Ecologies of theory

Abstract

This commentary responds to the tensions and synergies highlighted by Williams et al. in ‘Black livingness and insurgent ecological politics: Thinking across Black geographies/Atlantics/ecologies’ by bringing their argument in dialogue with the work of Martinican theorist Suzanne Césaire. In particular, it addresses the tension between geographies of the Black Atlantic and Black geographies in relation to the reproduction of Whiteness. The dimension of Black ecologies further highlights the need to engage beyond the mostly North American context.

I am grateful for the argument made by Teona Williams, Christian Keeve, Case Watkins, Brian Williams, Levi Van Sant, Alex Moulton and Judith Carney about the tensions and synergies between the discourses of geographies of the Black Atlantic, Black Geographies and Black Ecologies. As a U.K.- and Germany-based researcher, I have witnessed some of these tensions between discourses and how they play out across research, teaching, as well as policy. Therefore, this article could become a useful document for reference, especially if differences and misappropriations were drawn out more sharply. I can see why this approach may not be desired, given the aim to identify synergies, although attention to conflict does not necessarily stand in the way of collaboration.

As Williams et al. argue, all three discourses function as a challenge to artificial minoritisation in different ways: geographies of the Black Atlantic emphasise cultural hybridity, Black geographies focus on structural oppression and liberation, and Black ecologies attend to the ecological dimension of Black lives. In my own geographical research and teaching, I have been investigating theoretical contributions that have been deliberately erased to (re)produce Whiteness. My aim to re-establish connections potentially resonates with the method of geographies of the Black Atlantic. However, there have been several encounters that have made me hesitant to align myself with it. In these encounters, Black Atlantic-associated framing became a way for White academics and policy makers to avoid uncomfortable conversations about racial inequality and oppressive structures. Often, these discussions were explicitly directed against the perceived ‘Black and White’, confrontational mode of Black geographies. This is not to dismiss geographies of the Black Atlantic, especially given their political ambitions, but to highlight how strategic distortions contribute to rifts between discourses and need to be addressed.

Indeed, where I find geographies of the Black Atlantic invaluable is their attention to erasures, erasures that conceal hybridity and serve to produce sharp divisions between White and Black, to cement White supremacy. These divisions can inadvertently be replicated by progressive discourses when the boundary making is mistaken for the actual process. To illustrate this point, and to show how the different discourses could function as ‘critical friends’ to one another, I want to bring Williams et al. into dialogue with the Martinican author Suzanne Césaire. By drawing on a Caribbean author, I am also supporting calls issued by U.K.-based Black geographers for a stronger global focus of Black geographies (Gayle et al., 2019; Gayle and Pinnock, 2021; Okoye and Richardson, 2021; Pinnock, 2024).

Césaire was a member of the négritude movement, a predominately francophone network that sought alternatives to Black integration into White cultural and economic relations. In the 1930s and 1940s she published a series of essays in the journal Tropiques which she co-edited. Devised in response to colonial and fascist censorship, her method both conceals and reveals interconnected epistemic, economic and ecological issues that are normally compartmentalised under a colonial knowledge regime. To expose some of these issues, she uses descriptions of the Caribbean landscape, in a way that mocks the universalism of European theory and its apparent detachment from European economic interests.

An example that might serve as a bridge between contemporary discourses is contained within Césaire's essay The Malaise of a Civilisation (2012: 28–33), an acerbic inversion of Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents. Where Freud infamously argues that the civilising project is repressive but necessary to counter innate human aggression, Césaire shows how the civilising project's economic oppression, and its disguise as a moral project, commits greater violence against humans and nonhumans alike. To illustrate her point, she figuratively drops Freud into the Caribbean landscape, using the psychoanalyst's struggle with the natural, colonial environment to show the limitations of European perspectives.

Through this method, the reader gets the impression of a fragile coloniser who constantly requires soothing, whether it is through imported European architecture, animals and plants (or ‘colonial aesthetics’ from other places), Black child minders, or absolution from violent intimate relations through affirmation of racist distinctions. Césaire calls these environments a ‘nostalgic hell’ (Césaire, 2012: 41). Not only are these soothing practices absent from Freud, but Césaire effectively shows how he is subject to them as well in order to suppress the horrors of racial capitalism, just like any other colonial apologist.

Césaire then proceeds to develop the counter-figure of the ‘plant-human’, a Martinican who remains ‘naturally’ disinterested in capitalist notions of competition and progress. The ‘independent’ plant-human who makes ‘not the slightest effort to dominate nature’ and ‘abandons himself to the rhythm of universal life’ embodies the antidote to Freud's environmental determinism and the supposed universalism of human aggression (2012: 30). At the same time, it targets alternative European economic proposals such as communism that are equally obsessed with labour and progress (Nesbitt, 2022; Robinson, 2021). The plant-human further makes reference to Leo Frobenius’ ‘Ethiopian’ plant civilisation, another racist and economically motivated theory. By reading Freud through Frobenius, Césaire manages to make concealed references to the Ethiopian independence movement, which was at the time considered a success story in terms of gaining sovereignty (Shilliam, 2019).

Through her ecological imagery, Suzanne Césaire makes three important observations that connect to, but also cut across, contemporary discourses: (1) the White psychosis that is reflected in the disavowed economic underbelly of knowledge, (2) the limitation of knowledge through the White fabrication of Blackness, and (3) the necessity to develop alternative economic-ecological structures. Césaire's method necessitates that epistemic and economic justice are not separated, and that both are reflected in the environment.

Césaire's first point supports Black geographies’ critique of ‘science’, directed at its epistemic Whiteness and its ecological consequences (McKittrick, 2021; Yusoff, 2024). Although these analyses are not always hopeful, given the endurance of capitalism and White epistemologies, they offer a useful sense of realism in terms of the threshold of change. They further challenge the on-going avoidance of economics in discourses that claim to be invested in epistemic justice, such as science studies and the affiliated new materialisms. A critique that emerges from this direction is how scholars from these fields negotiate epistemic and social justice against a mostly White canon and a White middle class economic subject (Last, forthcoming; Sundberg, 2014; Todd, 2016).

The second trajectory connects this discourse to the Black Atlantic's exposure of (the denial of) intercultural relations: while Césaire flags White perspectives, she equally emphasises disavowed connections. Although such concealed relations can be difficult to trace, they function as important reminders of the predictions, analyses, and counter-proposals that have emerged from Black and other non-White discourses and practices. They also function as reminders that censorship and appropriation can be easily mistaken for the ideas themselves. Cross-cultural European intellectual and social movements such as the Enlightenment or the Renaissance, for example, are increasingly portrayed by both White supremacists and anti-racists as exclusively White projects, despite historical evidence to the contrary (Al-Khalili, 2011; Dhawan, 2024; Graeber, 2023). Here, Black geographies and Black Atlantic discourses can benefit from greater exchange to not advance these erasures. How could geographical knowledge, or rather, geographical histories and futures could look, if more connections were re-established?

Césaire's third point today resonates with the race issue within environmental movements. Her call to develop alternative economic proposals today might translate into practices such as ‘degrowth’ or ‘divestment’. As William et al. remind via Nathan Hare's (1970) intervention, this discourse suffers from the White environmentalism’ syndrome, often paying insufficient attention to Black and other minoritised economic and ecological experiments as, for example, detailed by authors such as Jessica Gordon Nembhard (Gordon Nembhard, 2014) or Beatriz Nascimento (2023). Here, a stronger dialogue could be built with Indigenous scholars and scholars from other settler colonial contexts, as well as other ‘Blackened’ groups such as non-Christian religious groups (Abu-Bakare, 2022; Tuck and Yang, 2012). Political ecology work by authors such as Munira Khayyat or Shourideh Molavi, for example, shows the extremes of the ‘colonial dialectic of waste/value’ (Williams et al., 2025) where coveted land is made unliveable both for the coloniser and Indigenous populations (Khayyat, 2022; Molavi, 2024). Such work not only renders apparent the everyday realities of war which are faced by a significant part of the world's racialised population, but also the on-going self-destructiveness of colonial economics.

Theoretical solidarity that does not flatten differences seems crucial in current times, where White fantasies of erasure are flaunted across the world. Williams et al.'s call for ‘insurgent scholarship’ stresses the difficult circumstances under which knowledges have and continue to be produced, and, most importantly, the individual and collective agency that scholars can mobilise to support alternative narratives and the communities to whom they connect.