Announcement: Spring Program Critical Thought

WiSER Spring Program

in Critical Thought

The Institute is delighted to announce the launch of a new initiative, The WiSER Spring Program in Critical Thought.

The Program will run from late June to August every year. Amongst others, it will feature a public lecture series by an internationally acclaimed scholar. It will also design and curate a cluster of advanced research seminars organized in collaboration with global humanities institutes worldwide, as well as various public events. This year, as we open this Program, events will run across the Summer, into early November.

More information about each event will follow soon.  

The 2016 Spring Program includes:

This Advanced Research Seminar is organized jointly with The Rock Ethics Institute and the Philosophy Department at Pennsylvania State University. 

It will cover themes including climate, race and migration; time and temperature; cities and the Anthropocene; extinction, destruction and apocalyptic imaginaries; and ‘posthuman’ erasures of race.  One of its goals is to plan for a special issue of Critical Philosophy of Race entitled “Race in the Age of the Anthropocene”.

A public debate, “The Climate of Racism”, will feature Eduardo Mendietta, Robert Bernasconi, Nancy Tuana, Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe.

This Advanced Research Seminar is jointly hosted with the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).

The Seminar will focus on the contemporary challenges to the University as a consequence both of technological innovations, political contestations, epistemological reconfigurations and the emergence of new knowledge formations and cognitive assemblages. It will examine the conditions under which traditional knowledge institutions might still be able to respond effectively to new learning environments and publics. Speakers from Vietnam, China and East Asia will join us for this event.

The Seminar will ask again, what is the University for? What types of institutional formats are currently best positioned not simply to respond to contemporary political, technological and epistemic shifts, but to innovate in the wake of them? Which kinds of ideas and forms of thinking underpin such “new thinking”? What are the different modes of critique and circulation of knowledge made possible by the advent of new technologies? What conception of the University would constitute the most effective response to the set of challenges it is being confronted with, in contexts both national and global?

In addition to its ongoing postdoctoral working sessions, The Planetary Library Project will hold three advanced research seminars on “Africa in Theory”. These will feature:

Juan Obarrio (Johns Hopkins University), author of The Spirit of Laws in Mozambique (2007)  on August 22, 2016.

Nancy Rose Hunt (University of Florida), author of A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (2016) on September 19, 2016.

Birgit Meyer (Utrecht University), author of Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana (2015) on September 26, 2016.

The lectures will be delivered by Anthony Bogues (Brown University). Each will explore a facet of the critical thought of the Caribbean theorist Sylvia Wynter. The lectures will map how the anti-colonial movements for political independence as well as the writings of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Jean Price Mars became foundational in her thinking about issues of decolonizing history, cultural practice and literary theory. They will also explore her current attempts to posit a theory of the human species and the necessity for human emancipation. Working from the premise that the praxis of radical anti-colonial thought formulated a distinctive set of philosophical, literary, social and political questions, Bogues will speak to three themes: ‘Plantation, Plot, Decolonization’; ‘Black Metamorphosis and the Creation of ‘the Native’; and ‘The Human as Praxis’. 

Peter Geschiere (University of Amsterdam) is one of the most well-known anthropologists of our time, and the author of The Modernity of Witchcraft Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (1997); The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe (2009); and Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust: Africa in Comparison (2013). He is the guest of a special session of the Wits Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities on September 27, 2016. He will also lead a discussion seminar on September 28, around his work.

This day and a half event will examine the ongoing transformations in South African rural societies and the afterlives of the Bantustan system in relation to the changing valencies of chieftaincies, customary law, land tenure, and new modes of subjection and patron-clients relationships. The extractive and rent-based economy underpinning these transformations will also be analyzed as well as the cultural and symbolic shifts in the social order.

A one-day event, this seminar will consider past lives and current formations of literary studies in South Africa. It will open a discussion about how this discipline has shaped itself, or been shaped by divergent political, intellectual and aesthetic forces,  over the last fifty years and how it could be re-animated in the present. We will consider longstanding interventions in relation to curriculum change and canon reformation, newly confronted by demands for a different kind of university and epistemology. It will also consider the performative aspects of ‘the English department’ within a wider economy of humanities scholarship, often convened by, but distinct from ‘English’ (media studies, cultural studies, translation studies, African languages and others). All of this will lead us to ask: what does – and could – a twenty-first century literary studies in South Africa today look like?  

The WiSER Spring Program in Critical Thought acknowledges the generous support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Rock Ethics Institute, Pennsylvania State University and the National Research Foundation (South Africa).