Description:

Macarena Gómez-Barris is Chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies and the Global South Center at Pratt Institute. She is author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives that theorizes social life through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also the author of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (2018), Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). In this talk, Gómez-Barris will analyze how current forms of embodied and artistic practice in the Americas reroute the destructive capacities of extractive capitalism thinking through submerged perspectives. She will also engage with questions on how we can move to non-extractive practices in the academy to begin to fully contend with the effects of the colonial and industrial modern project and create more sustainable webs of interdependence. Sponsored by the Graduate Cluster in Critical Studies in Theatre and Performance, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Performance Studies, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program.