Gabrielle Hecht: Toxic Tales from the African Anthropocene

The Anthropocene has become a rallying point for interdisciplinarity across the humanities, arts, and natural and social sciences. Yet these conversations easily falter, especially when critics observe that the notion can obscure massive inequalities by attributing the unfolding catastrophes to an undifferentiated “humanity.” The Anthropocene thus poses significant conceptual and methodological challenges to the humanities and qualitative social sciences. How can we theorize temporal and spatial scales that allow us to hold the planetary and the particular in the same frame? How can humanists gain purchase on the nexus of waste, toxicity, and violence that forms the core of the Anthropocene? This talk tackles these questions by exploring material histories of toxic waste in and beyond Africa.

Gabrielle Hecht is Professor of History at the University of Michigan, where she also directs the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. She recently served as associate director of the University of Michigan's African Studies Center, and remains an active participant in the ASC's joint project with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (South Africa) on Joining Theory and Empiricism in the remaking of the African Humanities.

Plakat: http://www.tlu.ee/UserFiles/Eesti Humanitaarinstituut/Hecht.pdf