This lecture explores the cultural production of climate migration in areas of colonial and extractive exploitation, focusing on examples from Central American and Mexican literature and art. By examining the intersections of literature, storytelling, and ecological displacement, it addresses critical questions about how culture has historically contributed to, justified, or challenged extractive colonial paradigms.

Through the lens of literary texts and art, this talk interrogates how dispossessed subjects—such as climate refugees—are represented and given a voice within these narratives. How do these representations complicate our understanding of migration and ecological violence? To what extent do literary discourses obscure or reveal the structural connections between climate change and colonial exploitation? And how can we, as readers and cultural critics, engage with these stories in ways that challenge dominant paradigms?

Estefanía Bournot: is APART- GSK Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Afro-Latin American Studies at Harvard University. Her work explores South-Atlantic cultural entanglements, critical ecologies and decolonial epistemologies from Africa and Latin America. See also: https://www.estefaniabournot.com

The lecture is part of following seminar:
The Great Displacement‘: Ecocritical Perspectives, Environmental Justice and Climate Fiction from Walt Whitman to Donna Haraway
https://ufind.univie.ac.at/de/course.html?lv=123222&semester=2024W

ONLINE via ZOOM:

https://uni-bielefeld.zoom-x.de/j/62788847572?pwd=UrjbCBpw99M8tUr5IlIp4PCfb5bUv8.1

Meeting-ID: 627 8884 7572
Passwort: 880119