Tracing a fugitive line from the anti-capitalist, abolitionist, and anti-enclosure poetics of the Industrial Revolution to the current crisis of fossil capitalism and its discontents, Anahid Nersessian and Daniel Eltringham's writings reorient the critical foundations of ecocriticism from the perspective of struggle. Reckoning with a counter-history of dissent that stretches from William Blake's Romantic-era radicalism to the contemporary militant poetics of Sean Bonney, this combined lecture and performance registers the commons and the calamity form as terrains of social domination, diminishing refuge, and potential resistance.

In collaboration with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) series Terrains of Struggle, Perdu hosts a program of talks, readings, and discussion.

Anahid Nersessian

Anahid Nersessian is poetry scholar and professor of English at UCLA whose recent work includes Keat’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (2022), a collection of experimental essays, and The Calamity Form: On Poetry & Social Life (2020).

Daniel Eltringham

Daniel Eltringham is a poet, translator, and author of Poetry & Commons: Postwar & Romantic Lyric in Times of Enclosure (2022).