Climate Change, Decolonization, & Global Blackness | Ancestral Claims with Denise Ferreira da Silva

Learn more at https://fhi.duke.edu/programs/entangl... About the Talk: If we are to attend to demands for decolonization (land dis-occupation and labor reparation), if we are to appreciate its ethical force, Prof. Ferreira da Silva argues, a radical philosophical re-orientation is needed. Towards contributing to such a move, in this presentation, she will comment on a speculative experiment on heat, which has been inspired by The Return of a Lake, an installation by the Brazilian artist Maria Tereza Alves. Ferreira da Silva will speculate on a shift of the undergrounds of thinking, which includes an account of existence that would correspond to a disruption of the basics of western philosophy, such as the collapsing of the metaphysical and the ontological into the existential without the presumption of transparency and the philosophical figure that hosts it, namely the subject. About the Speaker: An academic and artist, Denise Ferreira da Silva is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (U of Minnesota Press, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (Oficina da Imaginaçāo Política and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg/MIT Press, 2022 ) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013). Her several articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, Social Identities, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. Her artistic works includes the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. On the Entanglement Project at Duke-FHI: Climate catastrophe cannot be thought outside of the context of empire and the forms of racialization central to global capitalism, including the degradation of peoples, ecosystems and lands facilitated by states in the global North. Threats to the very existence of the planet and all its inhabitants result from this genocidal global development project, yet the effects are being borne more grotesquely by those who live in the global South. Environmental justice efforts that overlook the longue durée trajectory of the historical operations of capitalism, and the raciality that affixes a disproportionate burden onto ex-colonized areas of the planet and its inhabitants, fall short of pointing us in a direction of systemic and just change. The Climate Change, Decolonization and Global Blackness Lab seeks to explore the linkages among three pivotal and simultaneously occurring catastrophes—criminality, displacement, pandemics—toward developing a set of principles regarding decolonization as an ethical approach to climate change. #environmentaljustice #environmentalracism #blackecology #globalblackness #decolonization ‪@dukeuniversity‬ ‪@FranklinHumanities‬