No dia 24 de fevereiro acontece mais uma sessão do Seminário de Estudos Avançados - Ciclo de Conferências. Ananya Jahanara Kabir (Department of English, King’s College London) será a oradora convidada numa sessão sobre o tema The Transoceanic Creole Garden as Decolonial Practice. Na Sala Maria de Sousa do ICS-ULisboa, a partir das 10h30. Consulte o programa completo deste ciclo de conferências.

This seminar focuses on the Creole Garden: a small plot of land that enslaved, indentured, and variously unfree people cultivated for fruits, vegetables, and medicinal plants. A legacy and antithesis of the plantation economy, such gardens promote biodiversity against monocropping, human subsistence over profit, and sustainable small-scale agricultural practices. A consistent feature of Creole societies, they articulate the relationship between the human and the natural environment enabled through local wisdom that survived transoceanic diasporas and accelerated capitalism. Botany, pharmacy, foodways, and horticulture become tools of resistance, recycling, and memory that create new culture from traumatic displacements and uprooting, and showcase marginalised peoples of African, European, and Asian heritage. Today, the Creole Garden functions as a decolonial space of public reparation for histories of enslavement and indenture. This lecture showcases the work of Lusophone activists and artists, including Amilcar Cabral, Dino d’Santiago, and the Greenhouse Project, to demonstrate how the creole garden responds to the connection between traumatic histories of colonialism, climate crisis, and extractive capitalism through new transoceanic conversations that cross the Indian and Atlantic Oceans; the Lusophone, Francophone, and Anglophone worlds; and African, Indian, European, creole, and indigenous cultural contributions to these spaces.

Ananya Jahanara Kabir, FBA, is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London, and Fellow of the British Academy. Her research spans creolisation across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, critical philology, and the relationship between literary texts, embodied cultural expression, and memory work. From 2013 to 2018, she directed the ERC Advanced Grant-funded project Modern Moves (on the global popularity of African-heritage dance). She was awarded India’s Infosys Prize in the Humanities and Germany’s Humboldt Research Prize.