INVITE | Heated Conversations by Debjani Ganguly | 2 August | 10am (Johannesburg time)
You are warmly invited to the next session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Heated Conversations
(the full semester two program is here)
Debjani Ganguly will speak on
Catastrophic Modes, Formal Realism and Non-Human Futurity
Click here for paper
The paper explores radical shifts in the scale of realist aesthetics in an age saturated with catastrophic modes of thinking. The realist novel has undergone a major transformation toward the end of the twentieth century and into the new millennium as it confronts cataclysmic technological and environmental changes. I reflect on the challenges of thinking realist form in relation to questions of scale and magnitude that surpass the normal bounds of human experience. A form that has hitherto been ensconced in a plausible empirical realm attuned to human-scale cognition and sensory world is now compelled to reckon with phenomena in which the human subject is one among a multitude of nonhuman agents such as animals, insects, atmosphere, water, earth, and technology.
What constitutes the aesthetics of formal realism when the very meaning of quotidian human life is shot through with geophysical phenomena – pandemics, floods, wildfires – appearing at a scale and intensity that upends notions of the ordinary and the everyday? Could data modeling and simulations be said to constitute a plausible ground of formal realism in the way that factual genres such as newspapers, bureaucratic reports, medical case histories, and print inventories of population and public health constituted the ground of formal realism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. How do novels reckon with the gap between the multitude affected by catastrophic upheaval and the subjectivity of individuated lives that is the traditional focus of formal realism? What bearing might these insights have on the scale of realism and realist aesthetics today?
Debjani Ganguly is Professor of English and World Literature at the University of Virginia and research professor at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, ACU Melbourne. Her research interests include postcolonial and world literatures, media ecologies, new materialism, philosophies of technology and digitality, human rights discourse, and planetary humanities. She is the author of This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (2016) and Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (2005). Her third monograph, Catastrophic Modes and Planetary Realism, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is editor of the two-volume The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021). Her other books include Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual (ed. 2007) and Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality: Global Perspectives (ed. 2007). Her published work has appeared in journals such as New Literary History, Postcolonial Studies, Interventions, Asian Studies Review, South Asia, Angelaki, and the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. As director of humanities institutes at the University of Virginia (2016-2023) and the Australian National University (2007-2014), Debjani has fostered international projects and networks in global south studies, environmental humanities, digital humanities, informatics, big data, and AI, and human rights and refugee migration. She is the general editor with Francesca Orsini of the CUP monograph series, Cambridge Studies in World Literature. She is a Fellow and Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and advisory board member of the Harvard Institute for World Literature and the Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin.
Wednesday, 2nd August 2023
10am (Johannesburg time)
Register here:
https://wits-za.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwlcO-srzgtHN3ITaJ6sNJr2gTmvz2xKOWl
Heated Conversations is a new seminar series convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall
As global warming produces rising seas, falling dam levels and excessive droughts, generating new levels of multi-crisis in the world-now, so too are our conversations and discourses heating up in multiple ways. This seminar series takes up these questions of anthropogenic escalation and pedagogical shifts of gear. It does so in a context in which strengthening Southern bodies of knowledge is ever more crucial to engaging collectively with and comprehending these complex new rubrics and material dimensions. A forum broadly dedicated to the literary and cultural humanities, the seminar is hospitably open to wide participation from as many parts of the world as possible and will invite speakers to offer generative interventions for discussion and debate.
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at Wits University; Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WiSER, Wits.