Ashley Dawson

Ashley Dawson is an author, activist, and professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. Dawson specializes in postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and environmental humanities with a particular interest in histories and discourses of migration.^[1] Since 2004, Dawson has been a contributing member of the Social Text collective.^[2] Dawson was co-editor of Social Text Online from 2010-2014 and, by appointment of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), he was also editor of the Journal of Academic Freedom from 2012-2014.^[3] He has published and edited numerous books, and his essays have appeared in journals such as African Studies Review, Atlantic Studies, Cultural Critique, Interventions, Jouvert, New Formations, Postcolonial Studies, Postmodern Culture, Screen, Small Axe, South Atlantic Quarterly, Social Text, and Women’s Studies Quarterly.^[4]

Life and education[]

Dawson was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1965 to a British father and a South African mother. In 1973, his family emigrated from South Africa and relocated in Maryland, United States. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of the South in 1987, Dawson completed a master's degree in English at the University of Virginia, where he began to work on postcolonial studies.^[5] Dawson went on to earn a Ph.D. in English at Columbia University under the tutelage of professors , Anne McClintock, Jean Franco, and Edward Said.^[6]

Work[]

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After an early stint as Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, Dawson moved to the in 2001, where he remains a tenured Professor of English.

Throughout his career, he has contributed scholarship in the fields of postcolonial studies, transnational, and global literature and theory, twenty-first-century and contemporary literature, among others. More recently, his writings have focused on the environmental humanities and ecocriticism.^[7]

In his latest book, People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R Books 2020), Dawson provides a critique of a market-led transition to renewable energy. He surveys the early development of the electric grid in the United States, telling the story of battles for public control over power during the Great Depression. This history frames accounts of contemporary campaigns, in both the United States and Europe, that eschew market fundamentalism and sclerotic state power in favor of energy that is green, democratically managed, and equitably shared.

In Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, published with Verso in 2017, Dawson argues that cities are ground zero for climate change, contributing the lion’s share of carbon to the atmosphere, while also lying on the frontlines of rising sea levels. Today, the majority of the world’s megacities are located in coastal zones, yet few of them are adequately prepared for the floods that will increasingly menace their shores. Instead, most continue to develop luxury waterfront condos for the elite and industrial facilities for corporations, which contribute to the intensification of carbon emissions, while also placing coastal residents at greater risk when water levels rise. In Extreme Cities, Dawson offers an alarming portrait of the future of our cities, describing the efforts of Staten Island, New York, and Shishmareff, Alaska residents to relocate; Holland's models for defending against the seas; and the development of New York City before and after Hurricane Sandy. Real climate justice, he argues, must build “on anti-imperialist, antiracist, and feminist movements"^[8] as well as other collectives already fighting to remake cities in a more just and equitable way.

In Extinction: A Radical History, published by O/R Books in 2016, Dawson examines humanity's role in the catastrophic extinction of animal life on the planet and argues that environmental devastation cannot be fully understood without a critique of global economics and an interdisciplinary approach that combines science with radical politics, environmentalism, and the humanities.

Previously, in 2013, Dawson published The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature. His first monograph, Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain, 2007, presents a cultural history of migration and migrants to the United Kingdom after 1948. The book surveys how innovative forms of cultural expression like dub poetry and bhangra music work as expressions of defiance to the United Kingdom's exclusionary definitions of citizenship, while also reconfiguring notions of national belonging.

Publications[]

Books[]

Monographs[]

• People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons, O/R Books 2020
• Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, Verso 2017
• Extinction: A Radical History, O/R Books 2016
• The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature, Routledge 2013
• Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain, University of Michigan Press 2007

Edited volumes[]

• A People's Climate Plan for New York? Climate Action Lab, Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY 2019
• Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities (with Ali Abunimah, ), Haymarket Books 2015
• Imperial Ecologies (New Formations) (with Jeremy Gilbert, Wendy Wheeler), Lawrence & Wishart 2010
• Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (with ), University of Michigan Press 2009
• Democracy, States, and the Struggle for Social Justice (with , Neil Smith, ), Routledge 2009
• Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (New Americanists) (with ), Duke University Press 2007
• Global Cities of the South (with Brent Hayes Edwards), Special Issue, Social Text 2004

References[]

External links[]

• Ashley Dawson Website

Interviews[]

• Why Some 'Radical Conservationists' Think We Need to Abolish Capitalism to Save the Animals. Vice, March 10, 2016
• Extinction, “De-Extinction,” and Capitalism Against the Grain
• On domination, extinction, and capitalism's long history of slaughter This is Hell
• Ashley Dawson: Extinction: A Radical History Majority Report
• How is Neoliberal Capitalism Killing the Planet? YouTube (Channel-goingundergroundRT)

Public events[]

• Multispecies Salon: Hope In An Era of Extinction Princeton Environmental Institute-Princeton University
• Hope in a Time of Extinction CUNY The Center For Humanities