Sule Egya
Nature in environmental humanities scholarships has come to signify diverse engagements with the other-than-human world in the context of what has emerged as new materialism. In this course, however, we will explore nature as a concrete form of existence in which the spiritual space and the physical space merge, a spiritual-physical zone of biodiverse existence in which human beings, despite their powerful agency, are implicated as just one species of the earth’s beings ruled by the forces of nature. This form of nature is local, traditional, and indigenous thereby promoting the possibilities of identity formation among a people produced by a historical process. Hence, the idea of the plurality of nature: natures. The seminar puts this notion of nature in dialogue with decoloniality, which we will take as a process of critiquing perceived universality of Eurocentric knowledge system and practices imposed on formerly colonised societies.