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

About the Talk: In 1995, hurricanes Iris, Luis and Marylin blasted the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe with devastating long-term effects. A similar phenomenon happened in 2007 in Réunion in the Indian Ocean, after hurricane Gamède severely impacted the island with record rainfall and flooding. While these hurricanes remain in collective memory among the most damaging ones, and while the trauma that they generated is cyclically reactivated every time island populations grapple with the durable effects of these hurricanes, massive soil erosion has excavated slave burial grounds on popular touristy beaches of Guadeloupe and Réunion. As intangible witnesses of a camouflaged archive, the land and the ocean unsettled an archeology of absence, triggered a resurgence of traumas, and channeled symbolic commemoration practices by grassroots communities. Professor Curtius examines how enslaved bodies molded into the soil of the violent space of the plantation rematerialize no longer as the ghosts of history or the furniture of the Code Noir, but as a memorial grammar that needs to be deciphered. Cross-pollinating embodied community engagement, mortuary archeology, creative spiritual art and post/decolonial critical theory, Curtius posits that a tidalectical and anarchival imagination matters to excavate entangled layers of meaning and reconfigure the skeletons of history in a time of climate change.

About the Speaker: Anny-Dominique Curtius is Professor of Francophone Studies at the University of Iowa where she also serves as Co-Director of the Museum Futures Working Group at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. Her interdisciplinary books include Suzanne Césaire. Archéologie littéraire et artistique d'une mémoire empêchée [Suzanne Césaire. Literary and Artistic Archeology of a Hindered Memory] (2020), Symbioses d'une mémoire: Manifestations religieuses et littératures de la Caraïbe [Symbiosis of a Memory: Caribbean Religions and Literatures] (2006). She is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters in leading edited volumes and journals. She has two books in progress. One explores entangled subtitles and global audiences in Francophone cinemas. The second examines the entangled narrativization of slavery in politically charged memorials, performativities, visual arts and in the post-museum.

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.