Frankenstein and Kant’s beauty come from Dutch Indonesia
Dehlia Hannah, CApE Hum Fellow 2025 and Professor of Environmental Aesthetics at Copenhagen University is interviewed by CApE writer Semine Long-Callesen in an article for Resilience.
“The story of the Indonesian volcano Tambora presents the 1815 eruption as the catalyst for Mary Shelley’s Gothic Frankenstein, but the connection between today’s Indonesia and European colonial empires had long been established. The British East India Company had operated in Indonesia for centuries and engaged in the trade of pepper and many other commodities. The environmental crisis made numerous appearances in the European canon but little attention to colonial violence was given to it. It took the Anthropocene to create an aesthetic of the environmental crisis and self-reflection in the cultural canon. And it sparked a long process of going back over famous works that had been taken for granted as artworks devoid of environmental violence. European knowledge production was always tied to the routes of the empire and Western researchers continue to embody their desire for something pure and beautiful. But for a brief moment in the 2010s, the Anthropocene debate allowed for a deeper understanding of the environmental crisis and the many loose ends to come together.”
Read the full article "Frankenstein and Kant's beauty come from Dutch Indonesia".