The Anthropocene, as a diverse set of environmental happenings under the long arc of settler colonialism, slavery and racial capitalism, is delivering a lesson in geologic realism about the natality of ecological and racialised violence. Such reckonings with geology—as an inventory of matter—arrive on the foreshore in various forms of inundation that threaten, remake and rift the taken for granted ground. In this broken ground, the inhuman dimensions of Modernity’s horizons are engaged to reveal a foundational racialisation of matter. This seminar will investigate the grammars of these inhuman geologies on the beach as a rift/riff zone; a zone where the political terra of land as property and bodies as commodities are opened up by libidinal and littoral economies. With a concern for fashioning alternative worlds and counter-modes of anti-racist fossilisation in the Anthropocene, the beach will be a site in which to collectively address both epochal times and time travel.
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Geologic Realism: on the beach in epochal times
Mon, Jul 8, 20192:00 pm to 5:00 pm -
Tue, Jul 9, 20192:00 pm to 5:00 pm
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Wed, Jul 10, 20192:00 pm to 5:00 pm
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Thu, Jul 11, 20192:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography in the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on earth sciences, black feminist theory, geophilosophy and political aesthetics in the Anthropocene. Recent publications include, A Billion Black Anthropocenes (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), a Special Issue on “Geosocial Formations”(2017) for Theory, Culture and Society and “Geologic Realism” (2019) in Social Text. She is currently finishing a book on “Geologic Life” that addresses the geologies of race under colonialism and their afterlives in the grammars of materiality in the Anthropocene.
Day 1: Anthropocenic Times
Sylvia Wynter, 1492: A New World View in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, 5-57. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.
Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations” in Sylvia Wynter ed. Katherine McKittrick. Durham, Duke University Press, 2015.
Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Day 2: You Are Here (arrival)
Christina Sharpe “Lose your Kin” New Inquiry, 2016
Kathryn Yusoff Epochal Aesthetics: Affectual Infrastructures of the Anthropocene e-flux, 2017
Day 3: You Are (not) Here (erasure)
Laura Pulido and Juan de Lara (2018) “Reimagining the ‘Justice’ in Environment Justice: Radical Ecologies, Decolonial Thought, and the Black Radical Tradition” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space (1-2): 76-98.
Francoise Verges Racial Capitalocene Verso 2017
Kathryn Yusoff White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike e-flux, 2019
Day 4: Geologic Blues: at the beach in the breach of time
Edouard Glissant “The Black Beach” “The Burning Beach” Poetics of Relation Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2010.
Katherine McKittrick “Rift” Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode 50, 2019.
Tiffany Lethabo King. “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight.” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 1 (2017): 162-85.