Dr Michele Lobo1
1Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
In the Manifesto for Abundant Futures, Collard et al (2014) argue that the advent of the Anthropocene is a ‘spark’ that can light a fire in our imaginaries for enacting pluriversal worlds. Indigenous, Black, southern and subaltern ontologies, however, highlight the scholarly and everyday struggle to produce these multiple realities in cities when racialising assemblages acquire stability in maintaining hierarchies of animacy and what it means to be properly human. This paper acknowledges the racialised logics of the Anthropocene grounded in white supremacy, white mastery and white affects of anxiety that focus on a One-World View highlighting crisis, catastrophe and extinction. But it seeks to go beyond this view by illuminating a geoaesthetics from ‘black and brown worlds’ on the edges of the Indian Ocean. Drawing and building on the work of Kathryn Yusoff and Edouard Glissant, I draw attention to the political dimension of geoaesthetics that destabilises racialised assemblages that have acquired inertia and nourishes ecological intimacies with a volatile, damaged earth.
Biography:
Michele Lobo is a social and cultural geographer internationally recognised for her scholarship on Anthropocene urbanism, race, Islam, affect and co-belonging that bridges diasporic knowledges with Indigenous and southern traditions of thought. She serves as the Editor of Social & Cultural Geography and the Reviews Editor, Postcolonial Studies, both highly regarded international journals. Her recent grants include a DFAT/Australia-India Council Grant on Australia-India student mobility and cultural diplomacy (2018), an ARC DECRA grant on Indigenous-ethnic minority encounters in Darwin and an ARC Discovery Grant on urban Islam in Australia, France and USA.