“Monsters, catastrophes and the Anthropocene. For a postcolonial critique of violent bio- and necropolitics” is the title of the keynote speech that Gaia Giuliani (IN2PAST / IHC, NOVA FCSH) will present at the opening of Spring Research Student Symposium, which takes place between 12 and 13 of March, 2026, at the Falmouth University.

Abstract: Within a critical analysis of logics, ontologies and narratives of the Anthropocene, and a rethinking of the relationship between biopower and colonial and racist narratives, caught in a circular relationship of co-(re)production, my paper is framed in a reflection on the nexus between catastrophe, monstrification and bio/necropolitics that expose certain subjects to premature and violent death, and their eccentric epistemologies resisting violent erasure.
It originates in a study on the relationship between the extractive violence of racial capitalism, colonial archives of race, and their use between modernity and postmodernity, and the impact they have in terms of an epistemic violence that reduces the complexity the relationship between human life, non-human life and non-life (Povinelli 2016) within the exploitative and extractive ontologies and logics of the Anthropocene.