Description:

The Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs hosts running colloquia for graduate students to present their research to globally engaged faculty and fellow students. In January's first graduate colloquium, English PhD candidate Kai Chase will present on their doctoral research. 

Q&A and discussion will follow; Lunch will be served. 

Narrating Ecologies of Self-determination in Puerto Rico  

Kai will speak on their dissertation, “Tracing the Neo-Conquest Narrative: Black and Native Eco-Solidarities Across Abya Yala,” which analyzes disruptions of colonial narratives in poetry, film, and novels by contemporary Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous writers. They call such irreverent revisions of colonial logics neo-conquest narratives. These narratives rewrite logics of conquest in order to reimagine diasporic relationships to land and body and to position gender as a critical mode of relational repair amidst catastrophe. In this presentation, they focus on their epilogue, where they consider the intersections of literary narratives and on-the-ground self-determination efforts. In particular, they reflect on recent fieldwork in Puerto Rico, where they researched how the US colonial power utilizes narratives of conservation and environmentalism to infringe upon Puerto Rican self-determination. Though they briefly discuss these (neo)colonial mythos, they focus most prominently on how everyday Puerto Ricans have created robust modes of self-determination through direct democratic ecologies of care, food sovereignty, and liberatory joy.

Learn more about the Buffett Institute's programming for graduate students >>