The Tropical Studies Working Group (TSWG) examines and critiques the conception of tropicality within the longue durée of colonial expansion and extraction from the 15th century on. Problematizing the geocultural imaginaries of the tropical belt—a vast territory encompassing a significant fraction of modern day Central and South America, South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Oceania—as the peripheral hinterlands for imperial desires and ambitions, this working group aims to re-center the tropics within contemporary frameworks of planetary justice and politics, restore animacy and agency to tropical subjects and spaces, and establish tropicality as a heuristic for understanding the historical development of race, climate, labor, and capital.
This working group will create convivial spaces of productive friction and contestation across both the disciplinary boundaries of fields such as anthropology, environmental history, visual culture, architecture, art history, political economy, and environmental sciences, as well as the diverse cultural and linguistic contexts spanning the tropics. Oriented around a dynamic bibliography of traditional and non-traditional scholarship, TSWG invites the Yale community and beyond—including but not limited to faculty, students, visiting scholars, and curatorial and librarian staff—to tropicalize through programs such as reading circles, film screenings, exhibition-making, food tasting, and collective creative writing, amongst other modalities.
Initiated and convened by Alfonse Chiu (MED’25, Yale School of Architecture).
Supported by the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale.