Il Tolomeo Rivista di studi postcoloniali | A Postcolonial Studies Journal | Journal d’études postcoloniales | Revista de estudos pós-coloniais

Journal | Il Tolomeo
Monographic journal issue | 22 | 2020
Research Article | Colonizzazione ambientale, defuturing capitalocenico e pratiche eco-artistiche decoloniali a sud

Colonizzazione ambientale, defuturing capitalocenico e pratiche eco-artistiche decoloniali a sud

Il ‘caso Taranto’

Abstract

The present essay aims at offering some interpretative keys for the ecological disaster of one of the most beautiful sites in the Mediterranean: Taranto. It does so through the ecocritical tools of postcolonial and decolonial thinking and the analysis of an intense iconography of eco-artistic urbanist engagements, which have dramatically exemplified what it has meant living in the midst of the largest of Europe’s steelworks. These engagements, having “one foot in literature and the other on land” (Glotfelty, Fromm 1996, XIX), attempt to decolonize the imaginary related to the deeply discordant relationship between the city of Taranto and ‘its’ steelworks, which is more than twice the size of the same city. We have chosen, after Jason Moore (2016), the adjective ‘capitalocenic’ rather than the more voguish ‘anthropocenic’, since the environmental changes are not the end result of an abstract human action, but rather of the tangible century-long rule of capital: the earthless (Vázquez 2017) mode of production of modernity that à la Descartes denies the earth into which it gets its claws and, as a consequence, it denies the deep knitting of “humanity-in-nature/nature-in-humanity” (Moore 2015).


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: Aug. 25, 2020 | Accepted: Oct. 24, 2020 | Published Dec. 22, 2020 | Language: it

Keywords South • Defuturing • Coloniality • Capitolocene

Copyright © 2020 Antonella D’Autilia, Luigi Carmine Cazzato. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/Tol/2499-5975/2020/22/020


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