Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing used their discussion of the newly termed Plantationocene to enhance and contextualize our contemporary notion of the Anthropocene. Specifically, the Plantationocene refers to the shift in conditions caused by the invention of the plantation, an apparatus that caused the “re-doing of worlds” by re-ordering environmental and economic systems on a global scale.

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Mirzoeff’s lecture focused on historical statues and the racist ideologies often embedded within them. Drawing on the Marxian and anti-colonial theories of Stuart Hall and Frantz Fanon, Mirzoeff expanded on Fanon’s idea of “the world of statues,” explaining that if we view whiteness as a statue—in the sense that they are idealized, composite forms of whiteness—we can interrogate the hierarchies that continue to operate within them.

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