2024–25 Grant Recipients
- Aesthetics of Decolonization
- Security, Precarity, Animals
- The Place of Shame: Ontology, Postcoloniality, and Aesthetic Encounters
- Trans-Imperial African Modernities
- Geographies of Capital
- Race as Theory Working Group
- Contesting Modernities from the Americas: Indigenous Knowlege, Spaces, and Material Culture
- Violent Subjectivities
AESTHETICS OF DECOLONIZATION
In “Infrastructures of Decolonization: Scales of Worldmaking in the Writings of Frantz Fanon,” Begüm Adalet calls for political theorists to––borrowing from the approach of critical geography––adopt a multiscalar approach in thinking about the numerous scales and registers that colonial power operates on, and in turn the anticolonial actors’ forces and conceptions of decolonization. A main analytical commitment of the multiscalar approach is to see different scales––the corporeal, the urban, the regional, the international, and the planetary––as nested together rather than separate categories; the intimate spaces of affect and memories are thus as significant as the spaces of institutions and ideologies in illustrating the intricate relations of decolonization.
Following Adalet in conceiving decolonization as a multiscalar project, this reading group convenes with a shared pursuit to reflect on the process of decolonization in art (broadly construed), visuality, and the built environment. Specifically, what are the visual languages of colonization and decolonization? How are the cultures and politics of imperialism and decolonization translated into the material forms of art, architecture, and cities? How do actors intervene discourses of colonial power by thinking through issues of visuality, and how can we understand their diagnoses and revolutionary endeavors as operating through aesthetics? In answering these questions, we place particular emphasis on materiality, in order to outline how a material approach can offer both conceptual and contextual insights into rethinking the current approaches and methodologies of postcolonial studies.
As a result, our bibliography covers a wide range of disciplines, including cultural theory, political theory, art and architectural history, and anthropology. The goal is to reflect on both the themes of aesthetics and decolonization, as well as the methodologies of studying these relations. The sessions begin with a set of readings that explore the concept of decoloniality, focusing specifically on the relations between theory and praxis (Mignolo and Wash 2018), and between imperialism and cultural production (Said 1993; Bhabha 1994; Azoulay 2019). Following that, we delve into how one could think about decolonization in terms of spatiality, and how the material practices of architecture, cartography, land and infrastructure are at once sites for subverting the colonial discourse (Adalet 2022; Craib 2017; Henni 2018; Larkin 2013). After that, we move to thinking about how the corporeal and intimate spaces of the everyday are equally important sites for thinking about power and decolonization. We focus on influential accounts of the everyday, but also authors that highlight the role of the sensory, affect, and taste (Lefebvre 1992; Seremetakis 1996; Roberts 2006; Stoler 2010; Feldman 2015; Das 2020). We will end with looking into a few case studies that explore these aforementioned issues in the practices of education (Tuck et al. 2014; Chumley 2016), museum spaces (Mignolo 2013, Akcan 2015), and contemporary art (Hoskoté 2023).
Members
Alice Fung—Department of Art & Visual Culture
Asya Ece Uzmay—Department of Architecture, History of Architecture & Urban Development
Jacqueline Liu—Department of Government
Priyanka Sen—Department of Architecture, History of Architecture & Urban Development
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SECURITY, PRECARITY, ANIMALS
How do animals prowl landscapes altered by cell phone towers, hydroelectric dams, and plantation agriculture? Fleshy and scaly animals exceed value calculations bounded by human populations and human nation-states, yet nonetheless figure inextricably in capitalism. Marx’s materialist history primed analyses of the non-human as resources organized and scaled into capitalist ‘nature.’ Recent works building unfaithfully upon Marx tracks the footsteps of that very active ‘nature’ as it becomes with, and in turn makes, contemporary capitalism. Writings by Michelle Murphy (2017), Natalie Porter (2019), Anna Tsing (2015), Sarah Franklin (2007) have queried how the globalizing of supply chains have also transformed putatively non-capitalist bodies—women, children, chicken, fungi, germ cells— into assets to be cultivated. Yet their works show also the unruliness of these living bodies, by which capitalism also becomes unruly and shape-shifted.
Thinking beyond economies of scale, this reading group turns to the patchy vulnerabilities shared between species. What is the precarity that comes with unruly capitalism? How are dangerous creatures securitized? And how do animals help us make sense of all of this? This reading group asks about the weight that animals bring to bear on the politics of capitalism and security in the twenty-first century. Charting a path through the recent flourishing of multispecies studies, we bring into the mix also a smattering of philosophy, Marxist critique, and fiction. Multispecies studies, taken here to be an assemblage of works tinkering with the boundaries between biology and the interpretive social sciences, has sought to re-attach studies of human sociality and culture to their non-human counterparts. In the last decade, the incorporation of ethnographic methods into multispecies studies has yielded queer and tender critiques of capitalism, settler colonialism, the natural sciences, and more. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich’s landmark survey of this turn (2010) points out that the multispecies turn constitutes a major reordering of the politics of anthropological attention in order to duly consider the “biographical and political lives” of that which would have been considered barely living. In doing so, the hope is that boundary-making projects such as the very notions of species, reproduction, or life, falter just far enough to help us see over the walls.
This reading group will convene a thoroughly interdisciplinary group of animal-lovers to probe the strangeness and familiarities of centering animals in a multi-species social world. Our group, comprising of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, computer scientists, data scientists, and fiction writers, seeks the space to hold conversations across fields vastly differentiated by methodology, yet drawn together by the vicissitudes of contemporary capitalist society.
Members
Talia Berniker—Department of Communication
Maz Do—Department of Literatures in English
Farridah Laffan—Department of Science & Technology Studies
Gotug Saatcioglu—Department of Computer Science
Rosamond Thalken—Department of Information Science
Alena Zhang—Department of Science & Technology Studies
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THE PLACE OF SHAME: ONTOLOGY, POSTCOLONIALITY, AND AESTHETIC ENCOUNTERS
This reading group proposes a re-examination of the debates surrounding so-called “primary” forms of affect that have been granted a foundational status in the analysis of political subjectivation. We will be focusing specifically on shame. Current scholarship has elevated anxiety (Crombez 2021), pain (Scarry 1985), and fear (Linke & Smith 2009) as constitutive in the shaping of the modern subject and polity. Simultaneously, the opposition between shame and guilt has occupied a privileged position in historicist and cross-cultural comparisons on the basic traits of what makes society and civilization (Elias 2000). Classically, shame and guilt have stood as demarcating lines between Eastern and Western societies (Benedict 2005), or between polytheistic and monotheistic ones (Freud 1964), respectively. This division was rightly denounced as orientalist and presentist (Said 2003), for it articulated the ethnocentric vision of expanding Western notions of cultural evolution (and political domination) aimed to retroactively explain and justify imaginaries of global Western hegemony.
One encounters, nonetheless, theorizations of shame that treat it not as a cultural or civilizational counterpart of guilt but as a more basic sign of the human condition, which reopens conversations on modern political subjectivation. One of the most salient contributions on the topic was Jacques Lacan’s (2007) notion of hontologie, a neologism that combines ontology (ontology) and shame (honte). For Lacan, shame affectively bodies forth the extent to which at the core of being, at the level of ontology, lies a fundamental void (Green & Vanheule 2004). Insofar as we are dealing with modern political subjectivation, however, it is impossible—and, indeed, shameful—to circumvent the historical in favor of the purely ontological; to erase shame-inducing difference with the rhetorical force of a fundamental –and foundational– void. As Franz Fanon (2017) argued, coloniality was not a mere secondary socialization that was added to the colonized subject but created the very fabric for the emergence of the colonized’s basic subjectivation as such. Coloniality is constitutive of ontology, and it inflicts the ways in which shame—as a fundamental human affect—is materially distributed and experienced in the world.
In this study group, then, we aim to bring together theoretical works of psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, as well as aesthetic objects concerning shame, that can shed light on the human subject’s place within modernity’s libidinal economies. If “theory” as a privileged language of modernity has steered clear of the ontological and colonial stakes of shame, this apparently “pre-modern” affect is often summoned in aesthetic encounters; encounters that cannot be bound by liberal modernity. In addition to opening up a space for shame, such aesthetic objects can also, hopefully, reveal a void in theoretical constructions. The theoretical and aesthetic works we are bringing into our discussion cut across linguistic, historical, and cultural divides, making way for a more nuanced, cross-cultural, and differentiated understanding of the place of shame in political subjectivation.
Members
Rogelio Scott Insua—Department of Anthropology
John Anspach—Department of Literatures in English
Praveen Tilakaratne—Department of Comparative Literature
Amparo Necker—Department of Comparative Literature
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TRANS-IMPERIAL AFRICAN MODERNITIES
This reading group comes together mainly following a graduate seminar in Modern African Philosophy in the Spring of 2024, taught by Prof. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò. The participants in this reading group want to reflect and expand on the foundations of the material discussed throughout the semester to move it in new directions following each participant’s research, centering on questions of empire, governance, development, self-determination, and, more broadly, processes of subjectivation in an African context.
Some of the main conceptual questions we will address concern rethinking the role of modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our study’s period and geographical boundaries will intentionally remain porous to allow for historical depth and granularity, creating cross-imperial connections across the continent. From Ottoman presence in East Africa to European expansionism in West Africa over the nineteenth century, including African imperial formations, the continent has seen a plethora of conflicting empires, interests, governances, and ideologies. Underlining the complexity of the historical processes at play, the reading group will address trans-imperial relations throughout the last centuries to move away from binary dichotomies between colonizer and colonized. By reading books on diverse forms of power relations between sets of actors with often divergent aspirations, we will aim to complicate the understanding of a dialectical historical development into one where a great many protagonists are entangled in a web of differentiated relationality. This framework will consider colonialism, race, slavery, modernization, urban development, art practices, and resistance across East, West, and South Africa.
Members
Alican Taylan—Department of Architecture, History of Architecture & Urban Development
Oliver Layman—Africana Studies & Research Center
Sophia Jahadhmy—Africana Studies & Research Center
Osman Alp Çıbıklı—Department of History
Nathalie Agbessi—Department of Romance Studies
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VIOLENT SUBJECTIVITIES
Current scholarly and political debates have resurfaced questions about the human, humanism, and the status of the humanities. Is the human a category that should be rescued or evacuated? What is the value and the political potential of continuing to theorize the human? This problem of the human and its definition has always been related to the question of violence. Constructing the human as the subject of Western philosophy entails a violence towards the form of subjectivity itself and the subaltern or the Other as excluded from this category. This very exclusion, in turn, makes possible the construct of the human. Our reading group plans to explore these questions by turning to several theorists of violence and subjectivity. We will examine diverse ways of approaching this theme through our discussions of work on political force, archival violence, Marxist and postcolonial critiques of the subject, and ethical understandings of the human.
Our reading list encompasses theories by established thinkers on violence, such as Arendt, Lukács, and Benjamin, as well as more recent works responding to and extending those debates. We will also read postcolonial critiques (Said and Spivak) of the constitution of subjectivity and its relation to imperial violence. Furthermore, we will consider the role of the archive and epistemic violence in formulating and delimiting subjectivity (Hartman and Derrida). We will then turn to theories that complicate the question of the subject and challenge the idea of a coherent, transparent, or stable notion of the self (Butler and Edelman). With Finkelde, who theorizes how “excessive subjectivity,” as he defines it, enables transformative acts towards a changed social order, we will revisit understandings of subjectivity from German Idealism (Kant and Hegel) through their influence on and revision by Lacan. In dialogue with Gordon and Levine, we will attend to the role of competing sociopolitical forces and discursive forms in shaping subjectivities at the intersection of race, gender, and class. The proposed bibliography will allow us to both engage with the critical tradition and examine ways of departing from that tradition.
Members
Maria Al-Raes—Department of Literatures in English
Kevin Dong—Department of Asian Studies
Dominique Joe—Department of Literatures in English
Connie Perez-Cruz—Department of Comparative Literature
Aditi Shenoy—Department of Literatures in English
Martina Villalobos—Department of German Studies
Daniella Prieto—Department of Romance Studies
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GEOGRAPHIES OF CAPITAL
Since the meltdown of the international banking system during the 2008 slump, scholars across an array of disciplines have begun to show greater interest in capitalism and institutions. Economist Thomas Piketty’s towering monograph on wealth and income inequality since the eighteenth century best captures this Zeitgeist and has prompted further interest in the forces structuring the global economy. There is a good reason for this interest: institutions and finance offer a window onto the functioning of global capitalism, and a chance to enrich our understanding of it. Nevertheless, recent work has paid little attention to the spatial qualities of global capital, and the inequalities they produce and reinforce. Therefore, this reading group starts from the assumption that political economy, to be adequately understood, requires spatializing. Historical geography offers a particularly exciting avenue for such insights.
Our goal is to interrogate an array of work that, over the past five decades, has wrestled theoretically, empirically, and narratively with the boundary between geography, political economy, sociology, philosophy, and history. More specifically, we will examine how thinkers across disciplines have explored the connection between space and global political economy. Many theorists, leaning heavily on the philosophical understandings of space put forward by Henri Lefebvre, have come to view “spatiality” as a set of human relations that are produced and constructed socially.
Building on this assumption, we will focus on how spatial scales interact along three lines of inquiry. First, we are interested in homogeneity. Through organization and information, we intend to scrutinize and discuss texts that deal with the unification (though uneven) of world space, with strong points and weaker dominated ones. Second, we pay attention to fragmentation—studies that hone in on the process by which larger spaces are fractured into smaller ones, which in turn carry out social functions: Labor, leisure, housing, transport, production, consumption etc. Third, we consider hierarchy: scholarship that considers the degree to which centers and peripheries are differentiated, according to the varying degrees of distance between them and the centers.
In the process, we seek tentative answers to the following questions: What is the relationship between bureaucratic states and social, political, and economic space? How does space structure economic development? What role do commodity circuits play in defining the cultural, economic, political and social relations that link different regions to the global economy? What is the relationship between the town and countryside? How do class-divided, racialized, and gendered spaces structure society and political economy?
Members
Harry Churchill—Department of History
Filip Galic— Department of Architecture, History of Architecture & Urban Development
Andrew Scheinman— Department of Architecture, History of Architecture & Urban Development
Josephine Haillot— Department of Romance Studies
Yui Sasajima—Department of Anthropology
Dror Birger—Department of Comparative Literature
Eve Devillers—Department of Global Development
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RACE AS THEORY WORKING GROUP
Race shapes the quotidian experiences of people in the United States. Phrases like “multiculturalism,” “post-racial society,” “diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives” deeply reflect how race operates as a fundamental part of society and its relations across social, cultural, economic, and political realms. Racial representation in the media and workforce functions as a remedy to exclusion and structural violence for the nation-state, businesses, and universities.
Education serves as a crucial site of struggle of learning and engaging in critical conversations on race as certain curriculum is prohibited (for instance Arizona’s 2010 ban on Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American studies curriculum), students’ face repression as they exercise their right to protest, and humanities and arts face budget cuts all while university prices have risen. As scholars with educational backgrounds in History, Information Science, Africana Studies, Computer Science, and Ethnic Studies, our research interests and political investments require us to bridge scholarship across disciplines as academia inherently separates knowledge into various fields.
The bibliography we have collected engages with race as a category of analysis and uses racialization as a framework that encapsulates differences (such as class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, disability, geography). Throughout the year we will explore a multitude of topics to explore the continuity and change of race as a historical and contemporary theory applicable to our interdisciplinary studies. First, race in the university as higher education becomes commodified and the struggle to access education continues (Fred Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Roderick A. Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference). Second, theory on human, personhood, and subjectivity as notions of race can be traced back to 1492 and the universal racial hierarchy (Sylvia Wynter’s On Being Human as Praxis, Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Towards A Global Idea of Race, Michael Richardson’s Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data and Ecology after the End of the World, Cecilia Márquez’s Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation). Third, the application of race by nation-states and their citizens through biopower as a governance of life (Mbembe’s Necropolitics, Roberto Esposito’s Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy; S.E. Chinn’s
Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence). Fourth, the deployment of race as a global mechanism that informs empire and extraction, imperialism and militarism, surveillance and technology (Ivan Chaar Lopez’s The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology and Intrusion; Troeung, Y-Dang’s Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia; Greg Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World, Lisa Nakamura’s Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronics Manufacture).
As part of our working group we hope to experiment with different pedagogical styles to engage with readings and to develop materials for our teaching as educators. We hope to collaborate with faculty and students across campus to host programs, invite junior scholars to campus, and have writing sessions. Race provides an analysis on the relationship between people and surveillance through data collection from websites and social media, biometrics on social media and borderlands, and military industrial complex.
Members
Charlie Wang—Department of History and Asian Studies Program
Khadija Jallow—Department of Information Science
Sophie Jahadmy— Africana Studies & Research Center
Jeremy Peschard —Department of History
Sofia Meadows-Muriel—Africana Studies & Research Center
Nia Whitmal—Department of Anthropology
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CONTESTING MODERNITIES FROM THE AMERICAS: INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE, SPACES, AND MATERIAL CULTURE
The history of the Americas and the understanding of their cultures has been told from a point of view where colonizers—Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English— and their perspectives are privileged to the point that other viewpoints just disappear. While 1492 marks a break that was often catastrophic for the Indigenous people of the Americas, their complex history stretches back tens of thousands of years. From this first colonization to the nation-building of the newly independent states, Indigenous knowledge has been erased and displaced. However, Indigenous peoples themselves have fought back against genocide and epistemicide for 500 years, and their voices, histories, and writings exist to this day as an act of resistance. This group is an effort to approach the different ways in which material culture brings insights to uncover the knowledge of indigenous populations throughout the Americas. Material culture is approached in a broad sense that includes commodities, visual culture, cartographies, and archaeological remains. Moreover, we will use anticolonial perspectives to explore how the study of material culture and spatiality in the Americas has been shaped from a Eurocentric perspective and will engage with literature that works to correct that.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (2021) approach to what it means to decolonize a discipline sets a strong foundation for the goals of our reading group from which we will turn to Luiz Lara’s (2024) and Cooke’s (2022) questioning of the fundamental assumptions on which spatial studies and art history have been built. Meanwhile, Appadurai (2013) and Capistrano-Baker (ed., 2020) will provide grounded perspectives on materiality, entanglement, and how objects play a part in acculturation both as commodities and as visual culture. Amanda Smith (2021) Mundy (1996, 2018) and Padrón (2020) will provide a redefinition of what mapping is and the role of Indigenous people in spacemaking in the Americas from 1492 to 20th century commodities’ booms. From there we will approach Cornejo Polar (1994), Bigelow (2020), and Cohen Suarez (2016) to delve into how Indigenous knowledge and epistemology have shaped societies across the Americas. Finally, there is a variety of case studies we will approach with these frameworks in mind.
The members of this group will explore the bibliography from international experiences and perspectives. By approaching material culture from anthropological archaeology, history of art, literature, and history, we aim to enrich—methodologically and theoretically—the way we approach our own research. Each of us studies the culture and manifestations of Indigenous populations located from North to South America and from the Pacific to the Caribbean. While our disciplines and methods vary greatly, we have common goals and perspectives that support from the Institute for Comparative Modernities will help us achieve and refine.
Members
María Paula Corredor Acosta—Department of History
Rafael Cruz Gil—Department of Anthropology
Juliana Fagua Arias—Department of History of Art & Visual Studies
Alvaro Jasaui Chero—Department of Romance Studies
Leonardo Santamaria-Montero—Department of History of Art & Visual Studies
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