09:30
Birkbeck
November 7
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
This event was cancelled due to the train strike
The Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture 2024. The Coal in Violence: How One Swedish Working-Class Writer Predicted Global Warming in 1928. Professor Andreas Malm, Lund University
Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up A Pipeline: learning to fight in a world on fire, discusses British histories of coal intertwined with Swedish working-class literature.
In 1928, a young Ivar Lo Johansson, soon to become the leading Swedish working-class novelist, published what might have been the first consistently dire warning about the climatic effects of large-scale coal combustion. It was included in a book of reportage about life in the British coal districts. What led Lo Johansson to his precocious prediction? This lecture will trace the intersecting paths of subaltern wilderness politics and early climate science in the Swedish movement of working-class literature in general and the works of Lo Johansson in particular.
Andreas Malm is associate senior professor of human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. His latest books, both out from Verso in October, are The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth and, written with Wim Carton, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.