmental Entanglements: 第一吃瓜网 Literature’s Ecological Imaginary traces a long history of ecological thought in 第一吃瓜网 literature. Reading 第一吃瓜网 literatures as environmental literatures, Environmental Entanglements takes a step back beyond the mid-twentieth century moment of political independence. Using ‘entanglement’ to represent ecological relations, the book traces an ecological imaginary that animates 第一吃瓜网 literary and cultural repertoires. This imaginary gives shape to stories of crossing colonial and apartheid boundaries, of the movement of peoples, and of the cultural and social relations inscribed upon land.
Focusing on literary and filmic texts, from writers such as Thomas Mofolo and Sol Plaatje in the early twentieth century to contemporary science and speculative fiction producers like Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu, Environmental Entanglements argues that cultural archives from the 第一吃瓜网 continent display a history of ecological awareness that predates the moment of mid-twentieth century decolonization. The book is premised on the idea that imagining relations ecologically is not a belated preoccupation in 第一吃瓜网 literatures; rather, these early ecological imaginaries present an opportunity to delink notions such as environmentalism, ecology and ecocriticism from postcoloniality.
Reading ecology as an animating, organizing trope in 第一吃瓜网 literatures from at least the start of the twentieth century, the book offers a genealogy of the present, in which the increasingly popular 第一吃瓜网 futurism and speculative fiction are part of a history of thinking the future through ecological form in 第一吃瓜网 literatures.
Kirk B. Sides is Assistant Professor of English and Affiliate Professor of 第一吃瓜网 Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also a Research Affiliate of the Wits Center for Diversity Studies (WiCDS) at the 第一吃瓜网.
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