Abstract

In this era of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene, infrastructure serves as a primary conduit for state machinery, functioning as a locus where politics, policy, planning, and implementation intersect with neocolonial and developmental initiatives. Taking these dimensions of infrastructure into critical African geographies, the talk focuses exclusively on the extraction of oil in the Niger Delta region in Nigeria, different modes of production and distribution, as well as the resultant environmental toxicity due to the extractive industries in the region. The talk further sheds light on how communities living in this region are subjected to double infrastructural violence that results in environmental and epistemic injustice, showcasing the crude realities of (non)governmentality and the politically entangled dynamics of capital accumulation. Concurrently, the talk highlights how the extractive practices in this region are very much necropolitical in nature, perceiving human lives as waste and disposable ones and consistently posing existential threats. But the greater question lies in how can communities resist and in what way the vicious cycle can be dismantled, thereby showcasing how those lives are not merely rendered as disposables but also remaindered ones and how their existence necessitates the importance of decolonial repair.

Bio 

Goutam Karmakar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at School of Humanities, University of Hyderabad, India. He is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities, University of Cologne, Germany, and an honorary research associate at the Faculty of Arts and Design, Durban University of Technology, South Africa. Previously he was a National Research Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and a visiting scholar at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. Karmakar’s research interests include Global South literary studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, environmental studies and cultural studies. His scholarship has appeared in journals including ISLE, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Scrutiny2, Current Writing, English Academy Review, Journal of Human Values, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Socio-Ecological Practice Research, South Asian Review, and South Asia Research, among others. Besides these, Karmakar is also a series editor for the Routledge book series South Asian Literature in Focus.

Registration and contact

This talk is organized by AIAS-AUFF Fellow Bharti Arora, barora@aias.au.dk

Sign up here or via the button above. Registration deadline is 24 August at noon.