This page hosts the schedule and readings for the Planetarities seminar meetings, Spring 2015, facilitated by Neel Ahuja.

 

Seminar Description

 

1/9 Study

• Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “The University and the Undercommons,” Chapter 2 of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013)
• Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Critical Inquiry (2004) (optional)

 

1/16 Matter

• Timothy Morton, “Zero Landscapes in the Time of Hyperobjects,” Graz Architectural Magazine (2013)
• Jane Bennett, Preface and Chapter 1 of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010)
• Karl Marx, selection from Capital: Volume 1 (1867)
• Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, excerpts from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980)

 

1/23 Earth

• Jodi Byrd, “Is and Was: Poststructural Indians without Ancestry,” Chapter 1 of The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (2011)
• Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry (2009)
• Naveeda Khan, “The Death of Nature in the Age of Global Warming” (2014)
• Frantz Fanon, “On Violence,” Chapter 1 of The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

 

1/30 TBD

Groupwork/collaboration session

 

2/6 Anima

• Mel Chen, selection from Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2012)
• Kim TallBear, “Beyond Life/Not Life” (2014)
• Nicole Shukin, selection from Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009)
• Michel Foucault, short excerpts on biopower from Discipline and Punish (1975); The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (1976); and the lecture series Security, Territory, Population (1978)

 

2/13 Security

• Brian Massumi, “National Enterprise Emergency: Steps toward an Ecology of Powers,” Theory, Culture, and Society (2009)
• Melinda Cooper, “Preempting Emergence: The Biological Turn in the War on Terror,” Theory, Culture, and Society (2004)
• Jasbir Puar, “Prognosis Time: Toward a Geopolitics of Debility, Capacity, and Affect” Women and Performance (2011)
• Nicole Shukin, “Security Bonds: On Feeling Power and the Fiction of an Animal Governmentality,” English Studies in Canada (2013)

 

2/20 Atmosphere

On Friday 2/20, guest Renisa Mawani will join us and our meeting will take place at 4pm in Donovan Lounge, 2nd Floor, Greenlaw Hall. Please also attend Renisa’s Thursday 2/19 talk on the Komagata Maru, indigeneity, and anticolonialism at 4pm in Donovan Lounge.

• Renisa Mawani, “Atmospheric Pressures: On Race and Affect” (2014)
• Arun Saldanha, “Reontologising Race: The Machinic Geography of Phenotype,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2006)

 

2/27 Carbon

• Timothy Mitchell, “McJihad,” Chapter 8 of Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2011)
• Reza Negarestani, “Palaeopetrology: From Gog-Magog Axis to Petropunkism,” from Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008)
• Michel Foucault, selected articles from Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (2005)

 

3/6 Human

Guest Fadi Bardawil will join us

• Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Translating Life-Worlds into Labor and History,” Chapter 4 of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (1999)
• Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture (2004)
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, excerpt of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (please read p66-75 of the PDF) and short excerpt from Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999)

 

3/13 NO MEETING, Spring Break

 

3/20 Intimacy

Please attend Lisa Lowe talk (3/19) and seminar (3/20)

• Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” Chapter 8 of Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (2006)
• GWF Hegel, excerpt from Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

 

3/27 Informal Meeting

• Review of Mbembe, Lowe, etc.

 

4/3 NO MEETING, University Holiday

 

4/10 Relativity

• Karen Barad, “On Touching — The Inhuman That Therefore I Am,” differences (2012)
• Michelle Wright, introduction to Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (2015)
• Waziyatawin, “The Paradox of Indigenous Resurgence at the End of Empire,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society (2012)
• Jared Sexton, “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Unsovereign,” Critical Sociology (2014)

 

4/17 Meet to discuss further readings

 

4/24 Seminar Conclusion

• Fatimah Ashgar, “Pluto Shits on the Universe” (2015)