Virtual: ‘The Damned of the Anthropocene: Remembering the Disaster with Etel Adnan’s L’Apocalypse arabe / The Arab Apocalypse’

This talk first explores the Anthropocene as a disaster generating learning environments oriented around an energy aesthetics that critiques and finds more equitable alternatives to the capitalist economy of use and exchange and colonial-race violence. It then studies Etel Adnan’s apocalyptic book of poems L’Apocalypse arabe (1980) and its rewrite The Arab Apocalypse (1989), which deconstruct the meaning/nonmeaning and west/east binaries and arrive at a nonrelational relational model of what Abdelkebir Khatibi speculatively calls “l’oreintalisme desoriente” an “act of bringing Orientalism back to its native soil without any attempt to tell of its cardinality (that it has always oriented it).” 

Sean Singh Matharoo is a Postdoctoral Fellow of French in the Department of Romance Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he is updating his thesis into a book. He received his doctorate in Comparative Literature from UC Riverside in 2020. He is the author of three articles and a book chapter. 

Join this Zoom link on February 1 at 4:00 p.m. with the passcode: 497563.