Guest Speakers
January 11, 2022, 16:40-18:10 (CET)
Larissa Lai (University of Calgary)
Weird Habitat: Feral Space as Contact Zone in The Tiger Flu and Salt Fish Girl
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.
Larissa Lai has written eight books, including Iron Goddess of Mercy, Salt Fish Girl, The Tiger Flu, and a Nomados chapbook, Eggs in the Basement. Recipient of the Jim Duggins Mid-Career Novelist's Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Astraea Award, and finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the Books in Canada First Novel Award and seven more, she's been involved in cultural organizing, experimental poetry and speculative fiction communities since the late 1980s. She feels at home in both Vancouver and Calgary, and holds a Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary where she directs The Insurgent Architects' House for Creative Writing.
This Public Guest Lecture is part of the Global Weirding Lecture Series, co-organized with Alison Sperling (TU Berlin) and supported by the TUD IMPRESS Internationalization Program. For a Zoom Link, please contact global.weirding@tu-dresden.de
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December 14, 2021, 16:40-18:10 (CET)
Rebekah Sheldon (University of Indiana, Bloomington)
Race, Nature, Magic, Lovecraft
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.
Rebekah Sheldon is an Associate Professor of English at Indiana University. Her first book, The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe (2016), from University of Minnesota Press, received an Honorable Mention from the Science Fiction and Technocultural Studies book award. She is currently working on a brief theoretical manuscript, New Critical Occultism, and a longer monograph, Magic in Theory and Practice, both of which consider the role of magic in contemporary theoretical and cultural productions from Harry Potter to the Alt-Right Shaman. Her work on Lovecraft forms a part of the second of these projects. She has published pieces on the occult and criticism in Symplokē and Angelaki as well as the volume Trans-States: The Art of Crossing Over. She is also an associate editor of Extrapolation.
This Public Guest Lecture is part of the Global Weirding Lecture Series, co-organized with Alison Sperling (TU Berlin) and supported by the TUD IMPRESS Internationalization Program.
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December 8, 2021, 18:30-20:00 (CET)
Alison Sperling (TU Berlin)
From the Old Weird to the New Weird: Disrupting a Literary History
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.
Alison Sperling is an IPODI Postdoctoral Fellow at the Technical University Berlin and an Affiliate Research Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin. She researches the Weird and science fictional in literature and visual culture, feminist and queer theory, and the Anthropocene. She has published in Rhizomes, Girlhood Studies, and Paradoxa, with forthcoming work in Science Fiction Studies and The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. She is also the editor of a recent issue of Paradoxa on "Climate Fictions." She is currently at work on her first book project, Weird Modernisms.
This Public Guest Lecture is part of the Global Weirding Lecture Series, co-organized with Alison Sperling (TU Berlin) and supported by the TUD IMPRESS Internationalization Program.
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November 23, 2021, 16:40-18:10 (CET)
Stefanie K. Dunning (Miami University, Ohio)
Other/World(ly): The Black Ecology of (Outer) Space
I am the brother of the wind
I cover the Earth and hold it like a ball in my hands
I can take away others to another galaxy
I will take you to new worlds
I will take you to outer unseen worlds that are more beautiful than anything the earth presents.
--Sun Ra, Tweet, June 29, 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.
Stefanie K. Dunning is an Associate Professor of English at Miami University. She is a graduate of Spelman College and the University of California, Riverside, and a Ford Fellow. Her first book, Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same-Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture, from Indiana University Press, was published in 2009. Her latest project, Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture from the University Press of Mississippi was published in April 2021. In addition to her published books, she has been published in African American Review, MELUS, Studies in the Fantastic, and other journals and anthologies. She also has a podcast, called Black to Nature: the podcast, available for listening on all major platforms.
This Public Guest Lecture is part of the Global Weirding Lecture Series, co-organized with Alison Sperling (TU Berlin) and supported by the TUD IMPRESS Internationalization Program.
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July 6, 2021, 16:40-18:10 (CET)
Brent Ryan Bellamy (Trent University, Ontario)
Remainders of the American Century: Understanding US Culture through the Post-Apocalyptic Novel
Since 1945 the portentous fate of the United States has shifted from the irradiated future of nuclear holocaust to the saltwater wash of global warming. This talk will introduce a theory of the post-apocalyptic novel in American literature from the 1940s to the present as reflections of a growing anxiety about the decline of US hegemony. It suggests that post-apocalyptic novels imagine human responses to the aftermath of catastrophe. The talk will argue that the shape of the future they imagine is defined by "the remainder," when what is left behind expresses itself in storytelling tropes. The discussion will illuminate the political unconscious of post-apocalyptic writing, drawing on a range of disciplinary fields, including science fiction studies, American studies, energy humanities research, and world-systems analysis.
Brent Ryan Bellamy is a settler-scholar, managing editor, and collaborative educator. His recent publications include an essay in Public Bookstitled "How to Build a World" and his edited collection, An Ecotopian Lexicon available from University of Minnesota Press and Materialism and the Critique of Energy available at mcmprime.com.
This public guest lecture takes place in the context of the Seminar "North American Petrocultures" and in collaboration with the North American Studies Colloquium. For a zoom link, please contact moritz.ingwersen@tu-dresden.
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June 1, 2021, 16:40-18:10 (CET)
Jonathan Bordo (Trent University, Ontario)
Canada, the Proper Name of the Wilderness: The Metaphysics of Absence in Landscape Art of Canada from Tom Thomson to Edward Burtynsky
The enunciation of a single proposition namely that the word “Canada” is the proper name of the wilderness is the subject of this lecture, a partial exposition of that proposition by revisiting the very beginning of this inquiry that was initiated through an engagement with the landscape art of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. This art, defined as a landscape without a witness, manifests a metaphysics of absence that presupposed the erasure of Indigenous presence from landscape. The cultural implications of this erasure are shown as a contrarity in the work of Emily Carr while the perpetuation of Wilderness as a metaphysics of absence finds its fulfilled expression in the environmental photographs of Edward Burtynsky. It is often said that Canada is without its myth, ruling fable, grand narrative. This lecture will show that Canada even to this day is still carried by wilderness as its myth and fable.
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 on cultural theory, the arts, and literature with a particular emphasis on landscape, art history, imitation, and locales of memory. Currently, he is completing a monograph entitled Canada, The Proper Name of the Wilderness from which this lecture has been drawn.
This public guest lecture takes place in the context of the Seminar "Issues in Canadian Literature: From Survival to Decolonization" and in collaboration with the North American Studies Colloquium. For a zoom link, please contact moritz.ingwersen@tu-dresden.
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April 27, 2021, 16:40-18:10
Rachel Webb Jekanowski (Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador)
Cinemas of Extraction: Race, Geology, and Settler Imaginaries in Canadian Popular Science Films
As early as the 1940s, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) produced industrial, scientific, and educational films about natural resource management, mining, and exploratory drilling. Many of these films were co-sponsored by government ministries with an interest in promoting the profitable development of Canada’s natural resources. In this talk, I focus on a collection of popular science films produced by the NFB in the decades following post-World War II concerned with geology, deep time, and extractive industry. Films like Know Your Resources (dir. David A. Smith, 1950), The Face of the High Arctic (dir. Dalton Muir, 1958), Riches of the Earth (Revised) (dir. Colin Low, 1966), and The North Has Changed (director uncredited, produced by David Bairstow, 1967) depict some of the social dimensions of industry, alongside scientific narratives about Canada’s physical geography and geological history. Although created with different contexts and audiences in mind—from high school classrooms to Canada’s centennial celebration in 1967—these films share an investment in what Kathryn Yusoff calls geology’s “racial formation” (2018). Drawing on film theory, science studies, critical settler colonial scholarship, and the energy humanities, this talk examines how this “cinema of extraction” responses to the interlocking logics of scientific praxis, extraction, and race at work within Canada’s settler colonial projectand Western models of economic development.For contemporary viewers, these films also offer fertile grounds for reexamining the ways that science is used to frame changing social attitudes towards extraction and sustainability in our current climate crisis.
Rachel W. Jekanowski is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at Memorial University and an interdisciplinary scholar of Film and Media and the Environmental Humanities. Her research focuses on entanglements of visual culture, industry, and environments in North America, historically and in the times-to-come.
This public guest lecture takes place in the context of the Seminar "North American Petrocultures" and in collaboration with the North American Studies Colloquium. For a zoom link, please contact moritz.ingwersen@tu-dresden.