Facing the Colonial Toxicity of the World: The Case of the French Caribbean
Lecture by Malcolm Ferdinand
(online, in English)
Tue, 6 Jul 2021, 7 pm
Kunstverein Freiburg cordially invites you to participate in a lecture and subsequent discussion with Malcolm Ferdinand, a political and cultural scientist from Martinique, on Tue, 06.07.2021 at 7pm. The discussion will be held in English and online via the Zoom video conferencing system.
“Contrary to a technocratic approach that tends to disconnect environmental issues from their historical, social and political contexts, I suggest that environmental pollutions such as that of Guadeloupe and Martinique need to be understood in relation to the social and political issues associated with life in post-colonial and post-slavery societies.”[1]
Malcom Ferdinand’s lecture Facing the Colonial Toxicity of the World: The Case of the French Caribbean addresses the double mechanism of colonial toxicities in the Plantationocene and the coloniality of toxics, with a special focus on the pesticide contamination in the French Antilles induced by the banana industry (Chlordecone poisoning). Investigating both the causes and consequences of this long-lasting and harmful contamination of Martinique and Guadeloupe, he will discuss ongoing political actions and art practices that attempt to open up avenues for a post-toxic and post-colonial world.
Born and raised in Martinique, Ferdinand is a civil and environmental engineer from University College London and a doctor in political philosophy from Université Paris Diderot. He is currently a researcher in the fields of political ecology and environmental humanities at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and based at the University Paris Dauphine-PSL. He is the author of Une écologie décoloniale (2019), of which an English translation is forthcoming under the title A Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (Polity Books, 2021).
To receive the access link to the event, please register by email at anmeldung@kunstvereinfreiburg.de by Mon, 5 Jul 2021. You can download and install the Zoom application here.
[1] Ferdinand, M. (2017) Living in Contaminated Land: The Struggle for a Decolonial Environmental Justice in Contemporary Martinique and Guadeloupe, in: Heritage and Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ed. by M. Castillo and A. Strecker. Leiden: Leiden UP, 95–107, here 97.