Critical insights from C21's Tennessen Scholars
Tennessen Scholar Joni Hayward reflects on some of the more striking connections between our recent Insecurity conference and the insecurity and precarity that underscore life as a graduate student.
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.
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.
“The Anthropocene has made clear that the enlightenment way of viewing history as forward progress is wrong. Rather, history is a labyrinth– and we are inside of it.” Often the question at talks about climate change have to do with hope. What can we hope for? Is there any hope at all? According to Amitav […]
Palpable excitement hung in the air of Curtin 175 on the Thursday afternoon prior to the Century for 20th Century studies 50th anniversary Symposium. Now known as the Center for 21st Century studies, the center’s long legacy enjoyed a well-deserved celebration this past week. Guests from the Center’s past and present spoke of their experiences […]
What does it mean for a country to have an historical policy? For Dr. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, this question begins and ends in the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland. Historical policies—shaped by myriad realms of public discourse from politics to media to museums— engender civic attitudes; they give form to […]
Over the course of a week, I discussed the human-like qualities of Amazon’s Alexa with a class of undergraduates, participated in a history seminar in which we interrogated writings by Hegel and Marx and their theories of consciousness and materiality, and engaged with colleagues and mentors at Dr. N. Katherine Hayles’ guest lecture and discussion […]