On April 10, 2021, at 12 pm EST The Cooper Union Intra-Disciplinary Seminar series presents Malcom Ferdinand’s presentation “Facing the Colonial Toxicity of the World: the Case of the French Caribbean.”
For more information, please visit The Cooper Union Intra-Disciplinary Seminar web page.
This presentation will address the double mechanism of colonial toxicities in the Plantationocene and the coloniality of toxics, with a special focus on the pesticide contamination in the French Antilles induced by the banana industry (Chlordecone poisoning). Investigating both the causes and consequences of this long-lasting and harmful contamination of Martinique and Guadeloupe, I will discuss ongoing political actions and art practices that attempt to open up avenues for 3a post-toxic and post-colonial world.
Born and raised in Martinique, Malcom Ferdinand is a civil and environmental engi-neer from University College London and a doctor in political philosophy from Université Paris Diderot. He is currently a researcher in the fields of political ecology and environ-mental humanities at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and based at the University Paris Dauphine-PSL. He is the au-thor of Une écologie décoloniale (2019), of which an English translation is forthcoming under the title A Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (Polity Books, 2021).