War-Weather Continuum, the title for this seminar, is borrowed from Brian Massumi, alerting us to the entanglements of climate change and political conflict within current global relation. The seminar also draws upon a course Salar Mameni developed for Art & Education in 2019 that offered some entry points into the ecologies of global war with an attention to racialized geographies of conflict in West Asia. The notion of the Anthropocene, first proposed by climate scientists in the early 2000s, suggests that the human species has become a geological force. The term urges us to collectivize the human (into a species) and consider our combined effect on the planet across time. Artists and scholars in the humanities have approached the Anthropocene from various aesthetic and conceptual angles. Their interventions have critiqued the centrality of the “Anthropos” within the scientific discourse. Who is the “Anthropos” of the Anthropocene? Can it be extended to those bodies that have never gained such an ontological status in the first place? This course engages with the slipperiness of the “Anthropos” within regions of the world under militarized governance under the geopolitical title of the “War on Terror.” How can the notion of the Anthropocene be understood in such regions where the land and its multispecies inhabitants do not reach the status of the “Human” but are instead subjected to necropolitical destruction?
-
War-Weather Continuum
Mon, Oct 17, 20226:30 pm to 8:30 pm -
Tue, Oct 18, 20226:30 pm to 8:30 pm
-
Wed, Oct 19, 20226:30 pm to 8:30 pm
-
Public Talk: On the Terracene
Thu, Oct 20, 20227:00 pm
Salar Mameni is an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world with an interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia. Mameni is currently completing a book titled Crude: The Art of Living in the Terracene, that considers the emergence of the
Anthropocene as a new geological era in relation to the concurrent declaration of the War on Terror in the early 2000s. Playing on the words “terror” and “terra,” Mameni proposes the term “Terracene” in order to think the planetary in conjunction with ongoing militarization of transnational regions under terror. Crude engages contemporary art and aesthetic productions, paying particular attention to artists navigating the geopolitics of petrocultures and climate change. Mameni has published articles in Signs, Women & Performance, Al-Raida Journal, Fuse Magazine, Fillip Review and Canadian Art Journal. Mameni has also written for exhibition catalogs in Dubai, Sharjah and Istanbul. Mameni was the curator of “Snail Fever,” at the Third Line Gallery in Dubai that explored art as a pandemic bringing together artists from the region whose works consider the embodied, viral and contaminating nature of sonic and visual aesthetics.
Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (2015)
Laleh Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (2020)
Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (2019)
Joseph Pugliese, Biopolitics of More than Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence (2020)
Jairus Victor Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (2019)
Lou Cornum “Radioactive Intimacies.” Critical Ethnic Studies (2020)
Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies (2016)