Events

Past Event

Stephanie LeMenager - Near Futures: Essays on Transition Aesthetics

May 9, 2022
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
America/New_York
Online

“Nothing could be worse than a return to normality,” environmental justice activist Arundhati Roy wrote in her essay on COVID-19, in which she recognizes the pandemic as a “portal” that “offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves.” The doomsday machine Roy makes reference to includes a rapacious global capitalism, the neoliberal policies which stoke it, the colonial residues of racism, caste, and dispossession of Indigenous lands. Colonial modernity could be another name for this doomsday machine. Roy’s word “portal” is a figure of Transition, a figure shot through with complex structures of feeling. Stephanie LeMenager uses the term “Transition” to indicate the socio-economic shifts that our climate crisis demands. Transition connotes a psychological or even spiritual atmosphere in the current US and other regions of the North where the hegemonies of liberal modernity and liberal humanism are shattering, where mainstream media channels are overwhelmed by the noise of populist propaganda, where humanities programs are questioning whether “humanities” disciplines can comprehend and adapt, toward decolonial thought, toward the ecological facts of a collapsing climate. Transition aesthetics evident in literature and art offer possibilities for living on within near, almost unrecognizable futures.

Event Speakers

  • Stephanie LeMenager, Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor in English and American Literature at the University of Oregon
  • Response by Jennifer Wenzel, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University
  • Chaired by Mingfang Ting, Lamont Research Professor at Columbia University

Event Information

Free and open to the public; registration required. Please email [email protected] with any questions. 

Part of the Climate and Society Series. Hosted by

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Contact Information

The Center for Science and Society
212-854-7211