Date & time
Monday, February 15, 2021
11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
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Racial capitalism and geological violence in the wake of the plantation
Deborah A. Thomas and Kathryn Yusoff in conversation
Speaker(s)
Deborah A. Thomas and Kathryn Yusoff; co-moderated by Jill Didur and Kregg Hetherington
Cost
Free
Organization
Milieux, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture
Where
Online
Pineapple grove, Jamaica, c1905. Photograph from Picturesque Jamaica, by Adolphe Duperly & Son, (published in England, c1905). Artist: Adolphe Duperly & Son.
Deborah A. Thomas (University of Pennsylvania) and Kathryn Yusoff (Queen Mary, University of London) explore topics ranging from long memories, histories, and the environmental impact of racial capitalism.
Through this conversation, the two will think through the geopolitics of the plantation, Witnessing 2.0, the demands of ‘doubt,’ and the inhumanities and Black Anthropocenes within Caribbean and Black diasporic contexts and post/colonial time-spaces.
A co-presentation of the Colonial, Racial, and Indigenous Ecologies (CRIE) Working Group at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC) in conjunction with the Critical Anthropocene Working Group (CARG) at the Milieux Institute.
Co-moderators: Jill Didur (Department of English) and Kregg Hetherington (Department of Sociology and Anthropology).
About the Speakers
Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a Research Associate with the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. Her recent book, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (2019), was awarded the Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society in 2020 and was also the runner-up for the Gregory Bateson Prize in the same year. She is also the author of Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (2011).
Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography in the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. Most recently, she is author of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), a SI on “Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene” (with Nigel Clark) in Theory Culture and Society, “Epochal Aesthetics” in E-flux, and "Geologic Realism" in SocialText. Her most recent and overdue book project is Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race (forthcoming).