Lecture: Gondwanaland - the Transnational History of Southern Earth

There are few place/times like the ancient megacontinent Gondwanaland, that once connected a planetary south: South Asia, Southern African, South America, Australasia and Antarctica. It can simultaneously enchant a plate tectonics modeller, an Indigenous theologian, a historian of Tamil origin-stories, a Gond artist, and a UNESCO world heritage committee seeking to conserve ancient rainforest remnants.

Alison Bashford is leading a collaborative project that explores the modern history of Gondwanaland, incorporating and layering knowledge of its deep geological histories into imperial, settler-colonial and Indigenous histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this lecture, she explores how we might consider the history of Gondwanaland as an idiosyncratic transnational history, a history and geography that has been nationalised, colonised, and mythologised since c.1800.