Daryl Baldwin
“aapisaatawiaanki: We Awaken Our Language”
Abstract: The Myaamia (Miami) language ceased to be spoken sometime during the mid 20th century after the passing of its last speakers. During the following years, linguists and other academicians labeled the language as extinct, and claimed there was insufficient documentation to describe the language. This terminal designation, and the lack of knowledge regarding available documentation, would become challenged during the following decades. Beginning in the late 1980s, linguists and community members began the difficult work of not only reconstruct the language, but to reawaken their sleeping language among the tribal community. Today the Miami-Illinois language, as it is now officially called, has expanded in use and is currently being promoted by a youth generation who is developing an identity around its use and the knowledge system it reflects.
Recommended background reading:
McCarty, Teresa L., Daryl Baldwin, George M. Ironstrack, Julie Olds. (2013) neetawaapantamaanki iilinwiaanki meehkamaanki niiyoonaani: Searching for Our Talk and Finding Ourselves In: Language Planning and Policy in Native America: History, Theory, Praxis. Teresa L. McCarty, Multilingual Matters, Bristol, Buffalo, Toronto.
Claire Colebrook
“Extinguishing Ability: Persons as Post-Extinction Animals”
Abstract: As ‘we’ face a future of resource depletion and of a series of choices regarding what sort of world we leave for the future, we rely upon normative concepts of the person. The question of what sort of life we will be able to lead, and the question of what forms of life we wish to sustain is intensified by questions of climate change. Rather than see disability as an added concern when thinking about the future of the environment I will argue that both the humanities and traditional forms of eco-criticism are already intertwined with normative conceptions of life. Not only should we see some conceptions of ‘nature’ as dependent upon liberal theory and its economic-political assumptions, we should also see the liberal conception of the person as dependent upon a techno-industrial manufacturing of nature. In order to provide an adequate way of undertaking humanities inquiry into the fragile future, the liberal conception of personhood (and its strongly normative conception of ability and capacity) needs to be rejected in favor of a new mode of questioning that takes into account what I will define as a transcendental incapacity. For this reason concepts of capacity, debility, ability and personhood should give way to a new lexicon that is ecological (to do with powers of relation rather than powers of adaptation or sustainability).
William E. Connolly
“Extinction Events and Entangled Humanism”
Abstract: This essay starts by reviewing the limits and dangers of sociocentrism in the social sciences and humanities during a time when neoliberal capitalism and a host of nonhuman force fields with powers of their own bump into one another. It soon turns to a review of two major extinction events in the past that may help to illuminate dangers and possibilities of today: the decimation of 90% of life 250 million years ago and the demise of the Neanderthals 28000 years ago. The essay then attempts to account for the denials and deferrals about capitalist/climate intersections today through an engagement with Nietzsche. It closes with an elaboration of “entangled humanism”, both to challenge humanist exceptionalism and to soften the appearance “post-humanism” sometimes takes to those still mourning the loss of sociocentrism and humanist exceptionalism.
Joseph Masco
“The Six Extinctions: Visualizing Planetary Ecological Crisis Today”
Abstract: This paper considers the contemporary visual logics of planetary scale environmental crisis. Engaging an art exhibit curated by Hamza Walker entitled “Suicide Narcissis,” the talk considers artistic and earth science visualizations of extinction, and interrogates the geological science proposal to name industrial age human impacts on planet earth the “anthropocene”. Ultimately, the essay considers the psycho-social problematics of considering mass death and theorizes the contemporary logics of visualizing a radically changing environment.
Cary Wolfe
“The Poetics of Extinction”
Abstract: Abstract Forthcoming
Joanna Zylinska
“Photography after Extinction”
Abstract: In this talk I will consider what it would mean to envisage the world ‘after extinction’: not at a time when various species, including the one we are narcissistically most invested in – ourselves – have disappeared, but rather at a time when extinction has entered the conceptual and visual horizon of the majority of global citizens. Specifically, I will take the horizon of extinction as a reference point against which I will think the ontology of photography and its agency: what photography can do with and to the world, what it can cast light on, and what the role of this light (or, more broadly, light as such seen through the photographic lens) is in approaching questions of life and death on a planetary scale. Considering the history of photography as part of the broader nature-cultural history of our planet, I will trace parallels between photography and fossils, and read photography as a light-induced process of fossilisation occurring across different media. Seen from this perspective, photography will be presented as containing an actual material record of life (rather than just its memory trace). But I will also go back to photography’s original embracing of the natural light emanating from the sun to explore the extent to which photographic practice can tell us something about energy sources, and about our relation to the star that nourishes our planet. I will do this via an engagement with photographers who have consciously adopted the horizon of extinction as their workspace – from the nineteenth century geologist-photographer William Jerome Harrison through to contemporary artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto. I will also look at practices in which the work of the sun has been taken on as both a topic and a medium, including the post-digital practice of Penelope Umbrico. The talk will end with a brief presentation of my own artwork, The Anthropocene: A Local History Project.
References:
Zylinska, Joanna (2014) Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, an imprint of Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library: Ann Arbor), series: Critical Climate Change edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook. Pdf and web versions available open access: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/minimal-ethics.html
