M/W PhD in comparative literature, African ecopoetics

The thesis is part of the joint CNRS / University of Arizona project entitled "Environmental Justice, Extraction and Cultural Resistance in Africa".
A mobility subsidy (Africa / USA) is added to the remuneration of the contract.

The CNRS PhD research project will explore the underground and underwater worlds in African literatures and analyze, through the prism of ecopoetics, what literature tells us about experiences of the depths the way in which writers stage these experiences and the potential political implications of these poetic, dramaturgic, or narrative portrayals. The literary exploration of mines, underwater life (fluvial or maritime), forest canopies, will allow the PhD student to interrogate, in a specific manner, the place of human societies within the environment and the threat to ecosystems (overfishing, mining, deforestation). Questions of environmental justice and the issues at stake regarding what Rob Nixon calls the “environmentalism of the poor” open new and interesting perspectives for the development of an ecopoetics of the depths. The resources that the extractivist gaze considers exploitable, exportable, and exhaustible, are local, and very often an integral part of specific modes of socialization that sustain lasting connections between human societies and ecosystems. An ecopoetic approach is interested in the ways in which subterranean worlds participate in the socialization process and inspire the mobilization of environmental resistance.
Three framing methodologies will be employed (and combined) to define the parameters of the thesis. It will be necessary to choose, according to each type of subterritoriality (mines, underwater worlds, forests). A regional or national focus is preferable, with particular attention to the political, linguistic, and cultural context of the chosen region. Lastly, if the PhD student chooses to focus on mining, it will be possible to narrow the focus to a specific mineral (gold, coal, cobalt, copper, etc.), in which case a continent-wide transversal approach would be possible.