Room 411,
Fayerweather Hall
Columbia University’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the English Department’s Diaspora, Race and Empire Colloquium, and the History Department.
The English Department’s Diaspora, Race, and Empire colloquium, along with Columbia University’s Institute for Comparative Literature and the History Department will be hosting Ashley Dawson, Professor of English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), and Chairperson of the English Department at the College of Staten Island/CUNY for his talk titled “Delta Blues: Infrastructure, Empire, and Urbanization in Fragile Landscapes”. This event will take place on December 15, at 6 p.m., in Columbia University’s Fayerweather Hall, room 411. Light refreshments and beverages will be served.
“The Mississippi, the Mekong, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra: these and other river deltas are some of the most complex, rich, and fragile ecosystems on the planet. Key nodes in global circuits of people, culture, commodities, and organisms, contemporary delta cities are home to close to half a billion people. Such cities share significant traits, including unparalleled cultural cosmopolitanism and exceptionally unstable physical locations. During the colonial and postcolonial eras, deltas around the world were transformed by grandiose infrastructural projects such as the big dam whose spectacular size helped legitimate imperial power by demonstrating the rulers’ capacity to control nature. Today, deltas are uniquely vulnerable to flooding and other climate change-related disasters, their strikingly hybrid cultures threatened by the very infrastructures once taken as sublime symbols of modernity and power. Nowhere are the failures of the imperial environmental imaginary more clear than in delta cities such as Dhaka, Kolkata, and New Orleans, and nowhere are the stakes of the struggle for climate justice more clear” (Dawson).
Professor Dawson’s fields of specialization are cultural studies, environmental humanities, and postcolonial studies. Areas of interest of his include the experience and literature of migration, including movement from colonial and postcolonial nations to the former imperial center (Britain in particular) and from rural areas to mega-cities of the global South such as Lagos and Mumbai. He has also worked recently on contemporary discourses of U.S. imperialism and on the movement for climate justice. He is the author of Extinction: A Radical History (Forthcoming, O/R), Extreme City (Forthcoming, Verso), The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature (Routledge, 2013) and Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (University of Michigan Press, 2007). He has also co-edited four essay collections: Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities (Haymarket, 2015), Democracy, States, and the Struggle for Global Justice (Routledge, 2009); Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (University of Michigan Press, 2009); and Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (Duke University Press, 2007). His work has been published in journals such as African Studies Review, Atlantic Studies, Cultural Critique, Interventions, Jouvert, New Formations, Postcolonial Studies, Postmodern Culture, Screen, Small Axe, South Atlantic Quarterly,Social Text, and Women’s Studies Quarterly.
