Conversations across Place. Vol. 1, Reckoning With an Entangled World

Abstract

In her contribution to Conversations across Place, entitled “Towards a Lexicon of ‘Opacity’”, Shruti Belliappa grapples with the entangled legacies of colonialism that bind the human and non-human through place and time, where humans are divided into census-defined religious groups and “nature” is itself extracted from the human, converted into a mere curiosity for human enjoyment, extraction, or exploitation. Conversations across Place, edited by Frances Whorall-Campell and Nicola Brandt and published in 2021 by the Green Box, is a publication located squarely within a moment of intensifying global crisis. As prefaced here by Belliappa, the editors contend that there no longer remain “other” places untouched by the inequality, exploitation, and environmental destruction of our neoliberal age (p. 11). The assertion is palpable as once-rare environmental disasters, the inequities of global Covid-19 vaccine access, and displays of extreme desperation by many marginalised by capitalism jostle for space in news reports and in our collective conscience.