Launch of Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Empire Lifeworlds
When: Monday, May 19, 2025, 5:00 PM - 7:01 PM
Where: Room 313, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London Mile End Road London E1 4NS
The Department of Law and the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences is delighted to host a launch of an exciting new edited collection: Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Lifeworlds (Bloomsbury, 2024), co-edited by Antoinette Burton, Renisa Mawani, and Samantha Frost.
The three co-editors will introduce the book before opening up to discussion with the audience.
Human species supremacy is one of the most persistent fictions at work in the field of modern British imperial history today. This open access collection challenges that assumption, and investigates what histories of empire look like if reimagined as the effect of biocultural, chemical and cultural processes, rather than the result of effects by humans that have been visited upon cultural landscapes, fauna and biomes.
In understanding the boundaries between human and nonhuman worlds as porous and open to mutual transformation, and foregrounding interspecies interactions, Biocultural Empire seeks to understand the conditions of imperial power, experience and knowledge as a remix of 'nature' and 'culture'. Bringing empire's 'biocultural histories' to the fore, it asks imperial historians to reckon with an interpretative framework which refuses the sovereignty and boundedness of the imperial subject by seeing it as inseparable from its social and ecological formations. Through this biocultural framework this collection highlights how relentlessly the human species bias of western liberal thought persists at the heart of imperial projects and their histories, and offers a new anti-colonial method that represents a significant intervention in the field of British imperial history.
The book is available Open Access.
Speakers
- Antoinette Burton (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
- Renisa Mawani (University of British Columbia and Queen Mary University of London)
- Samantha Frost (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
The chair is Maksymilian Del Mar