The necessity of Afrofeminist epistemological interventions in climate change politics

Climate change is one of the multiple crises that feminist political theories are currently dealing with. Applying a power-sensitive analysis, many also highlight the coloniality of climate change – in material terms that lead to unequal responsibilities and vulnerabilities as well as in epistemological terms. The latter attest to our assumptions about causes of climate change, its manifestations and effects, its political and activist address. While these epistemologies do refer to the coloniality of climate change, this coloniality is also intersectionally constituted. Critical political theory approaches have sought to address these power inequalities in climate change and focused on post-decolonial, anti-racist, feminist, queer, anti-capitalist, and anti-ableist interventions. In this talk, I argue for the necessity of intersectional feminist theory perspectives on climate change. I am grounding these reflections in the French geopolitical context. On the one hand, this context is characterised by neoliberal, nationalist, and techno-centric approaches to climate politics. On the other hand, the French state creates an increasingly restrictive climate for intersectionally working activists and academics. Within this context, I illustrate that Afrofeminist theoretical perspectives on climate change offer an important way of arriving at an intersectional, transformative theorising of the climate crisis. They do so (1) by providing alternative knowledge archives that foreground, for instance, dependency, corporeality, and care as well as (2) by resisting their invisibilisation through structural restrictions. This talk concludes by explicating the value of Afrofeminist epistemological interventions for feminist political theory as well as the coloniality of climate change.