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39293
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Lecture-Discussion
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F
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2:00PM
-4:50PM
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M
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135 English Building
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Loughran, T
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- Part of Term:
- 1
- Date Range:
- 01/21/20-05/06/20
- Section Info:
- Colonial Anthropocene: From the Age of Extraction to the Age of Extinction “Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities.”-Sylvia Wynter. In this course we will explore the early Americas as a laboratory for the newly invented concept of the human, grounding our itinerary in the monumental genealogy laid down by the Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, who posits two crucial moments in the formation of our contemporary predicament: Man 1 (dating to Europe’s first encounter with the Americas in 1492) and Man 2 (dating to the liberal Enlightenment and its 19C Darwinian aftermath). We will trace the rise of Man 1 and Man 2 (and the worlds they both created and destroyed) and then look at contemporary attempts to think with and beyond these formations in recent work on post- and non-human Being. Our reading list will thus think “early America” both transnationally and transhistorically, with most of our attention given to cultural theorists such as Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, Hortense Spillers, Charles Mills, Walter Mignolo, Nick Estes, Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe, Lisa Lowe, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Alexander Weheliye, among others. Seminars will be largely student-run, with a section of the course reserved for thinking about student projects that might, like so many of our readings, “hack” the human(ist) project rather than simply reproduce it. Please note: this is not a course specifically about climate change, though climate change does provide the inevitable contemporary backdrop for the conversations we will be exploring. Instead, the course considers a related but slightly different set of planetary catastrophes with “Man” at its center: in short, colonialism, nationalism, and racial capitalism. Colonial Anthropocene: From the Age of Extraction to the Age of Extinction - “Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities.”-Sylvia Wynter. In this course we will explore the early Americas as a laboratory for the newly invented concept of the human, grounding our itinerary in the monumental genealogy laid down by the Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, who posits two crucial moments in the formation of our contemporary predicament: Man 1 (dating to Europe’s first encounter with the Americas in 1492) and Man 2 (dating to the liberal Enlightenment and its 19C Darwinian aftermath). We will trace the rise of Man 1 and Man 2 (and the worlds they both created and destroyed) and then look at contemporary attempts to think with and beyond these formations in recent work on post- and non-human Being. Our reading list will thus think “early America” both transnationally and transhistorically, with most of our attention given to cultural theorists such as Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, Hortense Spillers, Charles Mills, Walter Mignolo, Nick Estes, Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe, Lisa Lowe, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Alexander Weheliye, among others. Seminars will be largely student-run, with a section of the course reserved for thinking about student projects that might, like so many of our readings, “hack” the human(ist) project rather than simply reproduce it. Please note: this is not a course specifically about climate change, though climate change does provide the inevitable contemporary backdrop for the conversations we will be exploring. Instead, the course considers a related but slightly different set of planetary catastrophes with “Man” at its center: in short, colonialism, nationalism, and racial capitalism.
- Restriction(s):
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Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
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