CCDGB: Mary Louise Pratt, "Climate Catastrophe and the Crisis in Knowledgemaking: Decolonizing the Intellectual Commons"

Please join the Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Lab (CCDGB) at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute for our 2023-24 speaker series. CCDGB is part of The Entanglement Project, an FHI initiative focused on the intersections of race, health, and climate.

Most talks are hybrid:
- In-person registration (w/ COVID safety info): https://duke.is/yc4gm
- Zoom registration: https://duke.is/c/tjhj

The entangled forces of climate change and decolonization have put institutional knowledge-making apparatuses into interesting states of crisis that call forth creativity and experimentation, even as they invoke uncertainty and fear. As planetarity displaces globality, "post-humanist" thought seeks to remake western imaginations through concepts that dissolve familiar hierarchies of scale and familiar divides between animate/inanimate and living/nonliving. Simultaneously, the new millennium has inaugurated a worldwide flourishing of indigenous thought that proposes to remake the intellectual commons along decolonial and anti-extractivist lines. Territoriality sits at the heart of much of this revolutionary intellectual work, even as multispecies migration appears as a central axis of the planet's unfolding story.

Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor (emerita) in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, where she taught Latin American literature and culture, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and theory. She was formerly the Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities at Stanford University, where she was a leading voice in debates over humanities education, multiculturalism, and social justice. Dr. Pratt is affiliated with NYU's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics. Her current research interests include language, globalization and empire, mythologies of modernity, indigeneity as a global force, and the challenge of environmental catastrophe. Her publications include Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse 1979); Women, Culture and Politics in Latin America (1993 co-authored); Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. (1992, 2007); Los imaginarios planetarios (2017), and Planetary Longings (2022). She was president of the Modern Language Association in 2003 and the recipient of numerous fellowships and honors.