Heated Conversations by Sumana Roy | 26 July | 6pm
You are warmly invited to the next session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Heated Conversations
(the full semester two program is here)
Sumana Roy will speak on
Adbhuta, Ananda, Attention, Not Apocalypse -- On Working on a New Language for the Environment
Click here for paper
The language of alarmism and apocalypse, played out as much in the arts as in the news, has, quite clearly, not helped to bring any change in the way we look at both ourselves and our relationship to what exists outside us. 'Climate change', 'global warming', even the word 'environment' -- bureaucratic clichés numb our consciousness. Is it possible to revive a vocabulary of wonder, of adbhuta, of attention and enchantment, and ananda, of joy and delight and kinship, that can replace this exhausted manner of looking and feeling? I would like to argue for the rehabilitation and simultaneous creation of such a vocabulary with examples of how this might be done.
Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree, a work of nonfiction, Missing: A Novel, My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, and two poetry collections, Out of Syllabus and V. I. P: Very Important Plant. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University.
Wednesday, 26th July 2023
6pm
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.