In Case of Emergency: Catastrophe, Climate, and Capitalism

When we trace the genealogy of crisis, it can seem as if we’ve always been surrounded by catastrophe. Different factions of the ruling class tell us that we need to be prepared, but also that preparation may be fruitless. Crises shift and expand, strengthening their hold on us through their very instability. The state of emergency, after all, “is not the exception but the rule,” as Walter Benjamin theorized; it is not a single event but what Lauren Berlant called a norm “embedded” in the everyday. In the zones of crisis and in daily life, the emergency overwhelms the senses, requiring constant self-governance and limiting our political imagination.

The urgent threat of climate change, though often disavowed, is at the center of today’s general atmosphere of crisis. But so far, discourses of risk and emergency have mostly been a boon for the racist right and anti-democratic technocrats, rather than contributing to a genuine project of planetary stewardship.

The quest for “energy sovereignty” has unleashed a wave of extractive interventions in the Global South amid the collapse of the postwar international order, creating new sacrifice zones and colonial resource frontiers. Frustrated by electoral institutions’ inability to deliver systemic transformation, some environmentalists have embraced climate doomerism or the technosolutionism of geoengineering; meanwhile, states are developing new techniques of biopolitical management and military repression for a world of scarcity. None of this has halted the earth system’s destabilization, an environmental and political process that embeds slow, uneven, and racialized forms of ecological violence in everyday life. Walls hold back displaced people and rising seas. Crops fail, biodiversity plummets, and streams run dry. As heat takes its toll on agricultural laborers’ bodies, urbanites adjust to smoggy summers.

Unlike the “fevered immediacy that governs the society of the catastrophe-as-spectacle,” Rob Nixon writes, this unspectacular “slow violence” is dispersed over time and space. With the sirens blaring, it is easy to miss the ways in which the ideology of emergency warps our cultural production and social relations, obscuring the slow violence of climate change as well as the most pressing contradictions of capitalism today. How might we map the cartography of crisis? In doing so, might we open space for alternative ways of thinking and living within and against crisis? Can we hold crisis at bay long enough to bring about a “real state of emergency,” as Benjamin says is our task?

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5

Social Science Research Building 122

6:00–7:30pm
Keynote

Jason W. Moore
“The Climate-Class Conjuncture, or, the Worldwide Class Struggle in the Web of Life”
Discussant: Sianne Ngai

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6

Foster 107

10:30am–12:00pm
Welcome remarks

Contested Commons

• Myles André Bonadie, Yale University
  “Trouble Comes Triple: Race, Place, and Performance in the Anti-black Climate”

• Kwolanne Felix, New York University
  “The Crisis of Southern Commons: South Carolina 1865–1882”

• Sohini Sengupta, University of Chicago
  “Performing Catastrophe: Scarcity and the Poetics of Crisis in Indian Leftist Theater”

• Discussant: Victoria Saramago

1:00–2:30pm
Toxic Temporalities

• Aurore Boutet, Sorbonne University/University of Chicago
  “‘That Death on the Wall’: The Cyclical (Re)Discovery of Chicago’s Long Lead Crisis”

• Ben Jacob, Rutgers University
  “Repeal the Twentieth Century: Cheap Oil, Crisis Ecologies and the Making of Guyana’s 1999 Petroleum Agreement”

• Madeline Turner, Stanford University
  “Toxic Fertility: Living and Dying with Moroccan Soil”

• Kylie Walters, Northwestern University
  “The Plastic Picture Window: Promoting Petrochemical Environmentalism”

• Discussant: Jennifer Scappettone

2:45–4:15pm
(De)valuing Disaster

• Nathan Deschamps, Stanford University
  “The Visible Hands: Economic Evil and the Cartography of Crisis in Early Modern Germany”

• Sujin Jung, Indiana University Bloomington
  “Keeping Coral Alive as Art: Bioart and Infrastructures of Emergency”

• Dolma Ombadykow, Yale University
  “Bodily Survival for Export: Homeostasis, Fatigue, and the National Body, 1899–1945”

• Maya Sibul, University of Chicago
  “Coming to Account-Ability: On Labor, Crisis, and Redress in Rukeyser’s Documentary Poetics”

• Discussant: Joseph Masco

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Cobb 306

4:30–6:30pm
Film screenings and pizza

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7

Foster 107

10:30am–12:00pm
Extreme Environments

• Stella Oyekanmi, Brown University
  “Waiting on Paper: Paperwork and the Temporal Governance of Disaster in Ibadan, Southwestern Nigeria”

• Jorge Palacios, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  “Escape Velocity: Spaceflight, Alienation, and the Politics of Planetary Crisis”

• Moe Romanoff, Northwestern University
  “Crisis of Extinction, Crisis of Mediation: Mammoth Tusk Hunting and Its Aesthetic Afterlives across the Sino-Siberian Borderlands”

• Bradley Verhelle, University of Chicago
  “Ghost Herds: Imagining Catastrophe and Rural Environmental Justice at the Seneca Army Depot”

• Discussant: Elizabeth Chatterjee

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Social Science Research Building 122

1:30–2:30pm
Poetry reading

• Daniel Borzutzky

• Mónica de la Torre

• Joyelle McSweeney

3:00–4:30pm
Keynote

Gökçe Günel
“Floating Power: Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations”
Discussant: Aaron Jakes

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Organized by Aditi Kini, Tadhg Larabee, Ernest Lee, and Yolian Ogbu in collaboration with the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and with support from the Franke Institute for the Humanities; the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization; the Committee on Social Thought; the Department of Anthropology; the Department of English; the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity; the Department of Cinema and Media Studies; the Committee on Southern Asian Studies; the Chicago Center on Democracy; and the Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society. 

This event is free and open to the public, and registration is recommended. Please email us at ccct@uchicago.edu if you require any accommodations to enable your full participation.

Poster illustration: xoph rodrigo