MIT | This talk examines the relation between Islamophobia as the dominant
form of racism today and the ecological crisis. It looks at the three
common ways in which the two phenomena are seen to be linked: as an
entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a
source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms
of capitalist accumulation. The talk proposes a fourth way of linking
the two: an argument that they are both emanating from a similar mode of
being, or enmeshment, in the world, what is referred to as ‘generalised
domestication.’
Ghassan Hage has held many visting positions across the world
including in Harvard, University of Copenhagen, Ecoles des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales and American University of Beirut. He works in the
comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, diaspora and
racism and on the relation between anthropology, philosophy and social
and political theory. His most well-known work is White Nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society (Routledge 2000). His is also the author of Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imaginary (Melbourne University Press 2015). He is currently working on a book titled Is Islamophobia Accelerating Global Warming? and has most recently published a piece in American Ethnologist,
titled: "Etat de Siege. A Dying Domesticating Colonialism?" (2016) that
engages with the contemporary “refugee crisis” in Europe and beyond.
The talk is free and open to the public.
