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Climate Change and the Production of Knowledge
Ian Baucom and Matthew Omelsky, special issue editors
Duke University Press, 2017
Though the causes and effects of climate change pervade our everyday lives—the air we breathe, the food we eat, the objects we use—the way the discourse of climate change influences how we make meaning of ourselves and our world is still unexplored. Contributors to this issue bring diverse perspectives to the ways that climate change science and discourse have reshaped the contemporary architecture of knowledge itself: reconstituting intellectual disciplines and artistic practices, redrawing and dissolving boundaries, and reframing how knowledge is represented and disseminated. The contributors address the emergence of global warming discourse in fields like history, journalism, anthropology, and the visual arts; the collaborative study of climate change between the human and material sciences; and the impact of climate change on forms of representation and dissemination in this new interdisciplinary landscape.

Contributors. Ian Baucom, Rosi Braidotti, David Buckland, Matthew Burtner, Noel Castree, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, Olivia Gray, Willis Jenkins, Catherine Malabou, Matthew Omelsky, Michael Segal, Bently Spang, Gary Tomlinson, Astrid Ulloa, Lucy Wood
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front cover of Fugitive Time
Fugitive Time
Global Aesthetics and the Black Beyond
Matthew Omelsky
Duke University Press, 2023
In Fugitive Time, Matthew Omelsky theorizes the embodied experience of time in twentieth- and twenty-first-century black artforms from across the world. Through the lens of time, he charts the sensations and coursing thoughts that accompany desires for freedom as they appear in the work of artists as varied as Toni Morrison, Yvonne Vera, Aimé Césaire, and Issa Samb. “Fugitive time” names a distinct utopian desire directed at the anticipated moment when the body and mind have been unburdened of the violence that has consumed black life globally for centuries, bringing with it a new form of being. Omelsky shows how fugitive time is not about attaining this transcendent release but is instead about sustaining the idea of it as an ecstatic social gathering. From the desire for ethereal queer worlds in the Black Audio Film Collective’s Twilight City to Sun Ra’s transformation of nineteenth-century scientific racism into an insurgent fugitive aesthetic, Omelsky shows how fugitive time evolves and how it remains a dominant form of imagining freedom in global black cultural expression.
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