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Imaging an Assisted Evolution

The Environmental Futurity of Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama

Bibliographic Data

ID11417344
AuthorsAma Josephine B Johnstone (Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck University of London, London, UK, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume33
Issue6
Pages98-109
Publication date2019-11-02
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCritical Arts (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0256-0046 • E-ISSN: 1992-6049
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/02560046.2019.1688850
OpenAlexW3002010994
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited12

As the effects of climate change are felt with increasing violence along its multifarious front lines in the Global South, the futures of human and non-human life on the state-demarcated peripheral are cancelled out by both naturalising Euro-American discourse and the disavowal of what has been termed “climate colonialism”. Speculatively thinking with two photographs from South African visual activist Zanele Muholi’s series Somnyama Ngonyama (2012–ongoing), the article explores the theoretical landscape of the “anthropocene” through the prism of creative and academic work by Black, queer and indigenous practitioners whose works resists its homogenising narrative. Utilising bell hooks’ notion of the “oppositional gaze” and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the article reflects on how Muholi’s seemingly exposing photography in turn exposes the depoliticisation of ecological neocolonialism. The science-fictional and resistant practices of the artist reimagine the agential capacity of queer Black bodies in relation to environmentally changed futures

Business · Environmental ethics · Front (military · Futures contract · Geography · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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Citations per year0.25
Citation span2022 - 2022 (1)
Highly citedNo

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