The Drake Lecture Series: Professor Kathryn Yusoff
The Vanderbilt Department of English presents the Spring 2023 Drake Lecture on Apr. 21st at 3:15pm in the Main Library 4th Floor Community Room. This event is free and open to the public. We hope to see you there!
“Inhuman Memory” with Professor Kathryn Yusoff, visiting from Queen Mary University of London.
If the earth remembers more than it forgets—as a billion blackened Anthropocenes of colonial earth suggest—what is inhuman memory? In soil, rocks, mounds, can a gritty residue of counter-archives be found, 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), how might another poetics of the inhuman redress the afterlives of this racializing and racist colonial materiality? 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.
