Global South Humanities Initiative: Human Becoming

Description

The contemporary humanities have been shaped by an encounter with continental theory and its disavowal of what it called humanism, viewed as a bourgeois liberal discourse in and of the West. Yet, a wide range of anticolonial and Global South thinkers, from Senghor and Fanon to Said and Kapur, evade this gesture and speak of anticolonial and postcolonial struggles in terms of the possibilities for human becoming. What is the status of the question of humanism in the humanities today? In the convergence of catastrophes that marks our moment, what is the space for reopening the question of a shared life of the species on this planet from sites of contention and difference across the globe, from the experience of dispossessed populations of various kinds?

This discussion will take the form of a conversation between two authors of recent books concerned with the human and its modes of becoming: Stathis Gourgouris, professor of classics, English, and comparative literature at Columbia University and author of Nothing Sacred (2024), and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, associate professor of English and director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California and author of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Anti-Black World (2020). The conversation will be mediated by Christopher Celenza, dean of the Krieger School.

This is the Global South Humanities Initiative's inaugural event. A reception will follow.