This is the legacy website for the seminar Planetarities: Decolonial/Inhumanist Critique, which took place in Chapel Hill, North Carolina from January to April 2015. I moved the site from its old link (planetarities.web.unc.edu) to the UC Santa Cruz server in Fall 2016.

—Neel Ahuja

Please take note of a series of events at Duke related to conversations on postcolonialism, materialisms, and the posthuman turn from 4/14 to 4/17. You need to register to attend the Brennan/Ganguly seminar, so please see the links below.

1) Tim Brennan and Keya Ganguly, University of Minnesota: Materialist Conservation Seminar. Explores left-Hegelian approaches to materialism and being. Full Description here: http://www.fhi.duke.edu/sites/default/files/FHI%20Brennan%20Ganguly%20Seminar%20Description.pdf  ….. Register here: http://www.fhi.duke.edu/events/brennan-ganguly-seminar-1

2) A lecture by Keya Ganguly on Sri Aurobrindo and Indian nationalist radicalism: http://www.fhi.duke.edu/events/keya-ganguly-lecture

3) A conference on the thought of Giambattista Vico (which seems to be influenced by Chakrabarty’s examination of Vico’s approach to history in his project on climate change). Speakers include Srinivas Aravamundan, Tim Brennan, and Sabrina Ferry. See  http://www.fhi.duke.edu/events/conference-vico

Please note the following important events coming to Duke and UNC this week:

Lisa Lowe and Lisa Yoneyama at the Critical Asian Humanities Workshop

April 4 Lectures: John Stuart Mill in Hong Kong (Lowe) and A Transpacific Critique of Cold War Knowledge Formations (Yoneyama), 10am-230pm, East Duke 209

Ghassan Hage, anthropologist of race and nationalism; author of White Nation and Against Paranoid Nationalism

April 6 Lecture: The Diasporic Condition, 330pm, Graham Memorial 39

Noura Erakat, legal scholar, activist, and attorney working on Palestine and international humanitarian law

April 9 Lecture: Internationalizing Gaza: The Politics of International Law and the Struggle for Justice, 7pm, Hyde Hall, Institute for Arts and Humanities

1) Global Environmental Histories from Below

2) Deleuze and Guattari in the Anthropocene

Global Environmental Histories from Below

Call for Papers

Special Issue of

Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities

http://www.resiliencejournal.org

Robert Morrissey and Roderick Wilson, editors

We seek submissions for a special, peer-reviewed issue focusing on “Global Environmental Histories from Below” — by which we mean historical work that tells the history of environmental, social, and cultural change from the bottom up. Aiming for a truly global conversation, we hope to bring together scholars with a broad range of geographical and temporal concerns for a mix of essays that will be both methodological and topical. Digging below the level of empire and nation-state, this special issue will draw on local case studies from around the world to imagine and develop a set of frameworks for telling global environmental histories from a grassroots perspective.

Submissions should feature the viewpoint of the voiceless, underrepresented, or socially marginalized wherever possible. They might come at “the below” from a variety of angles, including but not limited to the following:

Indigenous environmental histories: work that addresses the intersection of native peoples and their historical relations with local, regional and interregional environments;

Environmental histories of agriculture and fishing: work that might range from agronomy to farming the sea to explore the long and complex history people have shared with plants, animals, and other historical actors at a variety of scales;

Vernacular knowledges: work that explores how tacit knowledge of the environment is learned and transmitted and how local bodies of knowledge have been changed or lost with the introduction of scientific management of natural environments.

Submissions should be no more than 7000 words, including notes.

Deadline for submissions is May 15, 2015.

For further information please contact Bob Morrissey at rmorriss@illinois.edu and Rod Wilson at riwilson@illinois.edu.

Journal Special Issue: Deleuze and Guattari in the Anthropocene

Twenty years after his death, Deleuze’s thought continues to be mobilised in relation to the most timely and critical problems society faces. As theory is starting to reconcile itself with a grim environmental future and with the emergence of the Anthropocene as a key conceptual framework, we are compelled to consider the philosophical consequences of the irreversible and profound impacts of industrialisation and consumerism on environments at a planetary scale. The Anthropocene disrupts thought itself, requiring that we re-evaluate the human and its place in the cosmos: a third Copernican Revolution. It is widely accepted now that the human species is itself a geological force. Any erstwhile conceptual gap between human and natural history has more or less collapsed. The question whether there could be a “good” or “bad” Anthropocene endows humans with an immense and unprecedented agency in their relationship to the earth, positioning us as accountable for past actions and inactions and future generations. We should beware that this moral dimension tends to offer little more than a biblical version of human stewardship as ostensible solution for the catastrophic futures scientists are alarmed about. It has precisely been such selfish anthropocentrism, and its most vicious avatar, capital, that landed the species in this predicament in the first place.

If the risks embedded in the Anthropocene conceptually unify the human as a species desiring food, energy, art, and a minimum of groundedness, it also brings into relief the ways in which a violent earth further fissures the species along economic, racial and sexual axes. Anthropocene anxiety manifests itself variously in reassessments of the entanglements of the human and the nonhuman, the continuing breakdown of the subject/object distinction, the mania apparent in the plans for geo-engineering, and increasingly popular rethinking of the human body in the context of becomings-animals, -plant and -mineral. The Anthropocene likewise reminds us of the necessity to think at more-than-human timescales. It has required that we consider deep time as well as vast space, reflecting in the process on the inevitability of human extinction and the conception of a world without us. What worlds are there before, beyond and after human time and thought?

In philosophical debates, the Anthropocene has seen an invigoration of cultural and ethical theorizing through the “posthumanist” redeployment of phenomenology, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, philosophy of science and literary theory. What might the significance of Deleuze and Guattari be in relation to this new and urgent set of concerns? Deleuze’s work presaged much of the concept of the Anthropocene, not only in his sustained challenges to humanism, anthropocentrism and capitalism, but also through his interest in geology and the philosophy of time. Guattari was keen on giving his work an “ecosophical” and “cartographical” dimension. Together, they posited a “geophilosophy” which called for a “new earth” along with “new peoples”. Not only does the work of Deleuze and Guattari offer a range of useful concepts that can be applied to contemporary problems such as anthropogenic climate change, peak oil and biotechnology, but it also models the kind of interdisciplinarity that the new epoch of the Anthropocene requires.

This special issue of Deleuze Studies, “Deleuze and Guattari in the Anthropocene”, will engage the many philosophical tools provided by Deleuze and Guattari and their interlocutors in order to critically approach our particularly tense moment in earth history, while also asking how this moment could change the ways they are read and further developed into the future.

We invite considerations of Deleuze, Guattari, or Deleuze-Guattari in relation to the Anthropocene from scholars working in any discipline. Contributions should be 6-8000 words in length and use the journal’s style. Abstracts are due on the 1st of March 2015, decisions will be made by the 15th of March, and final essays due on the 1st of November 2015. Articles will then be subject to double-blind peer review and will be published in 2016.

Please address queries to the editors:

Hannah Stark, School of Humanities, University of Tasmania (Australia)
hannah.stark@utas.edu.au

Arun Saldanha, Department of Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota (United States)
saldanha@umn.edu

For the past several years, the Duke Feminist Theory Workshop has featured presentations that address dimensions of posthumanism, materialism, and/or feminist science studies methods. If you’re interested in attending, space is limited; please register in advance:

http://womenstudies.duke.edu/feminist-theory-workshops/2015

Please note that part of the Duke workshop overlaps with the Lisa Lowe seminar on Friday 3/20.

Thanks to Travis for passing this along! The seminar requires a signup, so do that ASAP if you want to attend.

https://fhi.duke.edu/events/mezzadra-hardt-capitalist-operations-sign

http://www.c21uwm.com/afterextinction/

https://lifeandmatter.wordpress.com/2014/11/19/call-for-papers/