In his recently published study "The Climate of History in a Planetary Age" (2021), Dipesh Chakrabarty examines the relationship between the environment and historiography and addresses the question he previously posed: "Will climate change alter the way history is written?" (as in: Transit. Europäische Revue 41 (2011), 143-163). With regard to anthropogenic, human-induced global warming, this raises a number of methodological questions for the Humanities. For the Antarctic - parts of which have been claimed by the British Empire since 1908-, this means, for example: how to write the human history of an uninhabited and uninhabitable area of ice and snow? (ibid., 159)
How do you tell such a story? The tension between nature and narrative discourse has already been addressed by texts that have since become "classics" of environmental history - and have lost none of their topicality (such as William Cronon's "A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative", 1992). One thing seems clear: It is a relational history that we will discuss at this conference, weaving together environmental and imperial history with a particular interest in socio-cultural issues and methodological approaches:
Imperial expansion of the British Empire was multifaceted and fragmented. Imperial rule worked with overlapping sovereignties, spaces, and times, with a multiplicity of networks, transfers, techniques, and representations. Non-simultaneity produced different dynamics of transformation processes. This plurality has become part of the heterogeneity of colonial environments.
The environment is seen as a site of power. The conference deliberately uses a broad concept of power, encompassing the state, political regimes, law and international relations, economy and society, as well as issues such as race/class/gender, industrialisation, urbanisation, consumer culture and commodity frontiers, the knowledge society, the public sphere, civil society, (new) social movements, forms of protest and resistance, resource regimes, climate change and natural disasters, violence, migration and exile, social, generational or Transitional justice, and more. It is still not clear how this field will ultimately differentiate itself.
The assessment of human agency is a challenge and epitomizes fundamental questions of historiography: about human beings as actors, the entanglements between humans and environment/nature, the individual and society. Whose story, how told? Who is narrating? Perspectives, viewpoints and temporalities are equally challenged: the plurality of historical times, temporal layers, spaces of experience, horizons of expectation; forms and figurations of knowledge, ‘the archive’, evidence, rationality, narration and narrative, narrative possibilities between rise and fall, critique and crisis, utopia/dystopia.
The conference will explore these histories and their competing narrative options:
- in the interweaving of environmental and imperial histories in imperial networks
- in considering possible ways of structuring, e.g. by dividing into elements: earth, air, water, fire or other categories
- methodologically, in the combination of texts, practices, artefacts, performances, medialities and materialities.
We are open to all chronologies up to the present day, but see a focus on phases of colonial expansion and globalisation in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the interwar period and global political reorganisation after 1945, decolonisation processes and the formation of blocs during the Cold War, the United Nations, the New Economic Order especially in the 1950s and 1960s, up to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the debate on the Global Commons.
We are planning four panels with presentations of 15-20 minutes, followed by a commentary and discussion. The conference will be held at the University of Bonn from 29 November to 30 November 2024.
We welcome proposals consisting of an abstract (max. 500 words) and a short biography (max. 200 words) to be sent to Verena Steller (steller@em.uni-frankfurt.de) and Christine G. Krüger (info@agf-britishstudies.de) by 15 May, 2024.