Who We Are
materia
The Anthropocene, the current geological era brought about by humans, entails more than technology and production; it also has epistemological and aesthetic underpinnings. Case in point, consider the imagined, aestheticized separation of nature and culture. So why keep on doing “humanities” as usual? Since 2014, the DLCL focal group materia has served as a platform for graduate and faculty research on comparative and Latin Americanist anthropodecentric thought—that is, approaches that decenter the human. Our meetings combine reading discussion, student presentations, and guest speakers. Workshops include participants from ILAC, CompLit, Art & Art History, English, MTL, German, Anthropology, Music, EALC, CLAS, among many others. We collaborate with several other groups on campus and correspond with similar projects in the Bay Area and elsewhere. Cognate courses, as well as completed and ongoing dissertation and monograph projects, speak to the continuing impact of the group.
There have been forty-seven workshops and two international conferences to date. The former average twenty-five participants; the latter had over sixty each. We look forward to continuing serving as a vibrant space for the research of faculty and students from Stanford, the Bay Area, and beyond.
Héctor Hoyos and Ximena Briceño
Faculty Coordinators
Rebeca O. Peralta and João G. Viana
Graduate Student Coordinators
Our History
We would like you to know a little about our history.
In 2023-2024, materia hosted seven events that highlighted the group’s potential for combining interdisciplinary collaboration and discipline-based close-reading. Another three are scheduled for Spring, which also aim to advance formulations in the multi-year discussions promoted under the scope of our theme for the last two years: “narratives of the sociotechnical.”
In Fall, materia hosted a hybrid roundtable discussion of “On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: a Memo”, by Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz, in collaboration with Bio/Geo/Cosmopolíticas and NYU – Buenos Aires. The event was held on Thursday, November 30th, at 9am PST/ 14h BsAs. It featured guests from several locations and perspectives: Noelia Billi and Fermín Rodríguez, from Universidad de Buenos Aires; materia’s Ximena Briceño and Héctor Hoyos; Angèle Christin, from Communication, Stanford; Gabriel Giorgi, from CONICET NYU; Martín de Mauro, from CONICET UNC.
In Winter, our January 31st Graduate Research Fair was a unique opportunity to engage with advanced graduate students currently working with environmental humanities from a diverse array of disciplinary backgrounds in a dynamic setting. Students Nava Haghighi (Stanford Computer Science), Alejandro Ponce de León (UC Davis), María Zurita Ontiveros (Stanford TAPS), and Thomaz Amâncio (UChicago) presented a brief introduction of their present projects, followed by a discussion session moderated by Eric Kim (Stanford Slavic Languages and Cultures.)
On February 27th, in materia’s panel with CPADA, Dhanashree Thorat, Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University, spoke from her current book project on colonial genealogies undergirding the infrastructure of the Internet—such as submarine cables—in the Global South. Afterwards, Diana Montaño presented her first book, Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City, which examines how ordinary citizens used electricity, both symbolically and physically, in the construction of a modern nation.
In Spring, on April 24th, Prof. Carolyn Fornoff (Cornell University) presented a 40-minute lecture on a chapter of her new book Subjunctive Aesthetics (2024), titled “Land Defense and Counterfactual Mourning”. The talk focused on Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s Trilogía de Cuevas, a performance series about feminist land defense in Oaxaca and Zacatecas. Through raucous songs and sensual dance, Rincón Gallardo foregrounds the importance of female pleasure in land defense and in the task of imagining a world organized by desires other than profit. This work illustrates the rise of subjunctive aesthetic modes in response to environmental crisis and violence, modes that seek to go beyond what is and to imagine what could be or what should be.
On May 10th, Elizabeth Povinelli’s talk examined what Povinelli has been calling the European White Counterreformation. It discussed this White Counterreformation from the perspective of Rising Seas | Melting Glaciers, a project that pivots between two ecological disruptions, namely melting glaciers and rising tides, and two political historical forms and fates of colonial dispossession, namely the destruction of village/family-based commons in Trentino in 1805 and the invasion of Karrabing lands in the coastal land of the Northern Territory, Australia, in 1869. Unconcerned with a comparative project, the talk sought to to demonstrate the ongoing conditions of geontopower as the ecological catastrophes begun in colonialism start seeping into European soils.
On May 16th, materia invited Italian philosopher Rosi Braidotti. This Distinguished Lecture will map out the impact of so-called “post-” human thought in European academic institutions. Braidotti’s presentation will interrogate how this sweeping phenomenon interfaces with recent developments in capitalism and nationalism in the continent, and to what extent it is a pretext for dismantling critical theory. With a response and Q & A.
Finally, we had the pleasure of hosting esteemed Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty for our fourth and final meeting the 23-24 Academic Year. He developed the argument of One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (2023), an exploration of the temporal and intellectual fault lines that mark the collapse of the global and the planetary in human history. His talk took place on Friday, May 24, and was titled “Climate Change and the Politics of Difference.” It was followed by a Q&A session with the author, moderated by our team.
In 2022-2023 materia hosted a film-screening, scholarly presentations by graduate students and faculty, a reading session, and a two-day international conference. All our meetings but one, a zoom panel, were held in person at Pigott Hall. The international conference took place at the Center for Latin American Studies, in Bolívar House.
Our umbrella topic, which continued developing the following year given its potential and impact, was “narratives of the sociotechnical.” Building on Sheila Jasanoff, we have discussed the “sociotechnical” as interrelationships between human collectivities and their so-called instruments, which makes it impossible to tell when a given society begins and its technology ends, and furthermore establishes a codependence among these poles, such that technology makes a given society cohere and vice versa. All this notwithstanding, everyday discourse continues to uncouple these elements, for instance by imagining technology as something objective and not socially (co-)constructed; or disembodied, ahistoric, more or less “transferrable.” The specific question we explored had to do with the role of different narrative devices and rhetorical strategies in sociotechnical imaginaries in Latin America and elsewhere. We examined narrative arcs such as apocalypse, prolepsis, nostalgia, and expenditure. For next year, we want to focus on the other pole of the dialectic, namely, the narrativity of the sociotechnical itself.
The Fall quarter started off with the screening of Ana Vaz’s short documentary film Apiyemiyekî? ‒ commissioned as a response to the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985) ‒, with an after-talk by Srdan Keca (Stanford Department of Art & Art History). In the lively discussion, we engaged in the strategies of cinematic representation employed by Vaz to work with an extraordinary archive from Brazilian educator and Indigenous rights activist, Egydio Schwade—over three thousand drawings collected during a literacy project with the Waimiri-Atroari, a people native to the Brazilian Amazon. The second meeting of the Fall quarter featured Gustavo Carvajal (Universidad Finis Terrae, Chile) and Azucena Castro (Stanford U.). Over the course of stimulating conversations, our guests discussed how the climate crisis is elaborated in Chilean and Mexican poetic forms that interrogate technophilia. Chilean earthquakes and fires, as well as Mexican herbaria, informed narrative poems by Rosa Alcayaga and Verónica Gerber, respectively. Our third meeting and second panel event featured David Alan Stentiford (MTL, Stanford U.) and Christian Galdón (Univ. Paris 8). The panel, entitled “Literatures of Planetary Thresholds,” focused on the role of literature and socio-technical imaginaries in contexts where the so-called frontiers of “natural” spaces are re-thought and redefined. This event was organized in collaboration with the Modern Thought & Literature program and featured Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (Aarhus U.) as discussant. Topics included aquaculture in science fiction and the gene-editing poetry of Christian Bök.
The first meeting of the Winter was online and featured an engaging conversation between Lisa Blackmore (Univ. of Essex) and artist Camila Marambio (artistic collective Turba Tol Hol Tol). The talk, entitled “Wetlands in Art and Theory,” delved into artistic strategies to render wetlands and its potential to call for a politics of protection of the hydrocommons beyond extractivist views. The second meeting of the Winter quarter, “Literature and Expenditure,” featured presentations by Jaime Rodríguez Matos (CSU, Fresno) and Romina Wainberg (Stanford University). The discussions addressed the affordances of value, chance and (im-)productivity in works by Bataille, Neruda, Juarroz and nineteenth-century Latin American novels for a post-anthropocentric theory in the Anthropocene. The interdisciplinary breadth of these two sessions offered a unique opportunity to reflect upon the societal impact of art and critical theory.
We kicked off the Spring quarter with a fruitful reading session in preparation for our subsequent international conference May 5-6. With an engaged group of faculty, graduate and postgraduate attendees, we discussed technology as a capitalist myth through two keynotes in the upcoming event: an essay by sociologist Jason Moore, in connection with the ethno-performatic journey portrayed in a work by artist Karina Skvirsky Aguilera and its engagements with transportation technologies in Ecuador. We discussed these selections in dialogue with literary texts by Brazilian author Clarice Lispector and Peruvian writer José María Arguedas, focusing on the construction of Brasilia as a technological dream and the expansion of the extractive frontier to the ocean in 1960s Peru. Genuinely new connections and conceptual reformulations took shape during our conversation, which we continued very shortly afterwards at the international conference.
The main event of our year, a two-day conference titled “narratives of the sociotechnical” took place at Bolívar House with a distinguished roster of interdisciplinary scholars. The keynotes by Jason Moore (Binghamton University), author of Capitalism in the Web of Life, Gabriel Catren (Université Paris Cité), author of Pleromatica, or Elsinore’s Trance, and multidisciplinary artist Karina Aguilera Skvirsky explored the role of narrative in sociotechnical imaginaries—both the easily discernible narratives on a societal scale and more subtle narrative formations—with attention to novels and poems, as well as media and others. The conference hosted an equally distinguished line-up of presenters that discussed the main topic with focus on particular case-studies, situated contexts and interdisciplinary cultural materials: Jens Andermann (NYU); Lina Britto (Northwestern University); Katharina Gerstenberger (University of Utah); Thaïs Machado Borges (Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies, Stockholm University); Jorge Marcone (Rutgers University); Dominick Lawton (Stanford University); Victoria Googasian (Georgetown University); and Elaine M. Landry (UC Davis). You can read abstracts for each presentation here.
The Fall quarter started off with a talk featuring McKenzie Wark (Media and Culture, Eugene Lang College, The New School) in conversation with Orlando Bentancor (Spanish and Latin American Cultures, Barnard College). The talk, provocatively entitled “Non-Politics and Non-Ecologies,” sought to move beyond the limits of traditional concepts of ecology and politics, tackling concepts of planetary crisis throuh negative dialectics. In keeping with materia’s comparatist and interdisciplinary outlook, Prof. Wark and Prof. Bentancor’s event was organized in collaboration with Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Modern Thought & Literature program. The second meeting of the Fall quarter featured Mary J. Weismantel (Anthropology, Northwestern University) and Peruvian artist Sandra Gamarra. Over the course of a lively and stimulating conversation, our guests discussed Weismantel’s new book Playing with Things: Engaging the Moche Sex Pots (University of Texas Press, 2021) in connection with Gamarra’s artistic work on Indigenous objects. This event was co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History and the Stanford Archaeology Center.
Building upon the relationship between the human and the non-human, and sharpening our focus on deep temporality, we began the Winter quarter with a session led by historian Thomas Moynihan and artist Carolina Caycedo. In their talks, speakers addressed the crossroads of extractivism and human or planetary extinction. By approaching the latter topics from distinct epistemological and disciplinary viewpoints, Moynihan and Caycedo prompted a fruitful discussion and Q&A section on the ethico-political implications of considering Western and/or non-Western worldviews. To close off the quarter, we organized a special two-day event in collaboration with Stanford Global Studies (SGS) and the Modern Thought & Literature program. The event, titled “Framing Law & Humanities in/from the Global South,” began with an interdisciplinary roundtable on the horizons of the Law and Humanities critical paradigm. This roundtable featured a conversation between Diana Esther Guzmán Rodríguez (Law, Universidad Nacional de Colombia), Leila Neti (English, Occidental College), Beth Piatote (Comparative Literature and Native American Studies, UC Berkeley), and Marco Wan (Law and Literary Studies, University of Hong Kong). The event’s second session focused on the juridical personhood of nature, nonhuman rights, and the role of cultural production in conceptualizing these problems. The session’s theme allowed for a stimulating and eye-opening discussion between Alberto Acosta (Economist and Political Thinker, Former Minister of Energy and Mines in Ecuador), Alyse Bertenthal (Law, Wake Forest University), and Allison Bigelow (Spanish, University of Virginia). By virtue of the interdisciplinary breadth and transnational scope of its two sessions, our Law & Humanities event offered a rare opportunity to reflect upon the real-world impact and affordances of critical discourse.
Following materia’s Fall and Winter calendar, our final event of the year, followed by a small reception, featured Jacqueline Loss (UConn) and Laurence Coderre (NYU, pending confirmation) on a a panel entitlted “Socialism and Stuff,” connected to their work on Cuba and China, respectively.
We have also consolidated our new group website (materia.stanford.edu), which now allows us to upload materials (from recorded sessions to testimonials) and to communicate with the materia community in an increasingly dynamic fashion.
In our sixth year of activities, we hosted reading discussions and lectures on the general theme of “Life and Transmission.” With this theme, we intended to think critically about the pandemic—a crisis where the interaction of humans and nonhumans is laid bare—while looking beyond the conjuncture. One goal for the year’s series was to develop a common vocabulary around such topics as “virality,” “toxicity,” “contagion,” “extimacy,” and “biopower,” among others. All our meetings were held online with an average attendance of twenty-five participants.
The Fall quarter started off with a discussion on Money & War led by PhD Candidates Colin Drumm (History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz) and Harleen Kaur Bagga (Art History, Stanford). In his talk, Drumm discussed monetary politics and the limitations of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), shedding light on continuities and discontinuities between Mediterranean antiquity, early modern England, and contemporary world finances. Kaur Bagga also interrogated the relationship between contemporary and early modern frameworks. Her presentation examined Peter Snayers’ (1592-1666) topographic-analytical battle paintings from an anthropodecentric perspective. The second meeting of the Fall quarter featured a double lecture by Professors Timothy Campbell (Romance Studies, Cornell) and María del Rosario Acosta López (Hispanic Studies, UC Riverside). Both talks were carried out under the common theme of “Impolitical Critiques & Decolonial Grammars.” Campbell drew upon an earlier moment of Italian Thought, referred to as “the impolitical,” in order to contest the hegemony of what he called “the biopolitical reflection.” He elucidated the impolitical possibilities for biopolitics in order to avoid turning politics into a constant quarrel over the status of life. In turn, Acosta López engaged in a self-critical reflection on the limits and decolonial potential of her former project “grammars of listening.” She examined the extent to which said project holds under the scope of a decolonial look, and proposed two possible strategies for a “decolonization of listening;” namely, the invention of history and the resistance of memory.
Building upon the connection between the materialization of memory and the representation of history, the first discussion of the Winter quarter focused on the convening theme “Light, Matter, Meat, and Flesh.” The discussion was led by graduate students Fabián Mosquera (Hispanic Languages and Literatures, Pittsburgh) and Valeria Meiller (Spanish and Portuguese, Georgetown), who discussed their ongoing research and prompted a lively conversation among participants. In his talk, Mosquera reviewed the historically anthropocentric reading of Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Saint Matthew to contend that the film articulates a meta-cinematographic community—composed of a cloud of fireflies, a “synagogue of the iconoclast”—whose affective and poetic materiality prevails over the ruins of sociopolitical devastation. From an equally anthropodecentric viewpoint, Meiller examined the slaughterhouses built by the Argentine architect Francisco Salamone in the 1930s as spaces that hold valuable answers to how the meat industry helped shape a nation known worldwide for its meat production and steak culture. To close off the quarter, we organized a double lecture with Professors Gisela Heffes (Rice University) and Prof. Arndt Niebisch (University of Vienna). The event, titled “Uncontained Toxicity,” stood as a unique opportunity to put in conversation different departments (Latin American Studies and German Studies), as well as multiple disciplines (from Media Studies to Literary Criticism, History, Ecocriticism, Cultural Studies, and Cybernetics). In her talk, Heffes addressed the recurrence of toxicity in contemporary narratives of Argentina as a discourse of mutation and inoculation that appeals to a toxic semiotic while rendering bodies and spaces phantasmagoric specters. In turn, Niebisch revisited William S. Burroughs’s notion of the “word virus” and discussed how Burroughs subversive media guerilla is taken up by posthuman agents in social media networks.
Following our Fall and Winter conversations, the Spring quarter started off with a lecture by Professor Sybille Krämer (Aesthetics and Culture of Digital Media, Leuphana University) and a response by Hank Gerba (Art History, Stanford). Prof. Krämer’s lecture addressed women’s forgotten contributions to digital literacy and operative writing, from the 800 CE to contemporary techno-feminist movements in both the East and the West. In his response, Gerba posed enriching questions on the hidden layers of contemporary computing and provided insightful examples of women’s contributions to technology throughout modern history. Also in the Spring quarter, we featured presentations by graduate students Jameelah Morris (Anthropology, Stanford) and Reagan Ross (Communication, Stanford), whose works center on historical memory, the continuities of slavery and colonization, and Black activism. The capstone event of the year featured Professor Jennifer French (Spanish, Williams College), who will addressed the Spanish-Paraguayan anarchist Rafael Barrett’s anthropodecentric writings in conversation with Professor Javier Uriarte (Stony Brook University).
For previous years, including talks by Donna Haraway, Ericka Beckman, Eric Santner, and other distinguished speakers, see our Event archive.
We had an exciting line-up of reading sessions and guest speakers joining us on 2019-2020. Our theme of the year was “Information & Form.”
The Fall quarter started off with a reading discussion focused on new extractivisms – a phenomenon that encompasses natural resource exploitation, data mining, and transnational finance operations. Addressing this complex topic in our first meeting allowed the materia community to reflect on contemporary issues, from political and environmental conflicts at a global scale to personal privacy. The second meeting of the Fall quarter entailed a double lecture with Professors Tom McEnaney (UC Berkeley) and Micah Donohue (Eeastern New Mexico University). Both talks were carried out under the common theme of Borders & Technology. In this context, Professor Donohue explored the concept of “virtual literature” through his readings of interconnected texts by three authors: Jorge Luis Borges, José Saramago, and Ursula K. Le Guin. In turn, Professor McEnaney focused on interactions among art, architecture, activism, and digital infrastructure in contemporary Havana.
Building on the connection between online infrastructures and social relations, the first reading discussion of the Winter focused on Secrecy & Virtuality. The discussion was led by graduate students Juan Esteban Plaza (ILAC) and Jason Beckman (EALC), who discussed their ongoing research and prompted a lively conversation, covering from political conspiracies in 20th-century Latin America to the problem of empathy in literature and VR frameworks. To close the quarter, we organized a double lecture with Professors Chad Wellmon (University of Virginia) and Justin Read (University at Buffalo). The event, entitled Asynchronous Avant-gardes, stood as a unique opportunity to put in conversation different departments (German Studies and Spanish and Portuguese), as well as multiple disciplines (from Media Studies to Literary Theory, History, Cultural Studies, and Cybernetics). In his talk, Chad Wellmon traced a cross-disciplinary history of search, from 18th century Germany to Google, culminating in a critique of contemporary techno-utopianism. Departing from a dystopian assessment of the state of the art of technology, Justin Read read Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera through the lens of theorist Vilém Flusser.
For this Spring quarter, a two-day event and a reading discussion were planned. The event, entitled Matter, Sentience, and Agency and scheduled for March 30th-31st, encompassed a distinguished lecture by Professor Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University) and a talk by Professor Reza Negarestani (The New Centre for Research & Practice), followed by an interdisciplinary roundtable composed of Stanford faculty. The organization of this initiative involved a truly collaborative and interdisciplinary effort, made possible by co-sponsorships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, the Department of History, the Department of Philosophy, the Department of English, and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. This initiative was suspended due to COVID-19. The authorization of our main sponsors to hold on to their funding for the upcoming academic and fiscal year allows us to project the realization of this event in 2020-2021.
The second meeting programmed for the Spring quarter entails a reading discussion led by Professor Angela Rios (Anthropology) and graduate student and former materia coordinator Daniel Hernández (ILAC). Under the title Ethnographic Devices, this gathering is set to take place on May 11th and will be the first materia event to be carried out entirely online.
FALL
Oct 7: Reading Session: New Extractivisms
Nov 4: Borders & Technology double-lecture with Tom McEnaney (UC Berkeley) And Micah Donohue (ENMU)
WINTER
Jan 27: Secrecy & Virtuality discussion led by Juan Esteban Plaza (ILAC, Stanford) and Jason Beckman (EALC, Stanford).
Feb 24: Asynchronous avant-gardes double-lecture with Chad Wellmon (UVA) and Justin Read (University at Buffalo)
SPRING
March 30: Distinguished lecture by Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University) [cancelled due to COVID-19]
March 31: Intelligence & Spirit talk by Reza Negarestani (The New Centre for Research & Practice) in conversation with Stanford Faculty [postponed due to COVID-19]
May 11: Post-naturalist Fictions led by Daniel Hernández (Stanford University) and Sebastián Figueroa (University of Pennsylvania)
Power and the Non-Human
The main theme of the third year was “Power and the Non-Human.” We took our cues, among other sources, from the rich discussion of the New York city blackout of 1977 in Jane Bennett, the quasi-novelization of the Cuban history of tobacco and sugar in Fernando Ortiz, and the multifarious elucidations of the technosocial in Bruno Latour. Rather than thinking of politics as an exclusively human phenomenon, as if the social order were not also maintained by nonhuman actants, we will engage with materiality both in its cultural representation and as a condition of possibility for research in the humanities. The events of the year all tackled this problem, from different angles.
materia has established a discursive space on campus for sustained intellectual exchange across departments. Our regular participants come from ILAC and Comp Lit (the pillars of the group), as well as from English, MTL, German, Anthropology, and Music. Faculty, graduate students, visiting scholars, and undergraduates are among them; the more numerously represented group is grads. Our Latin Americanist-centered, inclusive approach has proven felicitous: a combination of theory, fiction, and other cultural products from the region and from elsewhere enriches our reflections. One aspect to highlight is the integration of preparatory readings into our proceedings. Either as background for talks and discussion or as the main conversation topic, they provide continuity and build-up across our meetings.
FALL
Oct 2: Readings: Lamborghini’s Tadeys, Vieira’s “Sermão de Santo António aos Peixes,” and Eagleton’s Materialism (excerpts).
Nov 13, with the Environmental Humanities Project: Orlando Bentancor, Barnard College and Laurie Palmer, UC Santa Cruz
WINTER
Jan 22: Zac Zimmer, UC Santa Cruz and Monica VanBladel, Stanford University
Feb 26: Marisol de la Cadena, UC Davis
SPRING
Apr 16: Chloe Rutter-Jensen, Universidad de los Andes and Patricia Valderrama, Stanford University
May 14: Bill Brown, University of Chicago
PIGOTT HALL (BLDG. 260), RM. 216
5:45-7:30 PM
Since Fall Quarter 2014, materia has hold twelve workshops and a conference to date. The former averaged twenty-five participants; the latter had over seventy. During the first year, the group discussed–and coined– the notion of “post-anthropocentric” as an umbrella term that sets in conversation a host of otherwise divisive trends. This is in itself a major contribution of the group; as the cultural or linguistic turns before it, the post-anthropocentric has the potential of generating entire bodies of research. Regarding the theme of animality and ecocriticism, ILAC Lecturer Ximena Briceño and graduate coordinator Monica VanBladel guided a discussion on reading selections by Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway, who gave a keynote at last year’s conference. We also had Professor Gabriel Giorgi from New York University presenting his most recent book and sharing his views on literary depictions of animals as expression of biopolitical entanglements, as opposed to political allegories. Finally, we read Pope Francis latest encyclical in the light of Philip Drake’s theory of politics within Animal Studies, followed by a lecture by Professor Dierdra Reber, from Emory, who presented her work on Animal Commune-ism and empathy. Part of our discussions have agreed that a focus on animality need not be at odds with an object-centric orientation, as our conversations have revolved around the organic/in-organic divide and its literary emplotment.
On the subject of value and political economy in the anthropocene, Professor Eric Santner, from the University of Chicago, proposed a new interpretation of Marx’s theory of value as one concerned with the afterlife of political theology in secular modernity. During her lecture, DLCL alumna Ericka Beckman, then an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, currently at UPenn, compared depictions of land (tierra) in the work of Chilean writer José Donoso and in that of the Mexican Juan Rulfo. Beckman focused on land as property bound by space and time (unlike financial assets) and showed how writers imagine a “rural hell” of peasant dispossession. Both discussions questioned the role of economy, value, and property in a space without the human as a center.
Regarding the idea of post-humanities, Anna Castillo, PhD Candidate in ILAC, presented on her dissertation. Castillo examined the potential effects of new technologies’ ever-intensifying intrusion into everyday sexual intimacy and its presence in Latin American contemporary literature. Previously, Professor Andrew Brown, from Washington University in St. Louis, had surveyed renderings of the posthuman in Latin American fiction as an instrument for navigating complex political and social realities. Per his account, the trope of “Latin American cyborg subjectivity” processes the experience of dictatorship and problematizes neoliberalism. In a similar vein, Distinguished Professor Francine Masiello, from UC Berkeley, examined how. under authoritarian regimes of the 1970s and 80s, a focus on the “bare life” conditions of the detained and disappeared triggered a wide conversation in the arts regarding ways to represent the body in relation to sensory perception. She mainly focused on how the visual and essayistic works of Chilean Guillermo Núñez and Brazilian Nuno Ramos register a crisis of experience.
Finally, we held other events regarding interdisciplinary approaches to material culture, including connections with art and philosophy. Professor Craig Epplin, from Portland State U., shared his work on dérive in the installations of the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs in Mexico and Panama. In such works, movement across space, Epplin showed, is not only about human perambulation, but about revealing the embeddedness of life-forms in a space that is both naturally and socially constituted. Further on, the lecture of NYU Professor Jacques Lezra claimed that philosophy’s unsatisfiable “need” for “individuals” is a useful definition of its “materialism”—a materialism that variously-oriented contemporary philosophies disavow rather than joyously assume. Diverse interdisciplinary paths have nourished the group to produce multiple approaches to post-anthropocentrism, as well as to stimulate varied research interests in participants.
Post-Anthropocentrism at Stanford: A State of the Question was the title of our Spring 2016 conference. In addition to Donna Haraway, the conference featured Professors Mads Rosendhal Thomsen (Aarhus University) and Rachel Price (Princeton University). Thomsen surveyed the post-human in fiction, while Price discussed oil and sugar as actants in art. DLCL graduate students Monica VanBladel and Patricia Valderrama, as well as David Stentiford and Vicky Googasian from MTL and English, shared their research on animality and non-heroic resistance, cadaveric materiality, the possibility of post-anthropocentric characters, and post-anthropogenic makings, respectively. Professors Ewa Domanska (Adam Mickiewics University at Poznan and Anthropology, Stanford) and Zephyr Frank (History, Stanford) served as discussants and participated in the rich discussions of these panels, which lead the way to the keynote. Haraway’s presentation was an exposé on her latest monograph, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), which came out two months after our conference. In the spirit of vigorous intellectual exchange that characterizes our group, all participants, including Professor Rodolfo Dirzo (Biology, Stanford), engaged in a closing roundtable.
