YEAR ZERO: MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLDING AFTER 1945
1945 marks the end of a world war, the rise of decolonized states, the beginning of an unruly geological epoch. Please join us for this symposium with six extraordinary scholars who cross disciplines to examine intersecting materialities and unprecedented logics of this postwar rupture, a Year Zero in which humans, nonhumans, and machines were violently remade.
We ask: how did new imaginaries and practices emerge from the industrialized bodies of plants, animals, and chemicals of this historical moment? How did the structural transformations of the second World War reorient the dynamics of ecologies, markets, and machines? What kinds of interdisciplinary methods, genres, and collaborative practices may be crafted to articulate these complex co-emergences, or what feminist scholars call worlding?
Thinking of security and affect through nuclear ruins (Masco), ecological consequences of growth paradigms (Livingston), queer postcolonial bodies through chemical fertilizers (Agard-Jones), remaking of a global South through oranges (Saraiva), smartness and resilience through infrastructure (Halpern), and the emergence of metadata after the war (Gitelman), this symposium gathers together a striking array of critical-creative practices for tracing more-than-human worlding and inhabiting their relentless, differential trajectories.
Please REGISTER HERE.
AGENDA (Please see the full agenda here)
coffee and tea
Welcome 10:00 – 10:15
Una Chaudhuri, New York University
Elaine Gan, New York University
Session 1 10:15 – 12PM
Orit Halpern, "The Planetary Test," Concordia University
Lisa Gitelman, "Metadata," New York University
lunch
Session 2 1:15 – 3PM
Tiago Saraiva, "Cloning and Cannibalism: Learning How to Live with Sadness in the Plantationocene," Drexel University
Vanessa Agard-Jones, "Vegetal, Chemical, Beetle," Columbia University
Session 3 3 - 5PM
Julie Livingston, "Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable," New York University
Joseph Masco, "The Artificial World, or the Futurity of Exposure After 1945," University of Chicago
wine and cheese
Co-organized by Elaine Gan and Una Chaudhuri, NYU XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement. With special thanks to NYU Abu Dhabi Institute, Department of Anthropology, Department of Environmental Studies, and Environmental Humanities Lecture Series.
Suggested Readings
Agard-Jones, Vanessa. “Bodies in the System.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, https://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-abstract/17/3%20(42)/182/33308/Bodies-in-the-System.
Agard-Jones, V. “What the Sands Remember.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 18, no. 2-3, 2012, pp. 325–346., doi:10.1215/10642684-1472917.
Halpern, Orit. “Golden Futures.” Limn, vol. 10, Apr. 2018, limn.it/articles/golden-futures/.
Halpern, Orit. “Hopeful Resilience.” e-Flux Architecture , 2018, www.e-flux.com/architecture/accumulation/96421/hopeful-resilience/.
Masco, Joseph. “Bad Weather.” Social Studies of Science, vol. 40, no. 1, Feb. 2010, pp. 7–40., doi:10.1177/0306312709341598.
Masco, Joseph. “The Age of Fallout.” History of the Present, vol. 5, no. 2, 2015, pp. 137–168., doi:10.5406/historypresent.5.2.0137.
Saraiva, Tiago. “Anthropophagy and Sadness: Cloning Citrus in São Paulo in the Plantationocene Era.” History and Technology, vol. 34, no. 1, 28 Sept. 2018, pp. 89–99., doi:10.1080/07341512.2018.1516877.
Saraiva, Tiago. “Fascist Modernist Landscapes: Wheat, Dams, Forests, and the Making of the Portuguese New State.” Environmental History, vol. 21, no. 1, 2016, pp. 54–75., doi:10.1093/envhis/emv116.
Wool, Zoë H., and Julie Livingston. “Collateral Afterworlds.” Social Text, vol. 35, no. 1 130, Mar. 2017, pp. 1–15., doi:10.1215/01642472-3727960.