Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres by Uhuru Phalafala | 26 Feb | 4pm (Johannesburg time)
WiSER and the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at the University of London UCL warmly invite you to the first seminar of our new online seminar series
Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres
Uhuru Phalafala will speak on
Cosmologies of Breath
Click here for paper
My grandfather is dead
he was vomiting blood, my mother says
lungs contaminated by history
brimming full with mine dust.
These are the opening lines of the epic poem Mine Mine Mine (2023), a personal narration of my family’s experience of the migrant labour system brought on by the gold mining industry in Johannesburg, South Africa. Using geopoetics to map geopolitics, it maps scales of catastrophic environments, or ecologies of crisis, from my grandfather’s lungs to colonial capitalist sites of Black breathlessness. The epic poem reveals how the extraction of natural resources from the body of earth is contingent upon the extraction of the Black body from the body of humanity. In this session I think through the process of writing Mine Mine Mine, which I view as existing within the black feminist tradition of imagining, ‘making’ and ‘doing’ against the commodification of humans and earth. I work from ‘an elsewhere’ – from Southern African cosmologies which rupture the logics and limits of New Worlding cosmology – from which I refuse the terms of wreckage, detritus, and ruin by experimenting with poetics of aliveness, possibility, communion, and futurity.
Please listen to an embodied reading from Mine Mine Mine here, and find an excerpt of the poetry here.
Uhuru Phalafala (PhD) is preoccupied with practices and poetics of be-ing together with ancestors, the land, plants and animals, cosmos and waters. This protracted contemplation has thus far produced essays, zines, a sonic documentary, poetry, poetico-mentary, and a turn to deep listening as embodied method. She is the author of Mine Mine Mine (2023) and Keorapetse Kgositsile & the Black Arts Movement: Poetics of Possibility (2024), and is a senior lecturer in the English department at Stellenbosch University.
Monday, 26th February 2024
4pm (Johannesburg time)
Register here
The series is convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall (WiSER) and Megan Vaughan (IAS).
Recent work on infrastructures, atmospheres and the biospheric shifts associated with conditions of the Anthropocene have relied on rendering newly vivid those aspects of the social which have long been treated as background. Sensory ecologies - affective or experienced space which compose environments, in Matthew Gandy’s terms, are synesthetic: like sounds, they reverberate within human and more-than-human subjects. Affective atmospheres are shared bodily situations, drawing also on renewed and shifting elemental understandings of air and refracted light. How can we come conceptually closer to the toxicities of both air pollution and rising authoritarianisms, to material and metaphoric atmospheres – and other less-than-visible carriers of damage? And to a better sense of the entanglements and relationalities that such modes of thought can produce? The growing non-transparency of air, in Sumana Roy’s terms, produces paranoid reading: suspicious, anticipatory theories of negative affect. This occurs in the context of the ‘disappearance of air’ in favour of mask filters, air purifiers and the AQI (Air Quality Index) for those who can afford it. Yet there may also be a reparative range to these questions: making air explicative might offer analytic opportunities for sustenance and responsiveness to what is to come.
The Series will run fortnightly on Mondays @ 4-5pm JHB time / 2-3pm London time. It will build on ongoing and emergent academic attention to air and atmospheres and draw out suggestions for future research and for ways of acting upon the contemporary air and atmospheric crisis, with a leading focus on global South contexts.