colonialism

Julie E. Hughes reviews the book The Last White Hunter: Reminiscences of a Colonial Shikari by Donald Anderson, with Joshua Mathew.

Triangulating narratives from a prospective mining site in northern Norway, Hugo Reinert works to identify (and render graspable) a particular effect of retroactive shock—tracing its resonance through experiences of chemical exposure, colonial racism, cultural erasure, and destruction of the built environment.

Adam Amir follows decolonizing and feminist methodologies to develop a form of communal participatory video production for portraying the last 300 remaining Cross River gorillas and their role in indigenous values and conservation efforts.

In this article, Sasha Litvintseva examines the history and materiality of asbestos to theorize toxic embodiment through the mutuality of the haptic sense and the breaching of boundaries of inside and outside. She develops this through an analysis of her own film project Asbestos (2016), shot at the mining town of Asbestos, Quebec.

Christine Hansen uses the concept of deep time to challenge the idea that never-before-witnessed events are unprecedented. Using the case of a massive firestorm in 2009 in southeast Australia, she calls into question the shallow temporal frames through which deep time environmental phenomena are understood in Australian settler culture and offers an insight into often unnoticed ways in which contemporary society struggles with the colonial legacy.

In the context of current concerns within the environmental humanities to challenge the idea that humans are somehow irreducible to nature, the authors in this article take up the much-neglected history of the idea of human exceptionality itself, arguing that this form of humanist discourse often forgets its own contingencies and instabilities, and its comprehensively violent inheritances.

João Afonso Baptista uses an ethnographic approach to analyze ecological knowledge in Angolan forests as shaped by local dwellers and represented by (neo)colonial processes of distinction and separation, namely the external knower and the object known.

The author examines the advent of native forest conservation in New Zealand’s Colony and the role of Thomas Potts in advocating exotic tree-planting as a response to timber shortage.