This symposium, presented as part of the Neubauer Collegium project Fossil Capitalism in the Global South, placed the frameworks of “fossil capitalism” and “Global South” under empirical and conceptual scrutiny. An interdisciplinary cohort of scholars of carbon energy and its political effects in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean considered how dominant genealogies of fossil capital—epitomized by Andreas Malm’s monograph of the same title—are unsettled by narratives and critiques from the colonial and postcolonial theaters of the “South.” Rather than a stable or taken-for-granted geography, the Global South instead marks a contested terrain from which to interrogate the purported North Atlantic origins of fossil capitalism and to propagate circuits of resistance that emerge from its so-called peripheries.

Participants

Omolade Adunbi (University of Michigan)
Santiago Acosta (SUNY College at Old Westbury)
Irem Az (Columbia University)
Elizabeth Chatterjee (University of Chicago)
Zachary Cuyler (New York University)
Mamyrah Douge-Prosper (University of California, Irvine)
Bret Gustafson (Washington University in St. Louis)
Ryan Cecil Jobson (University of Chicago)
Diana Montaño (Washington University in St. Louis)
Carol Iglesias Otero (University of Chicago)
Victoria Saramago (University of Chicago)
Mark Schuller (Northern Illinois University)
Matt Shutzer (Harvard University)
Ying Jia Tan (Wesleyan University)
Jennifer Wenzel (Columbia University)