Melting Sovereignties: Environmental Colonialism and the (Im)possibility of Reconciliation in Chantal Bilodeau’s "Sila"
American Studies Association of Turkey (ASAT) 43rd International American Studies Conference, İstanbul, Türkiye, 11 - 13 Kasım 2026, ss.68, (Özet Bildiri)
- Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
- Basıldığı Şehir: İstanbul
- Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.68
- İstanbul Kent Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
Chantal Bilodeau’s first play of the Arctic Cycle, Sila (2015), dramatizes the rapid melting of Arctic ice as a place of irreconcilable sovereignty struggles between Inuit and extractive petrocapitalism. With that regard, Bilodeau uses staging as a means to reveal the historical continuities of colonialism with the current extractivist logic under which environmental degradation becomes a neutral by-product of progress. This paper examines the play as a critical treatment of the forms of environmental colonialism that continue to shape reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and corporate-state apparatuses that cause planetary warming.
Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence accommodates the way that Arctic warming is colonizing Indigenous Arctic communities by the slow loss over time of conditions that are required to sustain Indigenous cultures. Moreover, the play illustrates how climate change is “colonial déjà vu,” a state in which Indigenous communities continue to suffer environmental crisis as part of a history of territorial theft and epistemicide. Through Nixon and Kyle Whyte, Bilodeau’s dramaturgy highlights the encounter between Inuit traditional ecological knowledge and Western technoscientific paradigms that together generate climate catastrophe.
Sila presents the different points of view of the Inuit elders, climate scientists, corporate representatives, and politicians in different scenes. Still, the discussions reveal that the processes of reconciliation are structurally impossible, as long as the structural worldviews are incommensurable. In the face of the (im)possibility of reconciliation, Sila questions how liberal structures of dialogue may be a method of ongoing colonialism, of the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge, and of the material violence of resource extraction and climate disruption.