Alien Justice with Anindita Banerjee

Alien Justice

With a billionaires’ space race underway against the backdrop of a literally burning planet ravaged by a pandemic, it is impossible to extricate science fiction’s long history of imagining outer space and its hypothetical forms of life from the imperial extractive logic of death on planet earth. This talk explores an altogether different genealogy of alien bodies, languages, and ecologies, one that offers templates of justice impossible to conceive within the confines of consensual reality and its attendant assumptions of absolute continuity and eternal generation. 

Anindita Banerjee is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and the chair of humanities in the Environment and Sustainability Program at Cornell University. Her most recent publications are South of the Future: Marketing Care and Speculating Life in South Asia and the Americas (SUNY Press, 2020), and a summer 2021 special issue on “Border Environments” in the Latin American Literary Review, available in open access at https://www.lalrp.net/16/volume/48/issue/96/.

Thursday, October 7, at 5:30 PM ET US on Zoom

Registration link: cutt.ly/AlienJustice

Event hosted by Theorizing, the colloquium series of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory

Event co-sponsored by Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities