Postcolonial Nature with Philip Aghoghovwia

Join us for the third instalment in a series of talks planned collaboratively by the Critical Anthropocene Research Group (CARG), Colonialism Race and Indigenous Ecologies (CRIE), and Society, Politics, Animals and Materiality (SPAM).
The Critical Anthropocene Speakers Series will feature an online talk with Dr. Philip Aghoghovwia.

In this talk, the speaker reflects on three vectors that inscribe the historicity of postcolonial nature as the articulation of a certain kind of lived experience:

• Land grabbing that renders indigenous inhabitants automatic serfs within their own environments
• Arrogant forms of conservation that expel human populations from their ancestral lands
• Destructive extraction of natural resources motivated by seductive but abstract metrics of economic growth that cannot be measured in terms of ecological (or any kind of) well-being of the particular local lifeworld

Engaging directly with nature in postcolonial thought is not possible for it must confront the imperatives of nature’s colonial and imperialist history — a necessary circumlocution that enables us to approach nature as a powerful signifier of being and quotidian experience in the postcolonial context.

About the speaker

Philip Aghoghovwia is a Nigerian/South African living in Edmonton, Canada. He has been a fellow/awardee of several prestigious organisations, including the AHP, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and African Studies Association (CCNY-ASA) Fellow, and DHET Future Professors Programme.

His research is in environmental humanities, African literature, energy and water studies, and the cultures and politics of resource extraction in Africa. Aghoghovwia holds a research rating of Y1 by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. He is the author of Violent Ecotropes: Petroculture in the Niger Delta (HSRC Press, 2022).