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Interrogating \u2018Planetary Boundaries\u2019 of the Anthropocene: Borderlands, Justice, and Re-Ordering<\/strong><\/p>\nSanjay Chaturvedi (South Asian University)<\/p>\n
The shifting meanings of boundaries and borders\u2014both material\/tangible and intangible\/ideational, and across multiple scales\u2014lie at the heart of unfolding debates on the Anthropocene. This \u2018new\u2019 social-geological epoch, marked by humanity\u2019s unprecedented impacts on Earth\u2019s geosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere, also generates under-researched boundary-inducing effects through its meta-geographies.<\/p>\n
This keynote explores how borderlands, when re-imagined as homelands, function as under-recognised yet powerful barometers of the Anthropocene. Drawing on the lived realities of border villages in Indian Punjab, such as Mohar Jamsher, it highlights how communities at the margins are doubly exposed\u2014both to ecological disruptions like floods and agrarian precarity, and to the epistemic violence of the post-partition locational curse. These experiences underscore the limits of classical geopolitics, rooted in rigid borders and state-centric security, in addressing socio-environmental injustices.<\/p>\n
The keynote proposes de-bordering as both method and metaphor: questioning undifferentiated notions of sovereignty, development, and risk, while re-envisioning borders as sites where \u2018collective climate security\u2019 may be approached through the lens of ontological (in)securities. Situating border communities as vantage points rather than peripheries, it calls for inclusive, bottom-up governance and a move beyond technocratic framings of planetary limits toward more just, culturally embedded, and integrated approaches to Earth System Governance. The notion of a critical geopolitics of the Anthropocene advanced here directly challenges the conceit that planetary problems can be managed through the very bordered frameworks that produced them.<\/p>\n
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Unexplored Literary Territory: Brussels Through the Eyes of Outsiders<\/strong><\/p>\nElisabeth Bekers (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)<\/p>\n
In 1992, Dutch novelist W. F. Hermans commented on his choice to live in Brussels by noting that the city was \u201cunexplored territory\u201d (1992: 36\u201337, my transl.), a remark that can certainly also be applied to the city\u2019s depiction in literature. Unlike other major cities whose iconic identities (Paris, city of love; New York, promised land) are widely recognized, the Belgian capital has not developed a distinctive myth of its own and consequently is less familiar to readers and scholars of modern literature. Nevertheless, since the 19th century, Brussels has inspired canonised and less-established authors, locals and foreigners writing in various European languages. In this paper, I will consider how Brussels has been imagined from the perspective of the Other\u2014termed hetero-images in imagology, which studies how national and cultural images and stereotypes are construed in literature (Beller & Leerssen 2007).<\/p>\n
In my discussion, the views of Brussels formulated by European border-crossers in works by canonical French and British authors from the 19th century\u2014Charles Baudelaire, G\u00e9rard de Nerval, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Bront\u00eb, and Joseph Conrad\u2014are compared with the perceptions offered by non-European travellers and immigrants in contemporary works by foreign and Brussels-based writers of non-European descent, such as Teju Cole, Alecia McKenzie, and Le\u00efla Houari. The authors of this relatively broad range of works will be shown to be less interested in capturing the spirit of Brussels\u2014let alone in creating a transcendent myth or a comprehensive portrait of the city\u2014than in tailoring the city to their own agendas. In my close reading of selected fragments, I will demonstrate how Brussels serves as a pretext for self-criticism and self-reflective socio-criticism, for which the authors draw on urban tropes that are applicable well beyond the Belgian capital, such as the city as palimpsest, fl\u00e2nerie, alienation, existential crisis, colonial continuities, cosmopolitan hybridity, and the persistence of boundaries and margins in an increasingly globalised world\/Brussels.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\n\n\n
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