Howard E. Woodin Environmental Studies Colloquium Series

“Desertification Archives: Global Black Ecologies and Anticipating Terror” a Howard E. Woodin Environmental Studies Colloquium Series talk by Brittany Meché, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Faculty in Science and Technology Studies and Africana Studies, Williams College.

Juxtaposing a 1985 international conference on desertification at Howard University with United States government agencies’ increased attention to the “global threat” of desertification during the same era, this talk traces the impact of environmental/military surveillance on the production of expert knowledge about arid environments. The 1985 “International Symposium on Drought and Desertification” brought together activists, journalists, scientists, African heads of state and members of the Congressional Black Caucus to strategize responses to recursive droughts and food crises in the West African Sahel and East Africa. Conference participants challenged conventional overpopulation discourses and instead mobilized Black internationalist solidarities towards building more sustainable African agricultural systems. Yet, at the same time, US intelligence and defense agencies began to frame drought and other environmental disturbances in Africa as security problems to be managed. This conjuncture highlights a broader set of issues about global security projects and environmental change in drylands, while also revealing how alternate counter publics sought to make sense of these changes in ways that challenged normative ideas about African spaces.

Dr. Brittany Meché is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College. Her research examines the politics of environmental expertise, global security projects, French and United States empire, and the making of Black/African diasporic worlds. Dr. Meché previously served as a visiting research fellow at Harvard University, the University of Edinburgh (UK), and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Germany). She is the co-editor of Heartbreak and Other Geographies: Collected Writings of Katherine McKittrick published earlier this year with the University of Minnesota Press. Her first solo-authored book Natural Insecurities: Sahelian Space-Time and the Empire of Expertise (forthcoming with Duke University Press) examines security interventions, climate change, and the afterlives of empire in West Africa.