Kathryn Yusoff Lecture: Inhuman Memory

Research Institute CLUE+, the Environmental Humanities Center and the Graduate School of Humanities, in cooperation with the Research Center for Material Culture present

Lecture by Kathryn Yusoff (Professor of Inhuman Geography)

Inhuman Memory

If the earth remembers more than it forgets—as a billion blackened Anthropocenes of colonial earth suggest—what is inhuman memory?  Can a gritty residue of counter-archives be found in soils, rocks, mounds, as the discourses of materiality organize its forgetting? Does history cling to the world in its erasure, the earth as a collector of disobedience, rebellion, and revolt, claiming time outside the colonial clock? Against an inhuman history of ‘dehumanization and thingification’ (Césaire 1999), this talk will explore how another poetics of the inhuman could redress the colonial afterlives of racial material-spatial practices. This talk maps another cartography of racialized geologies that sees the earth as an archival medium; one that unearths ghost geologies and suggest a way into reparative earth acts.

Kathryn Yusoff is professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press 2019). Her work is centred on dynamic earth events such as abrupt climate change, biodiversity loss and extinction. Her current research addresses questions of ‘Geologic Life’ within the proposed geologic epoch of the Anthropocene. Together with Casper Laing Ebbensgaard, Kerry Holden, and Michael Salu, she forms the Planetary Portals research group that uses imperial archives to create critical cartographies of the colonial praxis of emergence and extraction.

When: Wednesday, May 24, 2023
Time: 17:30-19:00
Where: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Theater7 NU-4C1
[NU Building, De Boelelaan 1111]

Attendance is free, but please register for the lecture using the form below.

On the same day, from 14:00 to 16:00, the VU Graduate School of Humanities offers a Masterclass for (R)MA and PhD students with Kathryn Yusoff and members of the Planetary Portals research group.  Students will read a set text and prepare questions ahead of the meeting.

The Masterclass is also offered through NICA. RMA and PhD students can receive 1 ECTS for reading the set texts, preparing questions and attending the Masterclass (please note that this does not apply to MA students).

If you are interested in participating in the masterclass, please register through this form: https://forms.gle/az1v3FXEpMo8NS268

UPDATE: The masterclass is now fully booked and we are no longer able to accept new registrations. You are welcome to sign up for the lecture at 17:30.