Uploaded June 2024 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
Learn more at https://fhi.duke.edu/programs/entanglement-project
ABOUT THE LECTURE: The entangled forces of climate change and decolonization have put institutional knowledge-making apparatuses into interesting states of crisis that call forth creativity and experimentation, even as they invoke uncertainty and fear. As planetarity displaces globality, "post-humanist" thought seeks to remake western imaginations through concepts that dissolve familiar hierarchies of scale and familiar divides between animate/inanimate and living/nonliving. Simultaneously, the new millennium has inaugurated a worldwide flourishing of indigenous thought that proposes to remake the intellectual commons along decolonial and anti-extractivist lines. Territoriality sits at the heart of much of this revolutionary intellectual work, even as multispecies migration appears as a central axis of the planet's unfolding story.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor (emerita) in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, where she taught Latin American literature and culture, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and theory. She was formerly the Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities at Stanford University, where she was a leading voice in debates over humanities education, multiculturalism, and social justice. Dr. Pratt is affiliated with NYU's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics. Her current research interests include language, globalization and empire, mythologies of modernity, indigeneity as a global force, and the challenge of environmental catastrophe. Her publications include Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse 1979); Women, Culture and Politics in Latin America (1993 co-authored); Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. (1992, 2007); Los imaginarios planetarios (2017), and Planetary Longings (2022). She was president of the Modern Language Association in 2003 and the recipient of numerous fellowships and honors.
On the Entanglement Project at Duke-FHI: Climate catastrophe cannot be thought outside of the context of empire and the forms of racialization central to global capitalism, including the degradation of peoples, ecosystems and lands facilitated by states in the global North. Threats to the very existence of the planet and all its inhabitants result from this genocidal global development project, yet the effects are being borne more grotesquely by those who live in the global South. Environmental justice efforts that overlook the longue durée trajectory of the historical operations of capitalism, and the raciality that affixes a disproportionate burden onto ex-colonized areas of the planet and its inhabitants, fall short of pointing us in a direction of systemic and just change.
The Climate Change, Decolonization and Global Blackness Lab seeks to explore the linkages among three pivotal and simultaneously occurring catastrophes—criminality, displacement, pandemics—toward developing a set of principles regarding decolonization as an ethical approach to climate change. @dukeuniversity @FranklinHumanities
Learn more at https://fhi.duke.edu/programs/entanglement-project
ABOUT THE LECTURE: The entangled forces of climate change and decolonization have put institutional knowledge-making apparatuses into interesting states of crisis that call forth creativity and experimentation, even as they invoke uncertainty and fear. As planetarity displaces globality, "post-humanist" thought seeks to remake western imaginations through concepts that dissolve familiar hierarchies of scale and familiar divides between animate/inanimate and living/nonliving. Simultaneously, the new millennium has inaugurated a worldwide flourishing of indigenous thought that proposes to remake the intellectual commons along decolonial and anti-extractivist lines. Territoriality sits at the heart of much of this revolutionary intellectual work, even as multispecies migration appears as a central axis of the planet's unfolding story.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor (emerita) in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, where she taught Latin American literature and culture, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and theory. She was formerly the Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities at Stanford University, where she was a leading voice in debates over humanities education, multiculturalism, and social justice. Dr. Pratt is affiliated with NYU's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics. Her current research interests include language, globalization and empire, mythologies of modernity, indigeneity as a global force, and the challenge of environmental catastrophe. Her publications include Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse 1979); Women, Culture and Politics in Latin America (1993 co-authored); Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. (1992, 2007); Los imaginarios planetarios (2017), and Planetary Longings (2022). She was president of the Modern Language Association in 2003 and the recipient of numerous fellowships and honors.
On the Entanglement Project at Duke-FHI: Climate catastrophe cannot be thought outside of the context of empire and the forms of racialization central to global capitalism, including the degradation of peoples, ecosystems and lands facilitated by states in the global North. Threats to the very existence of the planet and all its inhabitants result from this genocidal global development project, yet the effects are being borne more grotesquely by those who live in the global South. Environmental justice efforts that overlook the longue durée trajectory of the historical operations of capitalism, and the raciality that affixes a disproportionate burden onto ex-colonized areas of the planet and its inhabitants, fall short of pointing us in a direction of systemic and just change.
The Climate Change, Decolonization and Global Blackness Lab seeks to explore the linkages among three pivotal and simultaneously occurring catastrophes—criminality, displacement, pandemics—toward developing a set of principles regarding decolonization as an ethical approach to climate change. @dukeuniversity @FranklinHumanities
