For a postcolonial critique of the Anthropocene
4 May 2023 | 16:30-19.00 | Crociera Alta di Giurisprudenza, Università Statale di Milano | Via Festa del Perdono 7
Abstract
The seminar will focus on some key issues in the Anthropocene debate from feminist critique, postcolonial and decolonial reflections, critical studies on race and whiteness, and analysis within cultural studies of what are the discursive and visual representations of monsters and catastrophe at the boundaries of the Anthropocene. The issues we will focus on are the critique of the Eurocentric and Western perspective of ‘We’ being hypostatized and normalized in discourses on the Anthropocene; colonial and national archives and their legacies at work: ‘figures of race’; the question of the boundary as a means of reproducing systems of oppression in the Anthropocene; and finally, covid-19 apocalypse: The Drowned and the Saved by Technoscience; intersectionality, situated knowledge and responsible epistemologies; for a feminist political project of care, self-care and care of the earth.
Bio
Gaia Giuliani is a political philosopher, an expert in cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and critical race and gender studies, and a permanent researcher at the Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal. She works on the deconstruction of intersectional discourses and iconographies that materialize the monstrous in the context of colonial and postcolonial modernity.
During her career she has worked with the Universities of Bologna, University of Technology Sydney (Australia) and Cambridge (UK), also collaborating with the Universities of Padua, Milano Bicocca and Accademia di Brera, Fordham, Leeds, London (Birkbeck and Goldsmiths), and Ca’ Foscari.
Her monographs include Race, Nation, and Gender in Modern Italy. Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) [Finalist in the 2019 Edinburgh Gadda Prize], Bianco e nero. Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani with Cristina Lombardi-Diop (Le Monnier/Mondadori Education, 2013) [First prize in 2014 for the 20th and 21st century category of the competition announced by the American Association for Italian Studies], Beyond Curiosity (Aracne, 2008), Zombie, alieni e mutanti. Le paure dall’11 settembre a oggi (Le Monnier/Mondadori Education, 2016) and, lastly, Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene. A Postcolonial Critique (Routledge, 2021).
In person with free online access on the Teams platform.