Intimate Ecologies/Tentacular Tendencies

• In Event: Machines and Monsters

Abstract

As the effects of climate change become increasingly violent along its multifarious front lines in the Global South, human and non-human worlds are forced to evolve/ ‘become with’. This paper delves into the many slippages and often unexpectedly wet openings of alternative, rhizomatic and tentacular engagements with environmentalism, feminism and decolonial practice whilst attempting to arm itself from theoretical and literal afflictions of depression and “Anthropocenic despair” hazardous when studying climate colonialism. Utilising instead the erotic, speculative and theoretical landscapes of resistance present in Nigerian-American science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon and other Black queer futurities engaged by the monstress, the cephalodic and the tentacular.

Presenter

• Ama Josephine Budge, Birkbeck University