CLACS is honored to present Macarena Gómez-Barris (Pratt Institute) in dialogue with Amanda Lotspike, as part of the Racisms in Comparative Perspective Working Group.
Abstract:
How do we understand the arc of Indigenous aesthetics, and land and water defense in this moment of local and planetary ruin? Moving between examples from The Extractive Zone (2017) and Beyond the Pink Tide (2018), I center southern theory and modes of doing and being from within sites of extraction and monoculture that consider how we might analyze the relationship between genocide, ecocide, and feminicide within ongoing colonial condition of the Américas. I consider phenomenologies after nature that continue to move beyond the confines and constraints of the liberal nation state.
About the speakers:
Macarena Gómez-Barris is Professor in and Chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies. She is also the Director of the Global South Center at Pratt Institute, a space for critical inquiry that centers experimental modes of thinking, being and doing. Macarena is author of three books including The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives that theorizes social life, art, and decolonial praxis through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). Macarena’s recent book Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas (UC Press 2018) asks us to imagine politics beyond the nation state. She is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). She is the recipient of the Fulbright FLACSO-Quito (2014-2015).
Amanda Lotspike is a recent graduate of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies MA program and a former FLAS fellow. She is currently working as part of the "Ecologies of Migrant Care" team at the Hemispheric Institute at NYU.
This event is free and open to the public. ID is required to access the building. The conversation will be held in English.