Radicalising Ecological Concern: African American eco-poetry 1950s-1980s.
School: College of Arts and Humanities, Critical Studies
Supervisors: Dr Henry Ivry and Dr Chris Gair
Keywords:Militarisation and Climate Laboratories: Denaturalising the Security Imaginary in Cold War Era Black Poetics
About Scarlett’s Research:
During the Cold War, the United States military were the principal patron of Climate Science. As early as 1959, oil industry executives understood the connection between burning fossil fuels and climate change, but rather than reckoning with the existential threat of anthropogenic climate change, this data was most immediately used for the development of an ecological militarism, which worked to exploit the consequences of anthropogenic climate change for the express purpose of securitising the United States’ imperial order. My research examines the colonial and imperial entanglements of Cold War ecological militarism and environmental warfare through an emerging tradition of Black environmental poetry. It argues these works disrupt the ubiquity of the neoliberal security imaginary, and challenge the construction of planetary devastation as an inevitable, organic, and natural phenomena.
CONNECT WITH SCARLETT
E-mail: s.croft.1@research.gla.ac.uk