We are so excited to welcome the general public back to most events at La Maison Francaise of NYU. Please note that NYU requires all visitors to provide official proof (in English) that they are fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19 along with a valid photo ID. NYU Community: please be prepared to show your Violet Go pass.
Hybrid event: Conducted live at La Maison Française
This event will take place in English
Online via Zoom
Open to the public*
Advance Registration Required
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Axelle Karera: The Secret Lives and Sacred Worlds of Anthropos
The ongoing discontent with what the term “Anthropocene” descriptively offers prompted the need to retrieve the origins of our current ecological predicament with more historical precision. Such retrievals and the assessments they urged aim, ultimately, at undoing the Anthropocene’s seemingly incomplete histories. To this end, the canonical works of Edouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter have proven to be useful as their respective interventions enabled readers of the Anthropocene to both reinvest in efforts at reshuffling the contemporary world-order and to rethink the various survivalist injunctions undergirding environmental projects in our present time. In addition to considering the reemerging importance of imagining “new forms of life” in the age of the Anthropocene, this talk reflects on the extent to which Wynter’s system theory and Glissant’s relational philosophy can provide us with the critical means necessary to undertake a black critique of the Anthropocene.
Axelle Karera
Axelle Karera is an assistant professor of philosophy at Emory University. She teaches and writes at the intersections of black critical theory, 20th century continental philosophy, and the environmental humanities. Her most recent publications include a forthcoming essay on the concept of Paraontology in Black studies, “Paraontology: Interruption, Inheritance, or a Debt One Often Regrets” (Critical Philosophy of Race Journal, October 2022), “Black Feminist Philosophy and the Politics of Refusal” for the Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2020), and an article on Frantz Fanon’s notion of the racial epidermal schema in 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology (Northwestern University Press, 2019). She is currently completing her first monograph titled The Climate of Race: Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics, in which she examines the question of relationality in posthumanism, new materialist ontologies, and speculative realism's professed return to metaphysics. More importantly, the book's investigations seek to discern and read the ethical core of critical thought in the age of the Anthropocene without losing sight of its perplexing - and perhaps even necessary - disavowals on matters pertaining to racial ecocide.
*We are so excited to welcome the general public back to most events at La Maison Francaise of NYU. Instructions for attending events in-person will be confirmed shortly before each event. Please note that NYU requires all visitors to provide official proof (in English) that they are fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19. Additional details to follow.
Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture