Kevin McLaughlin’s new book, The Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin’s Critical Program (Fordham University Press, 2023), traces the development of a theory of literature and a method of criticism in Benjamin’s early interpretations of a nexus formed by Hölderlin, the German romantics, and Goethe. McLaughlin’s lecture will focus on Benjamin’s thesis of what he calls Goethe’s […]

September 13, 2023 / 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm / Add to Calendar 370 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley Hanna Perekhoda and Ilya Matveev Blanca Missé, Moderator and Respondent In a brazen act of imperialist aggression, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and has carried out indiscriminate killing of civilians, kidnapping of […]

Image credits: Stills from Fi al-thawra, During Revolution (Abounaddara 2019) Since the birth of photography, individuals have protected their image in the name of property rights or the right to privacy. But these rights don’t protect the world’s most vulnerable citizens whose indignity is exhibited on the screens of the world in the name of […]

The seminar will concentrate on the work of Abraham Cruzvillegas and Melanie Smith but will also look briefly at others of the 1990s generation, including Francis Alÿs; Pedro Reyes; Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; Teresa Margolles.

Melanie Smith’s 1989 move from the bleakness of Thatcher’s England to Mexico’s drama-filled neoliberal upheavals has given her singular insight into the perceptual conditions governing today’s erosion of material encounters. Tracing the aesthetic collision between the austere language of the monochrome and, as she puts it, the “baroque, excessive, saturated culture” of Mexico’s contemporary reality, Smith proposes a visual-temporal cognitive critique of Mexico’s reckless embrace of neoliberalism.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began over a year ago. The war has since killed tens of thousands, forced many more to flee, and reduced entire cities in Ukraine to rubble. While there is a sense that the war has turned into a watershed moment in post-Cold War history, its full consequences and global significance […]

“Colonial domesticity” is a way to express the centrality of forms of domesticity, such as family, kinship, and schooling, to the social reproduction of colonialism and racial capitalism. Colonial and capitalist social relations are materially reproduced through feminized care work, household, and embodied labor. While homes and households are primary sites for this invisible and often unwaged labor that reproduces human being, this reproduction also takes place in schools, factories, on assembly lines, in hospitals and prisons and in other institutions, at both intimate and global scales. 

This talk is drawn from Goldstein’s current book manuscript, The Colonial Present: Histories of Dispossession beyond Settlement. It considers the colonial-capitalist politics of water for Indigenous peoples and other racialized peoples during the present moment of climate catastrophe. The juridical production of water in the US Southwest as a “natural resource” to be quantified and managed, and […]

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI), which houses The Program in Critical Theory, is delighted to announce our inaugural symposium: Borders and Crossings: Contemporary Arts and Techniques of Migration. The event will take place March 10-11, 2023, at the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley. Borders are marked by fences and walls, but also by technologies, laws, […]

In a chapter entitled “Fanonian Futures,” David Scott points to the difference between the (Frantz) Fanon text that has resonated the most in the Northern Hemisphere — Black Skin, White Masks — and that which seemed most widely read in the South — The Wretched of the Earth, most especially “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness.” […]

The UC Berkeley Rhetoric 2022-23 Colloquium Series Presents: Fanon’s Psychoanalysis Open to all Berkeley students and faculty Add to Google calendar Of all the many aspects of the life and work of Frantz Fanon, his relation to psychoanalysis has remained amongst the most enigmatic and debated—repeatedly criticised or tidied up into more recognizable forms. In […]

“1902/2012” traces the emergence of Blackness as an ontological category in South Africa. It offers an analysis of early twentieth century Black writing in order to make claims about what Blackness came to mean at the dawn of the last century. Victoria Collis-Buthelezi is director of the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender, and Class at […]

Response by Mel Y. Chen, UC Berkeley In this talk I reconsider the “coloniality of gender” to explore some feminist mobilizations of bodies as territories in contemporary Latin America. I start by revisiting Latin American decolonial, non-binary approaches that highlight the coloniality of knowledge that informs medical and racist constructions of gender. Taking as a […]

Online Zoom event; Register here Join the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs for a virtual event in a series of interventions organized by the Critical South book series. The Scent of the Father: Essay on the Limits of Life and Science in Sub-Saharan Africa by Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, a conversation with Felwine Sarr (Duke University), Mamadou Diouf […]

Online Zoom event; Register here 10 AM PST / 8 PM SAST / 6 PM GMT Join the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs for a virtual event in a series of interventions organized by the Critical South book series. Undoing Apartheid, a conversation with the author Premesh Lalu (University of the Western Cape), Su-Ming Khoo (University […]