Thinking Nature Now: Concepts

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Professor Mary Louise Pratt in a roundtable with Columbia faculty members Vanessa Agard-Jones, Rosalind Morris, Elizabeth Povinelli, Rhiannon Stephens, and Jennifer Wenzel, moderating. In her book Planetary Longings (2022), Mary Louise Pratt invokes Elizabeth Grosz’s understanding of concepts as dynamic tools for intervening in the present and imagining possible futures. Participants on this roundtable will each propose a concept that can help us grasp and reimagine more-than-human nature amidst the overlapping and intensifying crises that we inhabit.

About the Speaker

is a Silver Professor and Professor Emerita of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. A versatile and creative scholar of Latin American literature and popular cultural production, her theorization of the “contact zone” in the early 1990s was among her many contributions to the broader postcolonial turn in literary studies and anthropology. She is the author of three books: Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, and Planetary Longings, as well as co-editor (with Kathleen Newman) and Critical Passions: Essays of Jean Franco. She held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987-88, served as the President of the Modern Language Association in 2003, and was an American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow of 2019.

About the Respondents

is an Associate Professor of Anthropology. At its most expansive, her work asks how coloniality is made material: in social forms, in human and nonhuman bodies, and in the landscapes in which we live. With a focus on Black life in the Atlantic world, she conducts historical and ethnographic research on racialization, environmental crisis, and the politics of gender and sexuality.

is Moore Collegiate Professor of Anthropology. Her work is addressed to the histories and social lives—including the deaths and afterlives—produced in the interstices of industrial and resource-based capitalism in the Global South. Those interests extend to the technological and media forms that attend or undergird these economies, and the forms of subjectivity produced in their midst. They also encompass the racialized and sexualized political logics and structures of desire accompanying these phenomena.

is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Law and Culture. She is also Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective and has received Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Antwerp. Povinelli's academic work has focused on developing a critical theory of settler late liberalism and its aftershocks, elaborated across eight monographs and numerous essays.

is Professor of History and specializes in the history of precolonial and early colonial East Africa from the first millennium CE through the twentieth century. Her current research is a collaborative project that focuses on questions of gender, power, and climate over fifteen-hundred years on the east coast of Africa.

is a literary critic jointly appointed in English & Comparative Literature and MESAAS. Trained in postcolonial theory and decolonization as well as South Asian and Anglophone African literatures, she has focused her recent work in the environmental and energy humanities, having helped to pioneer the study of literature and oil. Her international collaborations with the Petrocultures Research Group, the After Oil Collective, and the Petroleum and the Visual Arts cluster emphasize narrative and the imagination as crucial to understanding why so many remain so attached to the worlds that fossil fuels have made.

Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.

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