Submerged Perspectives: Life Otherwise in the Occupied Forest and Along the Alien Ocean

Macgeorge Visiting Speaker Award Lecture

In this presentation, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Chair of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute, addresses her recent work on Indigeneity, art praxis and ecological memories and try to extend the idea of submerged perspectives.

How do Indigenous peoples under the threat of extractive industries and military occupation contend with the decimating logics of racial capitalism? How do our theories about knowledge and the forest change under these conditions? Macarena also explores sea edges as a non-normative geography where buried histories of Indigenous disappearance and renewed resurgence come into focus. How can we think about the geographies of land and ocean together during the colonial anthropocene? What life otherwise emerges in these occupied and extractive zones?

Supported by the MacGeorge Bequest

Presenter

Professor Macarena Gómez-Barris, Chair, Social Science and Cultural Studies

Macarena GómezBarris is author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press 2010), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press 2017), and Beyond the Pink Tide: Artistic and Political Undercurrents in the Americas (UC Press 2018). She is coeditor with Herman Gray of Towards A Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press 2010) and coeditor with Licia FiolMatta of Las Américas Quarterly, a special issue of American Quarterly (Fall 2014). Her new book project is At the Sea’s Edge: Submerged Perspectives on Oceanic Life and Extinction. Her essays have appeared in Antipode, Social Text, GLQ, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies as well as numerous other venues and art catalogues. She has been a Visiting Professor at New York University and a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor at FLACSOQuito. She publishes on decolonial praxis, colonialism, space and memory, and critical geographies. She is founder and Director of the Global South Center, a transdisciplinary space for experimental research, artistic, and activist praxis, and Chairperson of the Department of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute.