Third Conference of the Postcolonial Europe-Network
in collaboration with the DFG Research Training Group Globalization and
Literature: Representations, Transformations, Inventions
LMU Munich, June 26-28,
2014
Meteorologies
of Modernity.
The conference sets out to explore weather, climate
and climate changes, both past and present, from a variety of disciplinary
perspectives. The aim is to broaden existing theoretical frameworks and to
examine, historicize and contextualize discourses on climate and weather.
Particular consideration will be given to literature and the arts, which we
consider as an archive where specific meteorological knowledge is not only registered
but also scrutinized and produced.
***********************************************************
Confirmed Speakers:
Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of
Chicago)
ElizabethDeLoughrey (University of
California, Los Angeles)
Eva Horn (University of Vienna)
Graham Huggan (University of Leeds)
Bernhard
Malkmus (Ohio State University)
Mirko
Bonné (Writer in Residence, Weather Stations
Project, Berlin)
Cornelia
Lüdecke (University of Hamburg/TU Munich)
************************************************************
Conference Program
Thursday, 26 June 2014
16.00–16.30: Coffee break
Panel II: Mapping Climate Zones: From
the Temperate…
18.30–19.00: Coffee break
19.00 Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago)
20.30 Reception
Friday, 27 June 2014
12.20–13.20: Lunch
13.20: Panel IV: …to the Tropical…
(Chair: Fabienne Imlinger)
15.20–15.40: Coffee
break
Hanna Strass (Munich) “There’s
going to be a drought. A wrong thing was done.” Weather Phenomena in Linda
Hogan’s People of the Whale
17.40-18.00: Coffee break
18.00 Reading by Mirko Bonné, Writer in Residence Weather
Stations Project / Berlin
19.30 Dinner
Saturday, 28 June 2014
9.30: Panel V: Island Climates (Chair:
Sandra Ponzanesi)
10.30–11.00: Coffee break
Elizabeth DeLoughrey (U.C.L.A.) The
Sea is Rising: Visualizing Climate Change in the Pacific
13.00: Closing remarks (Sarah Fekadu,
Fabienne Imlinger, Sandra Ponzanesi)
From Right: Tobias Doering, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sandra Ponzanesi, Paulo de Medeiros, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Sarah Fekadu, Fabienne Imlinger.
************************************************************
Hosts: Prof. Robert Stockhammer
(Comparative Literature, LMU Munich), Prof. Tobias Döring (English Literature,
LMU Munich)
************************************************************
Postcolonial Europe Network (PEN)
is funded by NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research).
The Research Training Group Globalization
and Literature: Representations, Transformations, Inventions is funded
by the DFG (German Research Fund). The DFG Research Training Group
sets out to examine the function of the literary in processes of globalization
from a broad historical perspective, ranging from antiquity to the present day.
The research interests focus on the interaction between literature and
globalizing dynamics: on the one hand, the transformation of the functions of
literature by historically variable media relations (e.g. the changing status
of books in societies in which communication is globalized by means of the
internet); on the other hand, the ways in which literature not only represents
and reflects, but also criticizes and intervenes in globalization processes.
[1] Chakrabarty, Dipesh.
2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35:
197-222. P. 213.
Third Conference of the Postcolonial Europe-Network
in collaboration with the DFG Research Training Group Globalization and
Literature: Representations, Transformations, Inventions
LMU Munich, June 26-28,
2014
Meteorologies
of Modernity.
Climate
Change and Weather in the Contexts of
Postcolonialism
and Globalization
The conference sets out to explore weather, climate
and climate changes, both past and present, from a variety of disciplinary
perspectives. The aim is to broaden existing theoretical frameworks and to
examine, historicize and contextualize discourses on climate and weather.
Particular consideration will be given to literature and the arts, which we
consider as an archive where specific meteorological knowledge is not only registered
but also scrutinized and produced.
As the title Meteorologies of Modernity suggests,
one cannot understand global warming without addressing its social, economic
and political dimensions: the history of industrialization and colonization, or
the (western) notions of, e.g., time, space but also freedom and, finally, the
human. By putting a particular focus on weather, the conference proposes to
examine another inherently modern phantasm and its relation to and/or
repercussions for present discourses on global warming: namely, the ability to
not only observe and predict, but to actually control and even produce weather
and climate.
The conference takes at its starting point the claim
put forward by various scholars that the present climate change calls for a
reformulation of the concepts, methodologies, and institutional structures of
contemporary humanities in general. According to historian Dipesh Chakrabarty,
the planetary crisis of global warming has brought about a collapse of the
distinction between the humanities and sciences: Due to the sheer number of
human population and the excessive use of fossil fuel and other resources,
humankind has now come to possess a geological force that is not only capable
of shaping local environment, but of determining climate, weather and
environment on a global scale. Consequently, these phenomena are no longer
clearly pertaining to the realm of the “natural,” and therefore an object of
study of the sciences. Chakrabarty’s idea of the “anthropocene” as the geological
epoch in which humans constitute a geophysical as well as political agent poses
a number of challenges to traditional approaches, both on a theoretical and
methodological level. As the historian points out, what is required is to
“bring together intellectual formations that are somewhat in tension with each
other: the planetary and the global; deep and recorded histories; species
thinking and critiques of capital.”[1] The conference proposes
to do this by putting into dialogue postcolonial studies and theories of
globalization and by exploring questions of (postcolonial) justice, capitalism,
and history.
Scholars in the field of postcolonial studies and
ecocriticism in particular are in the process of developing frameworks in which
to address questions of environmental (in)justice in national and global
formations of domination, i.e. to understand the historical and political
dimensions of how and why the effects of global warming affect certain
communities, regions or nations more strongly than others. While most scholars
would probably agree with Elizabeth Deloughrey and George Handley’s claim that
postcolonial ecology must be more than an extension of postcolonial
methodologies into the realm of the material world, it remains an ongoing task
to explore the profile, methodologies and frameworks of such a postcolonial
ecology. In what ways are the modern notions of the political, such as the
nation state, affected and possibly altered? How, indeed, can we visualize
notions of time and space that extend our familiar, i.e. modern temporal and
spatial imagination? What temporalities does the discourse on climate change itself
produce or forestall, by the use of, i.e., the affectively highly charged word
“crisis”? How is our sense of history affected when all the future seems to
bear is the advent of humanity’s end?
The conference wants to explore these and other
questions, particularly by drawing on the methodologies of literary and
cultural studies, by bringing to the fore how literature and the arts allow us
to critically and imaginatively engage with the representational challenges the
discourses about climate, climate change and weather have to offer. As, for
instance, a renewed interest for the topic in the context of cultural and
literary studies has shown, weather bears a specific affective as well as
metaphorical potential. Particular attention has moreover been given to
cultural practices of “meteorology” – i.e. the daily practices of observation,
cataloging, charting, and measuring oneself, the weather and the environment –
as they constitute and shape (modern) subjectivities and a sense of relation to
environment and being in the world. We would like to analyze to what extent
narratives of weather and climate crises of different epochs display a “global
consciousness,” how this is reflected in their narrative strategies, and which
new knowledge systems and power constellations are being formed.
By contextualizing and historicizing meteorological
knowledge from the viewpoints of historiography, literary studies, and cultural
studies, the aim is to bring perspectives from postcolonial studies,
ecocriticism and globalization theory into dialogue and to reflect upon the
wider implications of climate change for the concepts, methodologies and
institutional structures of contemporary humanities. The conference will have
as contributors both established and young scholars of the various disciplines.
***********************************************************
Confirmed Speakers:
Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of
Chicago)
ElizabethDeLoughrey (University of
California, Los Angeles)
Eva Horn (University of Vienna)
Graham Huggan (University of Leeds)
Bernhard
Malkmus (Ohio State University)
Mirko
Bonné (Writer in Residence, Weather Stations
Project, Berlin)
Cornelia
Lüdecke (University of Hamburg/TU Munich)
************************************************************
Conference Program
Thursday, 26 June 2014
Conference Venue: IBZ, Amalienstr. 38
13.30: Introductory address (Sarah
Fekadu, Fabienne Imlinger, Sandra Ponzanesi)
14.00: Panel I: Charting a Challenging
Terrain (Chair: Sarah Fekadu)
Robert Stockhammer (LMU Munich) Philology
in the Anthropocene?
Nicole Seymour (LMU Munich) Climate
Change, Cinema, and “Bad” Affect
16.00–16.30: Coffee break
Panel II: Mapping Climate Zones: From
the Temperate…
Oliver Grill (LMU Munich) Unpredictable
Weather. Meteorologic Calculations in Humboldt’s Kosmos and
Stifter’s Nachsommer
Bernhard Malkmus (Ohio State
University) Man in the Anthropocene: Max Frisch’s Eschatological
Meteorology
18.30–19.00: Coffee break
19.00 Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago)
Beyond
Capital: Time, Scale, and the Climate Crisis
20.30 Reception
Friday, 27 June 2014
Conference Venue: IBZ, Amalienstr. 38
9.00 Panel III …to the Polar…(Chair:
t.b.a.)
Cornelia Lüdecke (University of
Hamburg/TU Munich) The International Polar Year 1882/83 and the
Investigation of Climate Change around 1900Lars Jensen (Roskilde
University) The Island that came in from the Cold: Greenland, Climate
Change, and the Scramble for the Arctic
11.00–11.20: Coffee break
Prem Poddar (Roskilde University) Writing
on Water: East India Himalayas
12.20–13.20: Lunch
13.20: Panel IV: …to the Tropical…
(Chair: Fabienne Imlinger)
Eva Horn (University of
Vienna) Tropes of the Tropics: The Anthropology of Hot Climate
Patrick Ramponi (Hagen University) Weather
Manipulation and Weather Stress: Literary Meteoropathics and Climate Theory in
a Global Age
15.20–15.40: Coffee
break
Hanna Strass (Munich) “There’s
going to be a drought. A wrong thing was done.” Weather Phenomena in Linda
Hogan’s People of the Whale
Antonia Mehnert (Munich) Strange
Flight Behavior: Climate Change, Butterflies, and Eco Cosmopolitanism in
Barbara Kingsolver’s Latest Cli-fi Novel
17.40-18.00: Coffee break
18.00 Reading by Mirko Bonné, Writer in Residence Weather
Stations Project / Berlin
19.30 Dinner
Saturday, 28 June 2014
Conference venue: French Library,
Ludwigstr. 25, 4th floor
9.30: Panel V: Island Climates (Chair:
Sandra Ponzanesi)
Johannes Ungelenk (LMU Munich) The
Climate of the Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest
10.30–11.00: Coffee break
Elizabeth DeLoughrey (U.C.L.A.) The
Sea is Rising: Visualizing Climate Change in the Pacific
Graham Huggan (University of
Leeds) Unlucky Country? Australian Literature, Risk, and the
Global Climate Challenge
13.00: Closing remarks (Sarah Fekadu,
Fabienne Imlinger, Sandra Ponzanesi)
From Right: Tobias Doering, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sandra Ponzanesi, Paulo de Medeiros, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Sarah Fekadu, Fabienne Imlinger.
************************************************************
Hosts: Prof. Robert Stockhammer
(Comparative Literature, LMU Munich), Prof. Tobias Döring (English Literature,
LMU Munich)
Organizing team: Dr. Sarah Fekadu
(English Literature, LMU Munich), Dr. Fabienne Imlinger (Comparative
Literature, LMU Munich), Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi (Media and Culture Studies,
Utrecht University)
Contact: sarah.fekadu@anglistik.uni-muenchen.de,globalisierung@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
************************************************************
Postcolonial Europe Network (PEN)
is funded by NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research).
The project, conducted by Sandra
Ponzanesi (Utrecht University, the Netherlands) in collaboration with European
partners, aims to establish an international platform for developing research
into new forms of conceptualizing Europe from a multidisciplinary perspective
engaging several disciplines (literary, media, gender studies) in the
Humanities and the Social Sciences (sociology, political theory). PEN aspires
to develop theoretical and methodological tools for representing and imagining
Europe in a postcolonial and postimperial perspective.
International partners: Utrecht
University, University of Leeds, University of Munich, London School of
Economics, University of Naples, University of Roskilde and University of
Iceland, University of Warwick.
The Research Training Group Globalization
and Literature: Representations, Transformations, Inventions is funded
by the DFG (German Research Fund). The DFG Research Training Group
sets out to examine the function of the literary in processes of globalization
from a broad historical perspective, ranging from antiquity to the present day.
The research interests focus on the interaction between literature and
globalizing dynamics: on the one hand, the transformation of the functions of
literature by historically variable media relations (e.g. the changing status
of books in societies in which communication is globalized by means of the
internet); on the other hand, the ways in which literature not only represents
and reflects, but also criticizes and intervenes in globalization processes.
[1] Chakrabarty, Dipesh.
2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35:
197-222. P. 213.
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