Keynote Lecture "Unsettling Resilience Stories: Dismantling Colonial Ideas of Futurity”

Keynote Lecture “Unsettling Resilience Stories: Dismantling Colonial Ideas of Futurity” with Prof. Susie O'Brien at 09:30 on Thursday, June 22.

The idea of resilience is everywhere these days, offering a conceptual framework for thriving in volatile times. As it is commonly understood, resilience thinking assumes certain things about the world (i.e., it is dominated by forces that are complex, turbulent, unpredictable and largely beyond our control) and about the right way to live in it (through the cultivation of flexibility, adaptability and a hopeful orientation to the future).  Many critics have noted the conformity of these qualities of resilience with the principles of neoliberalism. This paper explores the emergence of resilience in the current historical conjuncture, to analyze its enlistment in visions of the future aligned with contemporary structures of power, including settler colonialism and racial capitalism. It also considers whether and, if so, how, the idea of resilience might be creatively deployed in the interests of decolonization and interspecies justice.

Susie O’Brien has been a professor at the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University since 1997. Her teaching and research are in literary and cultural studies, with a focus on postcolonial environmental humanities. Her publications, which include essays in Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Globalizations, Postcolonial Text, Canadian Literature, Cultural Critique, Interventions, Mosaic, and South Atlantic Quarterly, focus on postcolonial ecology, the slow and local food movements, risk, and resilience. Her book, Revolt and Remember: Unravelling Settler Colonial Resilience Stories, under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press, analyzes the usefulness and the limitations of the concept of resilience through an anti-colonial ecocritical lens.