[Commlist] CFP The Aesthetics of Geopower:Imagining Planetary Histories and Hegemonies

*Call for Papers*

**

*The Aesthetics of Geopower:*

*Imagining Planetary Histories and Hegemonies*


4 & 5 April 2024, University of Amsterdam | Deadline for proposals: 15 
October 2023.


*Keynote Speaker:*

**

Macarena Gómez-Barris 
<https://vivo.brown.edu/display/mgomezba#All> (Brown University, author 
of /The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives/, 
Duke University Press, 2017)


For this two-day, single-stream, and in-person conference, sponsored by 
the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and Dutch Research Council, 
scholars are invited to explore how the human and nonhuman forces 
shaping and emerging from the earth are articulated in art and cultural 
practice.

*

If the earth was once passed off as a neutral backdrop to human life, in 
the present age of ecological derangementit has reemerged as fraught 
with relations of power and politics. In this context, cultural 
theorists have put forward the rubric of /geopower /to conceptualize the 
ways that power is exerted /over/ and /through/ but also /by/ the earth 
(Clare 2013; Neyrat 2019; Yusoff 2018). Having long been entangled with 
extractive, racial capitalism (Bain 2023, 1-2), geopower is becoming 
especially visible amid climate change and discourses of the 
Anthropocene. From proposals for solar geoengineering to legislation 
extending legal personhood to ecological entities such as the Ganga 
River, contemporary manifestations of geopower indicate how politics and 
planetarity are colliding in complex ways that are increasingly defining 
the present and will shape the future.

Extrapolated from Michel Foucault’s thinking of biopower, geopower—or 
“geontopower” in Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s alternative 
formulation(2016)—has been theorized along several overlapping 
trajectories (Tola 2022; Luisetti 2019). For some, it primarily 
signifies the “government of the earth” (Diran & Traisnel 2019, 44) and 
implicates the technologies and tactics through which dominant subjects 
frame and exploit not just terrestrial environments but those “defined 
into nature” under patriarchal and colonial orders (Caputi 2020, 183). 
For another strand of theory, which draws on posthuman philosophies of 
life and matter (esp. Grosz 2008), geopower names the nonhuman forces of 
the earth, which permeate, condition, but also often disrupt or imperil 
humanly regulated environments (Clark 2011; Grosz, Yusoff, & Clark 2017).

Building on these developments, this conference explores how geopower 
intersects with aesthetics, taken expansively as referring to art, film, 
literature, and other forms of cultural practice, as well as sensed 
materiality and embodied perception. Our premise is that the aesthetic, 
far from being secondary or supplemental to the forces shaping the 
earth, is centrally entailed and embedded in dynamics of geopower. This 
can be seen in the visual construction of “the Earth system” as an 
object of calculation, conservation, and control, or in scholarly, 
literary, and filmic narratives of the Anthropocene, which cast 
different human subjects as planetary culprits or custodians (Bonneuil & 
Fressoz 2016). The earth’s inhuman forces, meanwhile, have a 
transgressive vitality that often registers aesthetically and might be 
articulated in artistic practice (Sheikh 2017). Such forces suffuse 
cultural practice even when not explicitly thematized, whether because 
some artistic scenes are economically aligned with particular regimes of 
resource extraction (Acosta 2020) or because cultural works are 
necessarily composed of planetary materialities, which precede and 
exceed discursive or authorial framings of the aesthetic (Parikka 2015).

To probe the connections among power, planetarity, and the aesthetic, we 
call on scholars, critics, and practitioners across disciplines to 
reflect on how diverse formations of geopower are enabled and mediated, 
but also challenged in cultural practice. How do conceptual, visual, 
poetic, or narratological framings of the earth calibrate social 
approaches to environments? Which marginalized perspectives can be 
brought forward to develop alternative representations or 
counter-histories of geopower? How is it imbricated with racializing, 
(neo)colonial, and cisheteropatriarchal orders? And how might theories 
of geopower be rethought by attending to its material manifestations or 
reimagined in literary and artistic experiment?

In addressing these and other questions pertaining to the aesthetics of 
geopower, contributors are invited to explore narratives, images, and 
practices relating to any genre or medium, or events, discourses, and 
materialities in any historical and geographical context. Possible 
topics might include (but are not limited to):

—cross-cultural perspectives on/representations of the earth as an 
aesthetic object;

—the significance of land and planetary forces in decolonial thought and 
practice;

—the aesthetics of geoengineering, from speculation to design;

—climate fiction and narrative constructions of geopower;

—articulations of the earth’s materialities in the arts and cultural 
practice;

—the role of mapping, remote sensing, and technological mediation in 
planetary governance;

—the politics and aesthetics of “deep time” imaginaries;

—Embodied and multi-sensory apprehensions of planetary power;

—representations of resource extraction and new commodity frontiers;

—the aestheticization of planetary forces that exceed and transcend the 
human;

—creative interventions that make visible the inequities and injustices 
of geopower.


*Submission*

Please submit abstracts (max. 300 words for 20 minute presentations) and 
a short biographical note (max. 250 words) to 
(aestheticsgeopower /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(aestheticsgeopower /at/ gmail.com)> by 15 
October 2023.

Kindly send submissions as a single pdf document of max. two pages. To 
deepen mutual engagement, papers will be circulated a week before the 
conference; each participant will be assigned a respondent and asked to 
act as primary respondent to an assigned paper in return. Selected 
papers will be invited for inclusion in an edited volume. No conference 
fees will be charged.

Organized by *Dr Simon Ferdinand* (www.simonferdinand.com 
<http://www.simonferdinand.com/>) and *Dr Colin 
Sterling* (www.colinsterling.com <http://www.colinsterling.com/>) of the 
University of Amsterdam.


*References*

Acosta, Santiago, /We Are Like Oil: An Ecology of the Venezuelan Culture 
Boom, 1973-1983/ (PhD. dissertation, New York: Columbia University, 2020).

Bain, Kimberly, “Black Soil,” /Social Text/ 41.1 (2023): 1-19.

Bonneuil, Christrophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, /The Shock of the 
Anthropocene/ (London: Verso, 2016).

Caputi, Jane, /Call Your “Mutha”: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto 
for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene/ (Oxford: Oxford University 
Press, 2020).

Clare, Stephanie, “Geopower: The Politics of Life and Land in Frantz 
Fanon's Writing,” /Diacritics/ 41.4 (2013): 60-80.

Clark, Nigel, /Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet 
/(London: Sage, 2010).

Diran, Ingrid, and Antoine Traisnel, “The Birth of Geopower,” 
/Diacritics/ 47.3 (2019): 32-51.

Grosz, Elizabeth, /Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the 
Earth/ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

Grosz, Elizabeth, Kathryn Yusoff, and Nigel Clark, “An Interview with 
Elizabeth Grosz: Geopower, Inhumanism and the Biopolitical,” /Theory, 
Culture, & Society/ 34. 2-3 (2017): 129-46.

Luisetti, Federico, “Geopower: On the States of Nature of Late 
Capitalism,” /European Journal of Social Theory/ 22.3 (2018): 342-63.

Neyrat, Frédéric, /The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation 
/(New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).

Parikka, Jussi, “Earth Forces: Contemporary Land Arts, Technology, and 
New Materialist Aesthetics,” /Cultural Studies Review/ 21.2 (2015): 47-75.

Povinelli, Elizabth A., /Geontologies: A Requiem to Late 
Liberalism/ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

Sheikh, Shela,“Translating Geontologies” in/And Now: Architecture 
Against a Developer Presidency: Essays on the Occasion of Trump's 
Inauguration/, edited James Graham (New York: Columbia Books on 
Architecture and the City, 2017), pp. 165-184

Tola, Miriam, “Geopower: Genealogies, Territories, and Politics,” in 
/Handbook of Critical Environmental Politics/, edited by Luigi 
Pellizzoni, Emanuele Leonardi, and Viviana Asara (Cheltenham: Edward 
Elgar, 2022), pp. 564-76.

Yusoff, Kathryn, “The Anthropocene and Geographies of Geopower,” in 
/Handbook on the Geographies of Power/, edited by Mat Coleman and John 
Agnew (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018), pp. 203-16.


URL: 
https://asca.uva.nl/shared/subsites/amsterdam-institute-for-humanities-research/en/events/2024/04/geopower.html?origin=puxViJXMR4qLMjgCvCIKgA 



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