Learn more at https://fhi.duke.edu/programs/entanglement-project

About the Talk: Dr. Dale Tomich, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, at Binghamton University, State University of New York, examines the history of the slave plantation as an integral part of the capitalist world-economy from the 15th through the 19th centuries. It explores the changing relation between the production of specific crops, environment, and the demand for slave labor over long historical time.

About the Speaker: Prof. Tomich received his PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and former Deputy Director of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations. He is author of Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique in the World-Economy, 1830-1848; Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital and World Economy; Espacios de esclavitud: tiempo / tiempos del capital; and Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (with Rafael de Bivar Marquese, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, and Carlos Venegas Fornias), as well as numerous articles and chapters on the history of the capitalist world-system, Atlantic slavery and methods of historical inquiry.

On the Entanglement Project at Duke-FHI: Climate catastrophe cannot be thought outside of the context of empire and the forms of racialization central to global capitalism, including the degradation of peoples, ecosystems and lands facilitated by states in the global North. Threats to the very existence of the planet and all its inhabitants result from this genocidal global development project, yet the effects are being borne more grotesquely by those who live in the global South. Environmental justice efforts that overlook the longue durée trajectory of the historical operations of capitalism, and the raciality that affixes a disproportionate burden onto ex-colonized areas of the planet and its inhabitants, fall short of pointing us in a direction of systemic and just change.

The Climate Change, Decolonization and Global Blackness Lab seeks to explore the linkages among three pivotal and simultaneously occurring catastrophes—criminality, displacement, pandemics—toward developing a set of principles regarding decolonization as an ethical approach to climate change.