The earth, the planet, the globe: does it matter what name we give to the world (already a fourth term!) we inhabit? Over the past twenty years or so, the awareness of living for better or worse in a globally interconnected world has intensified and become ubiquitous. Yet while globalization around the turn of the millennium seemed to promise the emergence of a borderless world-wide cosmopolis, today’s geopolitics is busy erecting new walls and militarizing old borders across the fault lines of poverty, race, citizenship and religion. The only phenomena that are still global seem to be transnational finance capital and the universal risks of climate change, melting pole caps, large-scale deforestation, rising sea levels and pandemics. Bleak prospects indeed that call for rigorous critique that may, hopefully, generate some alternate perspectives. In our seminar we will read and discuss a number of critical and creative, theoretical and artistic interventions that contribute to the ongoing construction of ‘the world’ – as planet, as globe, as earth, as …
We will read theoretical and activist texts by writers like Bruce Robbins, Rob Nixon, Gayatri Spivak, Naomi Klein, Hito Steyerl and Pheng Cheah, among others. Our literary corpus will include a story collection (Rana Dasgupta, Tokyo Cancelled), a novel (Mohsin Hamid, Exit West), and a piece of performance poetry (Kay Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos).
- Kursleiter:in: Prof. Dr. Dirk Wiemann