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COP26 Blogs: Lara Choksey

Dr Lara Choksey (Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures after 1800) on why we should be reading and using the energy of survival differently

cop26 venue activist projections

In my work, I ask what survival is made to mean, how it came to be a synonym for successful existence, and through this I track how it becomes attached to descriptions of good origins (eu-genēs). This question has led me away from competing for territory and struggling for resources, towards trajectories of kinship; from the static, repetitive problematic of “how can we live together?” to the peripatetic openness required from the question, often sequestered, which might unsettle the methods, technologies, data and moods that form global responses to climate catastrophe: why do we think we live so far apart? 

The world has changed since Paris. The early twenties feel light-years from the street-level ebullience of COP21 fringes taking up space on Le Corbusier’s avenues. The mid-twenties of COP26 loom, dark and bordered, as the world walls itself up. The pandemic has reconfigured climate change as a war of sovereignty to be fought on corporate timelines, exposing at once the techno-logics of large-scale emergency response, their neoimperial fault-lines, and their market value. While these structures remain – epistemological and economic, extractive and geopolitical, and, in the most limited sense, cultural – the world-to-be-saved is bound to detach itself further, and with increasing force, from worlds required to adapt. 

The spectacle of Glasgow has clarified once more that our current version of post-Westphalian internationalism is ill-equipped to intervene in this moment, when the-world-to-be-saved plans fast-track, short-term escape routes, and worlds required to adapt are forced to stay in place. Counter to this current, the fuel of survival on which the-world-to-be-saved operates is starting to run low.

I return in my work to ways that decoloniality has been and is practised in hostile conditions, not the best of all possible worlds. Part of this practice involves reading and using the energy of survival differently. The side-lined insistence of COP26 is that this does not have to mean giving in to extinction, preparing for death, or restoring natural capital. Among other things, it means surrendering the version of human life that stands in for the human, the narrow definition of survival to which this version of life has been fixed, and the creaturely supremacy that has accompanied it.

Image: Graeme Eddolls (activists project messages on the #COP26 venue)