As both a conceptual category with purchase across academic discourses and a material reality at once hyperpresent and historically entrenched, “extinction” is a rich site for timely interdisciplinary interventions. This event brings together a group of writers and scholars whose work explores extinction—both human and nonhuman—at its critical intersections with gender, sexuality, and race. Our speakers will take up questions related to the literary, political, ethical and ontological dimensions of extinctions past, present and future. Among other topics, we will discuss the centrality of extinction to the making of colonial America; the entanglement of environmental imperialism and indigenous oppression; the representation of Black precarity in post-apocalyptic speculative fiction; and the prospect of mothering at the end of the world.
Schedule:
12:00PM | Introductions: Tiana Reid, IRWGS Graduate Fellow and PhD Candidate in English & Comparative Literature (Columbia University)
12:00PM | Talk & Discussion: Elizabeth Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology (Columbia University)
1:00PM | Graduate Student Panel: Noni Carter, PhD Candidate in French and Romance Philology (Columbia University); Diana Newby, IRWGS Graduate Fellow and PhD Candidate in English & Comparative Literature (Columbia University); and Ami Yoon, PhD Candidate in English & Comparative Literature (Columbia University)
2:15PM | Reading & Discussion: Julietta Singh, ACLS Burkhardt Fellow (University of Richmond and Columbia University)
This event is free and open to the public. A light lunch will be provided.
This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Research, Gender, and Sexuality and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.
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