On February 15th, 2021, the Representing the Anthropocene project at the Speculative Life Cluster and the Colonial, Racial, Indigenous Ecologies (CRIE) working group at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University hosted the online event Racial Capitalism and Geological Violence in the Wake of the Plantation: Deborah A. Thomas and Kathryn Yusoff In Conversation.
The authors’ respective work has re-energized conversations about the long memories, histories, and environmental impact of racial capitalism, thinking through the bio-politics of the Plantation and Black Anthropocenes within Caribbean and Black diasporic contexts, and post/colonial time-spaces. The conversation recording will be available for viewing until December 31st, 2021.
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).
Recommended Readings
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Jackson, John L. Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. Harvard University Press, 2013.
Lyons, Kristina. Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics. Duke University Press, 2020.
Parreñas, Juno. Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Duke University Press, 2018.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 7-28.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 257-337.
This conversation was hosted by Concordia faculty members Dr. Nalini Mohabir (Human Geography), Dr. Kregg Hetherington (Anthropology) and Dr. Jill Didur (Environmental Humanities & Postcolonial Studies).