Sunday, 24 June 2018
5 – 8 pm
CLOSING PLENARY
Planetary Utopias
Angela Davis (Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Professor in Humanities, Columbia University, New York City)
Moderation: Nikita Dhawan
In place of an eschatological tradition that lends to critical thinking claims of directionality and purpose with promises of salvation and fulfilment, a planetary approach to thinking utopias facilitates multidirectional flows of hopes, desires and imaginaries without reproducing hegemonic paradigms of globality or transnationality that offer romantic longings for global conviviality and transnational solidarity. In contrast to investing futures with a purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit), the nonformulaic openness of planetary utopias involve not only reflecting on what is to be hoped, desired and imagined, but also on the limits of our best efforts to do so. What are the challenges of imagining a postimperial politics from the (non)place of planetarity?