With Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Olivier Marboeuf, Jennifer Gabrys, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh

Manifestos by Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau. Translated by Betsy Wing and Matt Reeck. Goldsmiths Press, 2022.

Join us for the launch of Manifestos, the collected manifestos of Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, published through the Planetarities Series with Goldsmiths Press.

For this special launch event at The Showroom, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Olivier Marboeuf will present their research and practice as it resonates with the Manifestos collection. Jennifer Gabrys, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh will discuss the ethos of the Planetarities series, which seeks to advance theoretical, experimental and practice-based work that shares a sense of urgency in relation to planetary troubles.

Manifestos brings together for the first time in English the manifestos written by Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau between 2000 and 2009. The individual texts grapple with concrete historical and political moments in France, the Caribbean and North America. Across the manifestos, as well as two collectively signed op-eds, the authors engage with socio-political aspects of climate catastrophe, resource extraction, toxicity and neocolonialism.

Throughout the collection, Glissant and Chamoiseau engage with key themes articulated through their poetic vocabulary, including Relation, globalisation, globality (mondialité), anti-universalism, métissage, the tout-monde (“whole-world”) and the tout-vivant (“all-living,” including the relationship of humans to each other and “nature”), créolité and the creolisation of the world, and the liberation from community assignations in response to individualism and neoliberal societies.

Translated as the first volume in the Planetarities series with Goldsmiths Press, the themes of Manifestos resonate with the planetary as they work in response to contemporary forms of (economic) globalisation, western capitalism, identity politics, and urban, digital and cosmic ecosystems, as well as the role of the poet-writer.

A distinguishing feature of this publication is its interventional aspect, which prioritises engaged scholarship and practice while demonstrating the relevance of the poetic in response to the urgencies of planetary crisis.

Biographies:

Elizabeth DeLoughrey is a professor in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment at University of California, Los Angeles on the unceded territories of the Gabrielino Tongva. She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Literatures (University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), and Allegories of the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019), an open-access text that examines climate change, the oceanic imaginary and empire in the literary and visual arts. She is co-editor of the volumes Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (Virginia University Press, 2005); Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford University Press, 2011); and Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (Routledge, 2015) and of numerous journal issues on critical ocean and postcolonial island studies. She has been the recipient of fellowships from organisations such as the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and the Rachel Carson Centre (Munich).

Jennifer Gabrys is Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She leads the Planetary Praxis research group and is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project Smart Forests: Transforming Environments into Social-Political Technologies. Her recent publications include Citizens of Worlds: Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle (2022), How to Do Things with Sensors (2019), and Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (2016). Together with Shela Sheikh and Ros Gray, she also co-edits the book series, Planetarities, published through Goldsmiths Press.

Ros Gray is Reader in Fine Art, Critical Studies, and Programme Director of the MA Art & Ecology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on art, ecology and planetarity, particularly artistic approaches to environmental crisis involving soil care, cultivation and rewilding. Recent publications include essays in Anthony Downley (ed), Palestine Is Not a Garden (forthcoming), Edward Chell, Transports of Delight (forthcoming), Carl Gent, Felon Herb (Kelder, 2021), and Elin Wagner and Elisabeth Tamm, Peace with the Earth (2021). She has also researched militant filmmaking networks dedicated to anti-colonial revolution and decolonisation, which produced numerous publications culminating in her monograph Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution: Anti-colonialism, Independence and Internationalism in Filmmaking, 1968-1991 (2020). In 2020-2021, she was Principal Investigator on the Natural Environment Research Council Creative Climate Partnership Sensing Soil. Ros is on the Editorial Board of Third Text, for which she co-edited the special issues The Militant Image: A Ciné Geography (2011) with Kodwo Eshun and The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions (2018) with Shela Sheikh, with whom she collaborated on numerous publications and the podcast The Coloniality of Planting for Camden Art Centre’s series Botanical Minds. She is co-commissioning editor of the Goldsmiths Press book series Planetarities.

Olivier Marboeuf is a writer, curator and film producer from Guadeloupe. In the 1990s, he and Yvan Alagbé founded Amok (now Frémok), a research comic book publisher; and then Espace Khiasma, a centre for visual art and living literature (2004 to 2018). He currently divides his work between transmission, speculative writing, drawing and film production within Spectre Productions. He has recently published the essay Suites Décoloniales: s’enfuir de la plantation and the poetry book Les Matières de la Nuit, both published by Editions de Commun. Many of his texts are accessible on his blog Toujours Debout.

Shela Sheikh is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of London Institute in Paris (ULIP). She previously directed the MA Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy and co-led the Critical Ecologies Research Stream at Goldsmiths, University of London. Work on colonialism and ecology includes The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions, a special issue of Third Text co-edited with Ros Gray (2018). Her current research addresses global people’s tribunals alongside staged trials and hearings, asking what environmental justice might look like within and beyond the framework of international law and how experimental, speculative forums can enact a decolonial imaginary of environmental justice. With Jennifer Gabrys and Ros Gray, she edits the Planetarities series for Goldsmiths Press.

Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) was a leading voice in debates centreing on the postcolonial condition and on the present and future of globalisation. Prolific as both a theorist and a literary author, Glissant started his career as a contemporary of Frantz Fanon in the early days of Francophone postcolonial thought. In the latter part of his career Glissant’s vision pushed beyond the boundaries of postcolonialism to encompass the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation. Glissant is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary, and Francophone literature.

Patrick Chamoiseau was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique. After studying law at universities in Martinique and Paris, he became a social worker. Although he is principally known for his novels, Chamoiseau has ranged broadly into other genres. He has written autobiographical narratives, assembled a collection of folktales, and been at the forefront of the theoretical debates surrounding créolité, or creoleness. He has also written for the theatre, contributed to discussions on contemporary Martinican and Caribbean politics, and collaborated on several photographic essays. A significant number of his fiction and nonfiction works have been translated into other languages.