October 17, 2023
Each year, the Environmental Humanities Initiative brings one of the world’s leading scholars to Arizona State University to lecture on the ways that the humanities illuminate debates around planetary health and justice. This year’s Distinguished Lecture will be delivered by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, and will take place on Thursday, Oct. 19, 2023, from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. in the Biodesign Auditorium, B105 on the ASU Tempe campus. The event is free of charge and open to the public.
DeLoughrey, a Professor in the English Department and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles will present “Mining the Deep: Speculative Fictions and Futures.” DeLoughrey is recognized in the environmental humanities as one of the first literary scholars to focus systematically on ocean and island studies, militarism, and postcolonial studies, and is internationally recognized as an expert on the Caribbean and Pacific Islands (Oceania). Her work,including Allegories of the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019), and Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Literatures (U of Hawai`i Press, 2007) examines climate change and empire in the literary and visual arts. In other works, including co-edited volumes Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (Virginia UP, 2005); Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford UP, 2011); and Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (Routledge, 2015), she elucidates the complexities of the Anthropocene, an era where the positionality of oceans and islands is crucial to the understanding of possibilities for social and environmental transformation. DeLoughrey teaches postcolonial and Indigenous literature courses on the environment, globalization, critical ocean studies, and climate change. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Most recently she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2021-22).
DeLoughrey’s lecture will be part of the “Indigeneity in the Oceanic Commons: Reclaiming Relations from Taiwan to Hawai’i” symposium (October 18-20), organized by Joni Adamson and Lisa Han, professors of English and Film and Media Studies DeLoughrey will examine the oceanic turn in the humanities, particularly what Gaston Bachelard once termed the “depth imagination.” She will pay particular attention to the contemporary scramble for the minerals of the seabed as a speculative practice of extractive industries and capital, and place this in conversation with recent speculative fiction that imagines techno-utopian futures of human and more-than-human life under the sea. Along the way, she will raise questions about literary genres and reading practices that produce an extractive imaginary, with important implications for the oceanic and environmental humanities.
DeLoughrey’s work on the Anthropocene Ocean has been highly influential in the environmental humanities as she has shown how islands have been historically misrepresented or misappropriated as microcosms of mainland. Island Studies as a discipline can be contextualized within DeLoughrey's conception of the Anthropocene Ocean. The Indigenizing Oceanic Commons symposium will explore and elucidate some of the ways that this discipline is epistemically delinking the conception of islandness from colonial definitions and facilitating a generation of new meanings while acknowledging and embracing complicated histories around islands and their communities. DeLoughrey’s research on the Caribbean and Pacific Island literature also assumes significance within indigenous studies as it focuses on how “Indigenous writers and artists imagine their place in the wake of settler colonial histories of violence and displacement” She noted in an interview for this article, , that her next project will examine “visual artists, poets, and novelists from the global south” who are addressing “how their imagination of uninhabitable spaces such as outer spaces and deep seas as places complicate the conception of humans and nonhumans.”
DeLoughrey will also be a panelist for the Oceanic symposium’s last session, titled “State of Critical Ocean Studies / Blue Humanities Roundtable”' which is scheduled on October 20th at 10:15 am. This round table, which will include ASU humanities professors Lisa Han and Jonathan Bate will reflect on symposium insights and outcomes. DeLoughrey's visit is hosted by the ASU Environmental Humanities Initiative. The event is in conjunction with the fall 2023 UNESCO BRIDGES Humanities Lab Mediating Ocean Futures and is part of ASU Humanities Week.