Guest Speakers
Global warming is a consequence of man-made changes to the atmosphere. Since the 1970s, technological intervention in the climate, known as solar geoengineering, has been increasingly discussed as a solution strategy. This involves the manipulation of the atmosphere to reflect more solar radiation and thus slow down global warming. In these techno-utopian visions, science fiction and engineering science lie close together.
The event sheds light on the hopes and risks of geo-engineering and examines them using snippets of science fiction literature and film. We ask: Can technologies help to ‘repair’ the atmosphere? What dangers do these technical interventions harbour? Who decides on the use of such technologies - and assesses their consequences?
With: Prof. Dr Chris Pak, literary scholar, Swansea University (UK); Lili Fuhr, geographer and political scientist, Center for International Environmental Law
Moderation: Junior Prof. Dr Moritz Ingwersen, Junior Professor of North American Literature with a focus on Future Studies, Technische Universität Dresden
*Hosted in Context of the Athmospheric ImaginAIRies seminar and lecture series "In the Greenhouse" as well as "Science Fiction and Artifical Athmospheres ". June 17, 2025.
dr. reelaviolette botts-ward is a professor and research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine, where she brings Black feminist healing and arts to healthcare spaces. She is also the founder of blackwomxnhealing—an intergenerational wellness collective—the author of mourning my inner[blackgirl]child (2021), and has served as a poet-in-residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Across all her work, she centers art, spirituality, and healing on behalf of her ancestors and foremothers.
In her visit to TU Dresden she will read from her book of poetry and learning mourning my inner[blackgirl]child (2021)—an intimate journey through embodied memory, complicated selves and times, and intergenerational healing. Her work was featured in our 2024 Introduction to Literary Studies course and we are all the more excited to now be able to welcome her to TU Dresden in person.
Hosted by the Juniorprofessorship of North American Literature and Future Studies in collaboration with the North American Studies Colloquium. June 17, 2025.
Die Atmosphäre umspannt den gesamten Planeten – und obwohl sie unteilbar ist, atmen doch nicht alle die gleiche Luft. Soziale Ungleichheit, Rassismus und globale Machtverhältnisse bestimmen, wer von Luftverschmutzung und Klimawandel am stärksten betroffen ist und wer sich vor ihren Folgen schützen kann. Doch wie lassen sich gerechtere Zukünfte gestalten, in denen diese Ungleichheit überwunden ist?
Die Veranstaltung lädt ein zu einer Suche nach Visionen für atmosphärische Gerechtigkeit—zwischen Aktivismus, Wissenschaft und künstlerischer Imagination. Im Mittelpunkt stehen dokumentarische Filme und afrofuturistische Science-Fiction, die koloniale Strukturen hinterfragen und marginalisierte Perspektiven in den Vordergrund rücken (Filme in englischer Sprache). Anhand dieser Erzählungen fragen wir: Wer denkt die Zukunft und gestaltet die Atmosphäre – und für wen? Wie können wir Welten schaffen, in denen Gerechtigkeit nicht nur ein Traum ist?
Mit Nelly Yah Pinkrah (TU Dresden) im Kontext von "Athmospheric ImaginAIRies" (Seminar) und "In the Greenhouse" (Vorlesungsreihe). MAy 28, 2025.
Sherryl Vint is Professor of English, Media, and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where she also directs the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. A leading scholar in speculative fiction studies and winner of the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Science Fiction Research Association, Prof. Vint is the author of numerous influential books, including Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021), Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed (2014), Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal (2012), and Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, and Science Fiction (2007). She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and is the Managing Editor of Science Fiction Studies and editor of book series Science in Popular Culture.
Hosted in the context of the survey lecture "Issues in North American Literature: Nature and Technology" (Prof. Ingwersen). February 3, 2025.
Roundtable at "Humanities Perspectives on on Energy Transition" Composium. Hosted in the Context of the "Geostories" Seminar and "LIKWA" lecture series. November 13, 2024.
Energy is more than the diesel in our cars, the electricity in our refrigerators, the lithium in our batteries. Energy shapes how we interact with the world. Its technologies, politics and materialities are deeply embedded in our histories, geographies, aesthetics, emotions, and visions of the good life. Energy systems are also cultural systems. In times of global heating, accelerated resource extraction, and environmental injustice, the task of transitioning towards more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable energy futures pertains to all aspects of cultural and scientific practice, and requires the perspectives and expertise of a wide variety of fields. This symposium will foreground the crucial role of the humanities and social sciences in engaging the complexities of energy transition and the legacies of petromodernity.
With contributors from the Czech Republic, Poland, the UK, and Germany, we will introduce critical perspectives and methods on energy justice, energy literacy, energy geographies, situated transitions, and post-fossil imaginaries. JOIN US!
Roundtable at "Humanities Perspectives on on Energy Transition" Composium. Hosted in the Context of the "Geostories" Seminar and "LIKWA" lecture series. November 13, 2024.
Energy is more than the diesel in our cars, the electricity in our refrigerators, the lithium in our batteries. Energy shapes how we interact with the world. Its technologies, politics and materialities are deeply embedded in our histories, geographies, aesthetics, emotions, and visions of the good life. Energy systems are also cultural systems. In times of global heating, accelerated resource extraction, and environmental injustice, the task of transitioning towards more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable energy futures pertains to all aspects of cultural and scientific practice, and requires the perspectives and expertise of a wide variety of fields. This symposium will foreground the crucial role of the humanities and social sciences in engaging the complexities of energy transition and the legacies of petromodernity.
With contributors from the Czech Republic, Poland, the UK, and Germany, we will introduce critical perspectives and methods on energy justice, energy literacy, energy geographies, situated transitions, and post-fossil imaginaries. JOIN US!
Roundtable at "Humanities Perspectives on on Energy Transition" Composium. Hosted in the Context of the "Geostories" Seminar and "LIKWA" lecture series. November 13, 2024.
Energy is more than the diesel in our cars, the electricity in our refrigerators, the lithium in our batteries. Energy shapes how we interact with the world. Its technologies, politics and materialities are deeply embedded in our histories, geographies, aesthetics, emotions, and visions of the good life. Energy systems are also cultural systems. In times of global heating, accelerated resource extraction, and environmental injustice, the task of transitioning towards more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable energy futures pertains to all aspects of cultural and scientific practice, and requires the perspectives and expertise of a wide variety of fields. This symposium will foreground the crucial role of the humanities and social sciences in engaging the complexities of energy transition and the legacies of petromodernity.
With contributors from the Czech Republic, Poland, the UK, and Germany, we will introduce critical perspectives and methods on energy justice, energy literacy, energy geographies, situated transitions, and post-fossil imaginaries. JOIN US!
Keynote Lecture of "Humanities Perspectives on Energy Transition" Symposium. Hosted in the Context of "Geostories" (seminar) and "LIKWA" (lecture series). November 13, 2024.
Energy is more than the diesel in our cars, the electricity in our refrigerators, the lithium in our batteries. Energy shapes how we interact with the world. Its technologies, politics and materialities are deeply embedded in our histories, geographies, aesthetics, emotions, and visions of the good life. Energy systems are also cultural systems. In times of global heating, accelerated resource extraction, and environmental injustice, the task of transitioning towards more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable energy futures pertains to all aspects of cultural and scientific practice, and requires the perspectives and expertise of a wide variety of fields. This symposium will foreground the crucial role of the humanities and social sciences in engaging the complexities of energy transition and the legacies of petromodernity.
With contributors from the Czech Republic, Poland, the UK, and Germany, we will introduce critical perspectives and methods on energy justice, energy literacy, energy geographies, situated transitions, and post-fossil imaginaries. JOIN US!
Jonathan Bordo (Ph.D., M.Phil., M.A. Yale) is Professor of Cultural Studies and former director of the Cultural Studies Ph.D. Program at Trent University, Ontario. He has published widely in the areas of cultural theory, the arts and literature with a particular emphasis on landscape, art, imitation and locales of memory. He has held prestigious fellowships at humanities centers and research libraries including Clare Hall Cambridge University, The John Carter Brown Library, The Chicago Institute for the Humanities, and the Australian National University. He is the co-editor of Place Matters: Critical Topographies in Word and Image (McGill Queen’s UP 2022, with Blake Fitzpatrick) and presently completing a monograph entitled Canada, The Proper Name of the Wilderness from which this lecture has been drawn. His published works at the nexus of art history, iconology, word and image, and film and media studies with a specific focus on Canadian landscape painting include:
- “Wilderness as Symbolic Form: Thoreau, Grünewald and the Group of Seven,” in Pascale Guibert, ed., Reflective Landscapes of the Anglophone Countries (Brill 2011), 147-171.
- “Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry 26.2 (2000): 224-247.
- “The Terra Nullius of Wilderness: Colonialist Landscape Art (Australia and Canada) and the So-called Claim to American Exception,” International Journal of Canadian Studies 15 (1997): 13-36.
- “The Jack Pine Wilderness Sublime or the Erasure of Aboriginal Presence from the Landscape,” Journal of Canadian Studies 2.7 (1994): 98-128.
Hosted in the Context of "Issues in North American Literature: Nature and Technology" (lecture), on November 11, 2024
In her 1976 preface to The Left Hand of Darkness (originally published in 1969), Ursula K. Le Guin describes science fiction as a “thought experiment” that approaches the present from an unfamiliar vantage rather than as a genre that anticipates fantastical futures: “science fiction is not predictive,” she argues, “it is descriptive.” Science fiction, to put this another way, often engages in what Darko Suvin refers to as a practice of “cognitive estrangement” that enables authors to describe familiar things in unusual ways; it can thus critically defamiliarize things we often take for granted about our contemporary world (Suvin 2017, 116).
In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Ann Leckie carries forward Le Guin’s speculative thought experiment in vital and important ways. The fifth novel in Leckie’s Imperial Radch series, Translation State (2023) expands, clarifies, and sharpens Leckie’s argument that misgendering others – refusing to honor their pronouns and their gender identities – is always an act of violence. The novel drives home how Radchaii characters who disregard others’ pronouns embody what Maria Lugones (drawing on Anibal Quijano) calls “the coloniality of gender,” or the way that imperial societies impose their own gender norms on other cultures in the service of hierarchical domination (Lugones 2008).
Translation State thus offers a striking example of the kind of speculative critical theory Suvin, Carl Freedman, and others gesture toward: it engages in a descriptive thought experiment, situated between transgender studies and science fiction studies (and complementing both), that starkly illuminates the operations of what Dean Spade refers to as “administrative violence,” or the ways that gender identity is imposed, policed, and enforced by various legal mechanisms that enact and sustain social and political norms (Spade 2015). The novel further explores how colonial and imperial power often inescapably shape social categories and slant the politics of recognition in favor of privileged subjects. Leckie thus particularly exposes how the categorical opposition between “human” and “nonhuman” always carries the difficult baggage of Western modernity since the Enlightenment, with its relentless focus on cisgendered white masculinity as a universal norm.
Hosted in collaboration between the North American Studies Colloquium, "Rewriting the History of the Future" (seminar), "Literature and Future" (LIKWA MA seminar) and "Issues in North American Literature" (lecture). July 2, 2024.
Sarena Ulibarri is the author of two science fiction novellas (Another Life with Stelliform Press and Steel Tree with Android Press) alongside almost 50 short stories, and was the 2023 recipient for the 2023 Utopia Award for Nonfiction for her essay “Horror and Hope in Climate Fiction.” She is also the editor of three solarpunk anthologies, Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers (2018), Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters (2020), and Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures (2021), alongside the forthcoming Solarpunk Creatures (2024).
Hosted in the context of "Literatur und Zukunft" (LIKWA lecture). January 24, 2024.
David A. Robertson (*1977) is an award-winning Indigenous author from Canada and member of the Norway House Cree Nation. Since 2008 he has written over 25 books and graphic novels for children and young adults that frequently integrate elements of fantasy, horror, and Indigenous storytelling. He is the recipient and nominee of numerous literary awards, including the Writers’ Union of Canada Freedom to Read Award (2021), the Governor General’s Literary Award (2017), the Beatrice Mosionier Indigenous Writer of the Year Award, the McNally Robinson Best Book for Young People Award, and many more. His most recent works include the Misewa Saga (2022-2023), Black Water: Family, Legacy, and Blood Memory (2020), and The Reckoner Rises (2020-2022) and he has contributed to celebrated anthologies of Indigenous speculative fiction such as Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time (2016), This Place: 150 Years Retold (2019), and Love After the End (2020). Through his writing about Indigenous cultures, communities, and histories, he educates and entertains, telling stories of Indigenous empowerment and futurity. Aside from being a writer he works at the Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Centre. Together with his wife and five children he lives in Winnipeg.
The reading was hosted in the context of the "Introduction to Literary Studies" lecture. November 8, 2023.
This lecture will consider the weird eroticism that arises from human-elemental encounters in contemporary literature and artworks. In response to the climate emergency, artists, filmmakers, and writers are increasingly exploring the perspectives of nonhuman actors and agents such as fungi, plant life, trees, rocks, and water. In my ongoing research into elemental aesthetics, I’ve been struck by the frequency with which sexuality and eroticism is invoked to convey the simultaneous disgust and fascination with nonhuman agency.
I will draw on a few exemplary examples of this weird eroticism, including queer xyloid sexuality in the arboreal collage artworks of Kenyan American artist Wangechi Mutu, lithic eroticism in the Icelandic ecohorror TV series Katla(Netflix, 2021), human-fungal procreation in British writer Aliya Whiteley’s dystopian novella The Beauty (2014), libidinal entanglements with mushrooms in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gothic horror novel Mexican Gothic (2020), and the weird species boundary-crossing of Mother Trees in British composer Joe Acheson’s Sonic Woodland acoustic installations at the Kew Gardens botanical estate at Wakehurst, West Sussex in England.
How are we to read such artworks? Why might these artists, directors, and writers be invoking our disgust? These works, I argue, embrace the fecund, the abject, and the decomposing possibilities of mushrooms, woods, and organic matter in a rich, ambivalent imagery of inhumanism. Human protagonists are threatened with death and transmutation into forms of nutrient-rich afterlife that nourish plants (human composting) via the elemental aesthetics of symbolic redemption, and unambiguously utopian possibility. I conclude that a cultural analysis that is attuned to the utopian impulse of such artworks can help us navigate the tyranny of human exceptionalism we must overcome at a time of ecocatastrophe and mass extinction.
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture at Birkbeck, University of London where she is Director of the Centre for Contemporary Literature. Her research focuses on utopian possibility as it intersects with questions of aesthetic form, genre, temporality, political subjectivity, and post/inhuman agency and she works and teaches widely on science fiction. Caroline is author of Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2019), co-editor of China Miéville: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015) and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture, 1945-2020 (forthcoming). Caroline is currently writing her second monograph, Hopeful Inhumanism: The Elemental Aesthetics of Ecocatastrophe and edits C21: Journal of 21st-Century Writings for the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies. Her research has featured in a variety of places, including the New Statesman, the Times Higher Education, the Guardian, SFX Magazine, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 3, BBC One South East, the Barbican Centre, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Whitechapel Gallery, and in a dedicated exhibition at the Museum of London.
Hosted in the Context of "Issues in North American Literature: Nature and Technology" (lecture). November 13, 2023.
Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler is the author of Wrist (2016), an Indigenous monster story written from the monsters perspective, and Ghost Lake (2020), an inter-related collection of short stories (both published by Kegedonce Press), and co-editor of Bawaajigan: Stories of Power (2019), a dream-themed anthology of work by Indigenous writers (Exile Editions). He is a recipient of an Indigenous Voices Award and a Hnatyshyn Reveal Award and teaches Creative Writing at Kwantlen University in British Columbia. He is Jewish and Anishinaabe, two spirit, and a member of Lac des Mille Lacs First Nation.
Hosted in the context of "Indigenous Horror" (seminar). Funded through the TU Dresden Diversity-Sensitive Teaching Award. January 17, 2023.
Dr. Michele Lacombe is Full Professor Emeritus with the Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. In January 2023 she is taking up a semester-long Fulbright Canada Research Chair with American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her area of specialization is Indigenous literature; "Rogarou Genealogies in Cherie Dimaline's Empire of Wild" will appear in Volume 34, No. 3-4 of Studies in American Indian Literatures.
Hosted in the context of "Indigenous Horror" (seminar). Funded through TU Dresden Diversity-Sensitive Teaching Award. November 22, 2022.
Join us for an evening with artist and author Rivers Solomon and musician and artist Obaro Ejimiwe on November 11 as part of the «Rethinking Relations» conference at TU Dresden. Rivers Solomon is a writer of speculative fictions and Afrofuturism and a finalist for the Lamda, Tiptree, and Locus Awards; they are the author of An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), The Deep (2019) and Sorrowland (2021). Obaro Ejimiwe is a visual artist and musician whose work examines themes around African spiritualism, colonization, masculinity, identity and black joy. Solomon's work and Ejimiwe’s sound performance will be framed by a joint conversation with cultural and media theorists Alison Sperling and Nelly Y. Pinkrah.
Hosted in the Context of "Literature and Elements" (seminar) and "Rethinking Relations" (conference). November 11, 2022.
Authors Reading, Film Screening & Panel Discussion.
As the current debate about a rejuvenation of Winnetou for German television demonstrates, uncertainty about how to deal with cultural appropriation and colonial stereotypes is still prevalent in Germany, especially when it comes to the portrayal and representation of Indigenous people. This evening, award-winning Indigenous writer and filmmaker Drew Hayden Taylor from the Curve Lake First Nation in Canada reverses the ethnographic gaze. We will screen his documentary Searching for Winnetou (2018), in which he sets out with a mix of wonder, humour, and curiosity to understand what the odd German fascination with the Indigenous peoples of North America is all about. As he makes his way to the Karl May Festival in Bad Segeberg, the Wild West hobbyist scene in Bavaria, and the Karl May Museum in Radebeul, he raises questions about the German romanticization of Indigenous cultures that seem more relevant than ever.
Hosted by North American Studies Colloquium & DHMD. November 7, 2022.
With the conference focusing on ‘disruption – agency – transformation’, this keynote will take one of these concepts as an entry point to reflect on the other two. From a sustainability transitions perspective, we will discuss the space for disruption and agency for addressing the current environmental and social crisis. We specifically take a closer look at different forms of agency in sustainability transitions and how these are reinvented and transformed through social innovations. We will also consider the close interlinkages between innovation, disruption and system reproduction in attempts of actors to influence transition dynamics and end with a reflection on the agency of research(ers) in and for sustainability transitions.
Hosted in the Context of LIKWA (lecture) by TUDiSC & Chair of North American Literature and Future Studies. October 12, 2022.
Public and academic debates around automobility have highlighted the need to rethink automobility. These debates usually revolve around technical innovations, such as replacing combustion engines and optimizing traffic systems. For these innovations to become solutions, however, the way individuals and societies think about automobility arguably needs to change on a more fundamental level. In particular, the environmental embeddedness of automobility, which has long been regarded as a disturbing factor, needs to be recognized as a primary and integral condition. The research project presented in this lecture contributes to this challenge by examining a period when automobility was a thoroughly environmental experience. In the early twentieth century, before closed cars and concrete roads became the standard, motorists navigated through mud, sand, and water, constantly exposed to the elements and acutely aware of their surroundings. Automobility was not sustainable at that time either, but it was perceived, discussed, and imagined as embedded in the natural environment. The project recovers this environmental approach to automobility by reading road literature from the period and tracing its environmental aesthetics: the new sensual perceptions and strategies of representation that automobility engendered.
Hosted by Societal Change Forum and Chair of North American Literature and Future Studies. May 18, 2022.
Dr Kanta Dihal is Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London and Associate Fellow of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. In her research, she focuses on the stories we tell about science and technology across cultures, and how they help us think about ethics and bias in new technologies.
Hosted in the Context of "Ghosts in the Machine: Critical A.I." (lecture series). May 10, 2022.
Class Visit and Co-Teaching in Global Weirding Seminar. January 18, 2022.
Recognizing the weird as liveliness at sites where inertness is expected, Larissa Lai takes up Anna Tsing and others' concept of feral space, as those spaces where "nonhuman invasions are tightly coupled with human projects of conquest, whether political or commercial" and adds to it Mary Louise Pratt's older notion of the "contact zone" as a site where cultures clash in highly asymmetrical relations of power. Understandings of "the human" are not as homogenous as critics of the anthropocene would sometimes have it. Lai recognizes the ways in which Asians, queers and women are oriented towards the human as a category and to full human subjectivity as a stance. Insofar as Asians have human agency (or, as Roy Miki would have it, "asiancy"), they also have access to non-Western orientations to so-called "nature"-- genealogically accessible ways of knowing that might disrupt the existing structures. Insofar as Asians are inert-- objects of the Western gaze-- they have much in common with the nonhuman: they are livelier than expected and continuous with other lively things. In this talk, Larissa Lai discusses the spaces and places of two of her novels, The Tiger Flu and Salt Fish Girl, as well as the lively beings who inhabit them.
Hosted in the Context of "Global Werding" (Seminar/Lecture Series). January 11, 2022.
In an article for The New York Times, writer Gabrielle Bellot describes recent Black horror cinema as giving expression to the “frightening reality of being Black in a world that still associates darkness of skin with the old meanings of darkness” and where “the ghosts of the past still walk the American landscape.” Her reading of the supernatural (darkness, ghosts) as figuring the past is in line with the journalistic consensus that Black horror is a genre of the uncanny, one that reflects the failure of post-racial optomism in the ongoing present of Black and brown dispossession and white supramacist violence. Without dismissing the importance of what Black activist Reverend William Barber has called the Third Great Reconstruction for the work of the genre, this talk will argue that such allegorical readings of the supernatural elide the way that Black horror also and crucially retools and retheorizes the metaphysics of Weird fiction toward an undoing of the spiritual/material binary. The purpose of this talk is to offer a non-allegorical reading of the supernatural in fictions by women writers and writers of color as well as in the thinking of Black Studies scholars and scholars of the new materialisms who cite the Weird in general and the stories of H.P. Lovecraft in specific. In asserting that these works are engaged in a shared metaphysical (as well as an historical) project, I am also arguing that these writers are doing more than correcting Lovecraft, they are also recognizing and foregrounding something in the tradition of the Weird inseparable from its nativism and racism. The project, in other words, tells us something necessary about the way that nativism and racism serve as defensive supplements to the seductive instabilities of the spiritual/material binary. Reading against the grain of new materialist rejections of vitalism, this talk is especially attentive to the shared interest in natural magic in theoretical and fictional engagements with climate weirding.
Hosted in the context of "Global Weirding" (seminar/lecture series). December 14, 2021.
This talk tracks a literary history of the Weird, a genre most associated with Modernist American writer of supernatural horror H.P. Lovecraft, from the Modernist period into the contemporary cultural moment. Departing somewhat from the majority of scholarship on the Weird which largely claims there is a kind of break between the Old and the New cultural iterations, the latter of which is often revisionary of Lovecraft and the Old Weird's racism and nativism, this talk will try to think differently about their relation and about the role of race in the long arc of weird cultural production in the U.S. context.
Hosted in the Context of "Global Weirding" (Seminar/Lecture Series). December 8, 2021.
On his Lanquidity (1978) album, the musician and artist Sun Ra features a piece called “There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You About).” In the expansive, curious provocation of sonic mystery embodied by both the sound of the piece and its title, we are invited to consider that what we imagined to be a totality (the known world) is in fact merely a fragment of an other/world(ly) context we have yet to grasp, pointing towards a broader (celestial) ecological field. This talk examines (outer) space to illuminate the way that mainstream representations of space cohere with colonialist narratives vis-a-vis blackness and how black writers and artists approach the blackness of (outer) space in a way that heals the conceptual rift introduced by Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon (and other enlightenment thinkers) when they defined "man" as the opposite of nature. This rift, I argue, sets the stage for the anti-blackness of Western society. Therefore, we can read contestations of Western arrangements relative to nature as a simultaneous rejection of anti-blackness.
In this talk, I utilize critical work by J.T. Roane, Sylvia Wynter, and Sharon Holland to stage a textual analysis of Afrofuturist texts like Sun Ra's Space Is the Place (1974). I intend to show that the way outer space is understood as antipodal to natural space, though it is, of course, as natural as any forest, exposes the continuing herniation in Western society between nature and the enlightenment human. Thus, traditional (outer) space narratives operate as recapitulations of colonialist and “new world” schemas that reproduce antiblackness and its antecedent rupture from the natural world. Yet black artists and writers subvert colonialist space narratives by defining (outer) space as the site of a felicitous non-Western elsewhere, stylizing other/world(li)ness in ways that disclose the capaciousness of black/space, where the universal precondition for embodied being is blackness, without which nothing is visible.
Hosted in the Context of "Global Weirding" (seminar/lecture series). November 23, 2021.
Hosted in the Context of "North American Petrocultures" (seminar) and North American Studies Colloquium. July 6, 2021.
Hosted in the context of "Issues in Canadian Literature" (seminar) & North American Studies Colloquium. June 1, 2021.
Hosted in the Context of "North American Petrocultures" (seminar) and North American Studies Colloquium. April 27, 2021.