Events
The Extractive Zone: Cecilia Vicuña’s Social Ecologies a Decolonizing Vision Speaker Series Lecture by Macarena Gómez-Barris
Extending arguments in her recently published book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, Gómez-Barris considers performative engagement with oceanic space, its social ecologies, and its occupation by transnational mega-extractive industries. During a time of new authoritarianisms in the Américas, she shows how extractive capitalism reorganizes the Pacific Ocean into a normative geography, where questions of stewardship and governance become epiphenomenal to the primary condition of resource accumulation. How does New York-based and mestiza artist Cecilia Vicuña’s sense the sea? How does she address the complexities of Indigeneity in the Global South? And, how might we think about Vicuña’s sea choreographies and similar radical artistic work as forms of embodiment that dissipate human, inhuman, and (after) nature divides?
Co-Sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; and Hemispheric Institute of Performance Politics
20 Cooper Square, fifth floor
New York, NY 10003
Macarena Gómez-Barris is Chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute and Director of the Global South Center. She is author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives that theorizes social life through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism, especially upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also author of the forthcoming Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Politics in the Américas (UC Press, 2018) and Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009). She is co-author with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and co-editor with Diana Taylor of Duke University Press series Dissident Acts. Macarena was a Fulbright fellow at Sociology and Gender Department in FLACSO Ecuador, Quito (2014-2015).
The event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow. A photo ID is required to enter NYU buildings and 20 Cooper Square is a wheelchair accessible venue.