PIGOTT HALL (RM. 216)
FREE AND OPEN TO PUBLIC

Chloe Rutter-Jensen, Universidad de los Andes
Human Elements of the “Periodic Table”: Delcy Morelos and Posthumanism

Current “cultural” products in the contact zone we call Colombia are a stimulating place to challenge the human as center of the universe. Morelos’s work, her co-creations, or better yet reconfigurations, consistently undertake becoming and undoing. In particular, she undoes the fiction of the self-generative subject, that subject which can invent HIMself no matter what its conditions. My talk explores how Morelos’ posthumanist creations help us understand how “we are all in this together”.

Patricia Valderrama, Stanford University
We’re Going Extinct! Animal Arts for the Anthropocene

All species, including our own, are confronting a qualitatively different existential crisis in the form of anthropogenic climate change, which includes the possibility of human extinction within the next eighty years. In this talk, I will consider what literature can do, beyond mimetic representation, to help us face the multispecies challenges the next decades and centuries will surely bring. Putting Nietzsche’s aesthetics in conversation with materialist, environmental, and decolonial feminisms, I try to use a certain kind of literature to chart a way forward and through, but not out of, the grief and dread of the sixth mass extinction.