From Haiti as the starting point, this presentation examines the varied manifestations of fossil fuels, as plastic, petrol or toxic fumes, to conceptualize the unequal duress of Caribbean fossil modernity.

Edwidge Danticat’s 'Pristine Paradise: The complexity of trash' and 'Machandiz' are specifically concerned with the politics of oil in Haiti, formulate an aesthetics of ordinary disaster and of ordinary acts of repair, nuance energy humanities’ dominant focus on the novel, providing, too, a distinctly Caribbean contribution to the field. Danticat’s essays trace how fossil fuels underpin the everyday and determine the thresholds between livable and unlivable life, foregrounding the ways in which fossil modernity is tethered to geologies of race. 

In response, the two essays, in their original and rewritten version published later in We are alone (2024), summon a space of confrontation with the wasting politics of oil, across its many forms, hoping to disrupt the violence of petrocapitalism and imagine a future beyond the (false) promise of oil and extraction.

Speaker

Kasia Mika-Bresolin is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her research and teaching focus on topics that are socially and politically urgent with crisis, vulnerability, justice and futures being key to her work in disaster studies, environmental humanities and postcolonial studies. She is the author of Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing Haiti’s futures. Her recent publications appeared in Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, Third Text, Modern and Contemporary France, Area, Journal of Haitian Studies, Moving Worlds. Her current work turns to the intersection of environmental and medical humanities, focusing on discordant temporalities of toxicity and loss, among others.

Moderator

Rosemarijn Hoefte is a historian specialized in the Caribbean. She is Professor in the history of Suriname after 1873 in comparative perspective at the University of Amsterdam. Her main research interests are the history of postabolition Suriname, migration and unfree labor, contemporary Caribbean history, and nation building and nation branding in postcolonial states.

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Thursday 4 June from 15.30–17.00 PM (CET).  

Anniversary Seminar Series

In 2026, KITLV will celebrate its 175th anniversary. The Members’ Association / Vereniging KITLV and the Institute KITLV are organizing an Anniversary Seminar Series to mark the occasion.

In the Anniversary Seminar Series, we invite people who have worked at KITLV in the past 25 years, visited us as fellows, or have been involved in joint research projects. Naturally, we strive to cover our wide range of disciplines, topics, and backgrounds. We invite speakers to present current or recent research to an audience of academics and others who are interested. Reflections on whether and how the connection with KITLV has led to or influenced that research are welcome. To cater to an international audience, the series will be in English and can be attended both physically and digitally.

Image

Plastic polution on a beach in Honduras. Source: The Ocean Cleanup. 

Flyer

PDF version (A3 poster)