Malcom Ferdinand – Loving Ourselves the Earth: Undoing the Colonial Inhabitation

Join us for the Speculative Life Speaker Series! This new lecture series brings together five distinguished speakers to engage with a range of thought-provoking topics from Caribbean narratives and environmental justice and history to the intersections of colonialism and ecology.

ABOUT THE TALK

The pesticide contamination of the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe has become known as one of the most important environmental scandals of the current French Republic. The historic use of the chlordecone (or Kepone) in particular has caused significant damage to both human and non-human while no one has been held accountable.

Based on 15 years of interdisciplinary research as well as a sustained political involvement in the case, Malcom Ferdinand will present a radical narrative of that scandal, one that moves away from the technicist perspectives of the French government and many scientists. Loving Ourselves the Earth: Undoing the Colonial Inhabitation, his recently published book (Seuil 2024), tells the story of an ongoing decolonial resistance and, with a poetic gesture, offers a conceptual proposition for inhabiting the Earth and engaging the world in the ruins of modern colonization.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Malcom Ferdinand is an environmental engineer from University College London and doctor in political philosophy from Université Paris Diderot. He is currently researcher at the CNRS (IRISSO/University Paris Dauphine). At the crossroads of political philosophy, postcolonial theory and political ecology, his research focuses on the Black Atlantic and particularly the Caribbean. He explores the relations between current ecological crises and the colonial history of modernity.

His work has been featured in numerous academic journals and includes the award winning book Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (Seuil, 2019 & Polity, 2021). He recently published a comprehensive study on the pesticides contamination of Martinique and Guadeloupe in a book called S’aimer la Terre: défaire l’habiter colonial (Seuil, 2024).

This event is supported by the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology, the Speculative Life Research Cluster, the Department of English at Concordia University, the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University, and the CISSC.