Events Archive

Achille Mbembe, "Critique of Black Reason" Workshop

September 18, 2017

The Institute for the Humanites and Global Cultures cordially invites students and faculty to attend a lecture and a workshop by Professor Achille Mbembe (U of Witwatersrand). Both events will feature Mbembe's new book, Critique of Black Reason (2017 - Duke UP). Other workshop panelists include Laurent Dubois (Duke), Juan Obarrio (Johns Hopkins) and Christina Mobley (UVA). 

In order to foster an intimate conversation, faculty and graduate students who wish to participate in the workshop (9/18, Wilson 142, 9:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m.) should register here. Workshop readings drawn from Critique of Black Reason are available through the registration form. Space is limited, and refreshments and lunch will be available.

Professor Mbembe will deliver his lecture entitled "Negative Messianism in the Age of Animism" in Wilson Hall 142, from 5-6:30. There is no registration required for this event.

About the book:

In Critique of Black Reason eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness—from the Atlantic slave trade to the present—to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With Critique of Black Reason, Mbembeoffers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future. 

About Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe is Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is coeditor of Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, also published by Duke University Press, and the author of On the Postcolony as well as several books in French.

Workshop on Global Water (convened by Christian McMillen)

May 8, 2017

Workshop on the Historical Novel and Ethnographic Writing with Amitav Ghosh

April 28, 2017

A workshop on the historical novel and ethnographic writing with members of the Mellon Global South Lab and Department of Anthropology students and faculty.

"Language at the Bar: James Joyce, Myles Joyce and the 1882 Maamtrasna Murders (Galway, Ireland) Revisited," Prof. Margaret Kelleher Public Lecture

April 20, 2017

Biography

Professor Margaret Kelleher was awarded the Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama in 2012.  For the previous five years, she was founding director of An Foras Feasa: the Institute for Research in Irish Historical and Cultural Traditions, at NUI Maynooth. Her books include The Feminization of Famine (published by Duke UP and Cork UP, 1997) and the landmark publication The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (2006), co-edited with Philip O¿Leary. She was a contributing editor to Field Day Anthology Volumes 4 and 5, and editor of the special issue on the Irish Literary Revival forIrish University Review (2003). Her primary research interests include nineteenth-century literature, famine literature, women¿s writings, cultural history, and the historical relationship between literature in English and Irish. 
 

She was awarded an IRCHSS Senior Project Fellowship in 2011 to create an electronic version of the Loebers' Guide to Irish Fiction (operative from November 2012 at http://www.lgif.ie) and has worked with colleagues in An Foras Feasa on a number of groundbreaking digital humanities projects. She was Principal Investigator (with John Keating) of the PRTLI 4 funded project 'Humanities, Technology and Innovation" 2007-2011 (grant award ¿5.8 m) and NUI Maynooth's Principal Investigator from 2011-2012 for the PRTLI 5 funded Digital Arts and Humanities PhD programme (grant award ¿750,000). Her current research project is a study of bilingual culture in nineteenth-century Ireland.
 

A leading advocate for Irish studies internationally, Professor Kelleher is Chairperson of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, Chair of the Irish Film Institute and a member of the Humanities Committee of Science Europe.  Educated at University College Cork and Boston College, she has been visiting Professor at Concordia University Montreal, University of São Paulo, Boston College and Beijing Foreign Studies University, and was recently awarded a visiting fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge. She is Director of the MA in Anglo-Irish Literature in the School of English, Drama and Film.

"Social Movements: Where Have All the Leaders Gone?" Prof. Michael Hardt Public Lecture

April 11, 2017

We continue to witness each year the eruption of “leaderless” social movements.  From North Africa and the Middle East to Europe, the Americas, and East Asia, movements have left journalists, political analysts, police forces, and governments disoriented and perplexed.  Activists too have struggled to understand and evaluate the power and effectiveness of horizontal movements.  The movements have proven able to pose democratic ideals, sometimes to force reforms, and to pressure and even overthrow regimes – and, indeed, widespread social processes have been set in motion in coordination with or as consequence of them – but the movements tend to be short-lived and seem unable to bring about lasting social transformation.  Many assume that if only social movements could find new leaders they would return to their earlier glory and be able to sustain and achieve projects of social transformation and liberation.  Where, they ask, are the new Martin Luther King Jr.s, Rudi Dutschkes, Patrice Lumumbas, and Steve Bikos?  Where have all the leaders gone? Leadership has become a conundrum that today’s movements seem unable to solve, but the leadership problem in revolutionary and progressive movements is not entirely new.  In this lecture, Hardt will use some examples from past theory and practice to situate and clarify some of the issues and alternatives involved in the organization of social movements today.

Time: 5:30 - 7:00 pm
Location: Nau Hall 101

Biography
 

Michael Hardt is Professor of Literature in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. His writings explore the new forms of domination in the contemporary world as well as the social movements and other forces of liberation that resist them. In the Empire trilogy -- Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009) -- he and Antonio Negri investigate the political, legal, economic, and social aspects of globalization. They also study the political and economic alternatives that could lead to a more democratic world. Their pamphlet Declaration (2012) attempts to articulate the significance of the encampments and occupations that began in 2011, from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, and to recognize the primary challenges faced by emerging democratic social movements today. 

Beyond Representation: Creative & Critical Practice in the Environmental Humanities

April 8, 2017

Many conversations in environmental humanities involve selecting and interpreting scientific data, then adding contributions from humanities fields to that quantitative base. Our symposium asks what happens when the equation is flipped—when we assume that many environmental issues start with the humanities. What questions are we best positioned to pose, and to explore? How can scientists help us, instead of the other way around? How are the humanities particularly suited to explore issues of environmental justice at the intersection of creative and critical practice? The symposium will explore these questions through interdisciplinary panels, workshops, and a reading by poet Cecily Parks. Panel topics include Critical Cartography, African American Environmentalisms, and Indigenous Environmental Justice. 
 

For more information, visit the official event page. 

The Global/Contemporary Symposium

March 31, 2017

What is gained and what is lost, what is revealed and what is obscured by understanding the moment in which we live as global? This one-day symposium at the University of Virginia will explore the alignment of two dominant terms within the academy, the “contemporary” and the “global,” to question, challenge, and expand the relationship between them. We hope to interrogate the ways in which the phenomena that draw the attention of scholars of the contemporary—the rise of digital media, an increasingly inter- and supra-national economy, technologies of migration and communication, far-reaching environmental degradation, and political unrest—have become the prominent reference points for writing about our current moment. While the time in which we live is inarguably global, this schema can obscure alternate ones and allow us to forget that the characteristics marking our era as “global” have long and complex histories of their own. Inviting a vibrant group of scholars, we hope that this symposium might lead to longer-term collaborations and an intellectual community that will supplement the ties we hold to our own departments and institutions—indeed, to create a wider-reaching and even global network of discourse surrounding this subject. For more information, visit the Global/Contemporary Symposium website.

"Bleak Liberalism and the Question of Therapeutic Criticism," Prof. Amanda Anderson Public Lecture

March 28, 2017

This talk will explore the demands of criticism at the present moment, assessing a number of recent calls for new methods, including those that seek to promote a new mood for criticism. The arguments of my recent book, Bleak Liberalism, will be discussed in relation to these larger debates, and a case will be made for the importance of the tradition of normative critical theory to the challenges we face both inside and outside the academy.  
 

Biography

Amanda Anderson joined the Brown faculty in 2012 as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and became Director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities in 2015. She is a literary scholar and theorist who has written on nineteenth-century literature and culture as well as on contemporary debates in the humanities. Her books include Bleak Liberalism (Chicago, 2016), The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, 2006), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, 2001), and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Cornell, 1993).  From 2008-2014, she served as the director of an interdisciplinary summer institute, the School of Criticism and Theory, which is hosted by Cornell University. Prior to joining the Brown faculty, she taught at Johns Hopkins University, where she served as department chair from 2003-2009.

In her latest work, Bleak Liberalism (Chicago, 2016), Professor Anderson asks: Why is liberalism so often dismissed by thinkers from both the left and the right? To those calling for wholesale transformation or claiming a monopoly on “realistic” conceptions of humanity, liberalism’s assured progressivism can seem hard to swallow. Bleak Liberalism makes the case for a renewed understanding of the liberal tradition, showing that it is much more attuned to the complexity of political life than conventional accounts have acknowledged.

Amanda Anderson examines canonical works of high realism, political novels from England and the United States, and modernist works to argue that liberalism has engaged sober and even stark views of historical development, political dynamics, and human and social psychology. From Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Hard Times to E. M. Forster’s Howards End to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, this literature demonstrates that liberalism has inventive ways of balancing sociological critique and moral aspiration. A deft blend of intellectual history and literary analysis, Bleak Liberalism reveals a richer understanding of one of the most important political ideologies of the modern era.

"What is a Poem?" Inaugural Symposium of the Center for Poetry and Poetics

March 17, 2017

Is a poem more like a song or a shipping container? What was a poem in the seventeenth century, and what is it in the digital age? Why poetry, anyway? Join our world-class speakers as they explore these and other questions. The symposium will conclude with a conversation with former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove. Visit the Center for Poetry & Poetics website for more information. 

"WHAT IS A POEM?" 

Friday, March 17, 2017

The Rotunda Dome Room

10am-5pm

10am - Noon - Panel 1
     Roland Greene
         “Apollo Barroco: What Was a Poem in the Seventeenth Century?” 
     Anjali Nerlekar
         “The Poem and the Ocean-Encircled Earth" 
     Marjorie Perloff
         “Reading the Verses Backward: Poetry for the Digital Age”      

1:30pm - 3:30pm - Panel 2
     Stephen Burt
          "Shipping Containers"
     Nikki Skillman
          "The Song of the Harpies"
     Don Share
          "Why Poetry"

4:00pm - 5:00pm – A Conversation with Rita Dove

Mellon Fellows Symposium (with Sheila Crane, Amanda Phillips, Douglas Fordham)

March 3, 2017

IHGC Presents 

Mellon Fellows Symposium

Friday March 3, 2017

10.00am-1.30pm

142 Wilson Hall

10:00 am - 10:45 am

Sheila Crane, Associate Professor, School of Architecture

"Towards a Non-Aligned Architectural Theory: Notes from the Maghrib"

10:45 am - 11:30 am

Amanda Phillips, Assistant Professor, Department of Art

"Between the Seas: Ottoman Textiles in the Eighteenth Century"

11:30 am - 12:15 pm

Douglas Fordham, Associate Professor, Department of Art

"Aquatint Empires: Medium and Message in Georgian Book Illustration relating to Asia and Africa"

12:15 pm - 1:30 pm

Lunch

Mellon Fellows Symposium (with Camilla Fojas, Mary Kuhn, Jack Chen, Hanadi Al-Samman)

February 10, 2017

IHGC Presents 

Mellon Fellows Symposium

Friday February 10, 2017

9.30am-1.30pm

142 Wilson Hall

9:30 am - 10:15 am

Hanadi Al-Samman, Associate Professor, Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures 

"Queering the Arab Closet"

10:15 am - 11:00 am

Jack Chen, Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures, & Cultures
"Towards a Literary History of Information in Traditional China"

11:00 am - 11:45 am

Camilla Fojas, Associate Professor, Department of Media Studies
"Techno-Domestics, Telecommunications, and Surveillance across the American Pacific"

11:45 am - 12:30 pm

Mary Kuhn, Assistant Professor, Department of English
"'The vulgar short leaved pine': Forest Industries and the U.S. Literary Landscape in the Late-19th Century”