Between Scarcity and Excess: Capitalism, Population Control and the Climate Crisis

Seminar Summer Semester 2020

MA Kunst Im Context, Universität der Künste Berlin

Wednesdays from 10:00 to 12:00

Content and Objectives

In this seminar we will explore tensions around the emergence of population as a managerial category starting in the second half of the 20th century and the production of scarcity under contemporary capitalism; the development of new technologies of birth control — from menstrual tracking apps to smart implants; and the norms currently associating population growth with the climate crisis. The course will be divided into three modules, each focusing on one of the previously mentioned topics; 

By the end of this course, students should:

• Apprehend the relationship between the idea of population as a managerial category and a theoretical framework for the maintenance of colonial power;

• How these power structures are articulated in the current discourse around sustainability and the climate crisis;

• Critically articulate concerns associated with population control policies and programs in the Global South.

Resources

You can access the course playlist here. Link to the course google drive upon request.

Week 1 — April 22 2020: Introductions.

Discussion on conditions for study, access to resources, and how to maintain a safe classroom during a pandemic. Technical questions: distribution of papers/books, access to libraries and online learning platforms. Brief discussion on pedagogical and analytical methods for this class; brief introduction to gender and decoloniality.

The transcript of the theoretical part of week 1 can be accessed here.

Week 2 — April 29 2020: Who gets to speak? Coloniality, epistemic privilege and the construction of gender and race.

Weekly texts: 

• Maria Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System,” Hypatia 22, no. 1 (2007): 186–209.

• Ramón Grosfoguel, “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality,” TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 1 (May 13, 2011), http://escholarship.org/uc/item/21k6t3fq.

Additional material:

• Breny Mendoza, “Coloniality of Gender and Power: From Postcoloniality to Decoloniality” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, 2016, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199328581.013.6.

• Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Boundary 2 12/13 (1984): 333–58, doi:10.2307/302821.

In-class discussion:

• Anna Bella Geiger — Native Brazil, Alien Brazil, 1977.

Week 3 — May 6 2020: Science, coloniality, and the making of the other.

Weekly texts:

• Londa Schiebinger, “Taxonomy for Human Beings,” in The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, ed. Gill Kirkup (London; New York: Routledge in association with the Open University, 2000).

• Ruha Benjamin, “Catching Our Breath: Critical Race STS and the Carceral Imagination,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 2, no. 0 (July 1, 2016): 145–56, https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2016.70.

Additional material:

• Evelyn Hammonds, “New Technologies of Race,” in The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, ed. Gill Kirkup (London; New York: Routledge in association with the Open University, 2000).

• Algiers — Can The Sub_Bass Speak? (2019) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waiwJ5rW4xw

In-class discussion:

• Teresa María Díaz Nerio – Hommage à Sara Bartman, 2008.

• Ana Mendieta — Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants), 1972.

Week 4 — May 13 2020: An introduction to settler colonial biopolitics

Weekly text:

• Scott Lauria Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 52–76, https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2011.10648801.

Additional material:

• Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, 1 edition (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1998); 

• Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978--1979, Reprint edition (Basingstoke England; New York: Picador, 2010).

• Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (December 21, 2003): 11–40, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11.

In-class discussion:

• Albert Eckhout — Brazilian series (1641)

Week 5 — May 20 2020: The biopolitics of sex.

Weekly texts:

• Frantz Fanon, “Medicine and Colonialism,” in A Dying Colonialism, 12/15/93 edition (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1994), 121–45

• Paul B. Preciado, “History of Technosexuality,” in Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. Bruce Benderson, English-Language Edition edition (New York, NY: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013), 68–79.

Additional material:

• Stephanie Clare, “Geopower: The Politics of Life and Land in Frantz Fanon’s Writing,” Diacritics 41, no. 4 (2013): 60–80, https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2013.0026

• Achille Mbembe, “Metamorphic Thought: The Works of Frantz Fanon,” African Studies 71, no. 1 (April 1, 2012): 19–28, https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2012.668291.

In-class discussion:

• Lee Bul — Untitled (Cravings Red), (2011, reconstruction of 1988 work)

• Lee Bul — Monster: Pink (1998 / 2011)

• Lucas Odahara — Os Sons Deles Ecoando Entre Eu E Você (2017)

Week 6 — May 27 2020: Bodies in Labor: workers and cyborgs, witches and goddesses.

Weekly texts:

• Edna Bonhomme, “What Coronavirus Has Taught Us about Inequality,” Al Jazeera, March 17, 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-taught-inequality-200316204401117.html.

• Caio Barretto Briso, “‘Instead of Doctors, They Send Police to Kill Us’: Locked-down Rio Faces Deadly Raids,” The Guardian, May 18, 2020, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/18/rio-de-janeiro-police-raid-coronavirus.

• Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003).

Additional material:

• Edna Bonhomme, “Racism: The Most Dangerous ‘Pre-Existing Condition,’” Al Jazeera, April 16, 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/racism-dangerous-pre-existing-condition-200414154246943.html.

In-class discussion:

• Lee Bul — Cyborg  series (1998-2011)

• Frida Kahlo — Self-portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States (1932)

• Xenia Rubinos — Mexican Chef (2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u1VAa1HBpM 

Week 7 — June 3, 2020: Disposable bodies: technologies of reproduction and the Global South.

Weekly texts:

• Lara Marks, “Human Guinea Pigs? The History of the Early Oral Contraceptive Clinical Trials,” History and Technology 15, no. 4 (January 1, 1999): 263–88, https://doi.org/10.1080/07341519908581949.

• A. R. Reis, “Norplant in Brazil: Implantation Strategy in the Guise of Scientific Research. | POPLINE.Org,” Issues in Reproductive and Genetic Engineering 3, no. 2 (1990), http://www.popline.org/node/376768.s.

Extra:

• Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill (Durham NC: Duke University Press Books, 2009).

• I. Schipper and F. Weyzig, “Examples of Unethical Trials — SOMO” (SOMO, 2008), http://somo.nl/publications-en/Publication_2534.

Week 8 — June 10, 2020: The making of scarcity: overpopulation and the surveillance of sexuality.

Weekly texts:

• Octavia E. Butler, “Bloodchild,” in Bloodchild and Other Stories, 2 edition (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005).

• Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Mankato, Minn: Creative Co, 1992).

• Michelle Murphy, “Economization of Life: Calculative Infrastructures of Population and Economy,” in Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity, ed. Peg Rawes (Routledge, 2013).

Extra:

• Michelle Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2012).

Week 9 — June 17, 2020: At the altar of capital: race, population control, and development

Weekly texts:

• Sofia Samatar, “An Account of the Land of Witches,” in Tender: Stories, Reprint edition (Easthampton, MA: SMALL BEER PR, 2019).

• Kalpana Wilson, “Population Control, the Cold War and Racialising Reproduction,” in Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice (London ; New York : New York: Zed Books, 2012).

Week 10 — June 24, 2020: Population, food production, and the climate crisis

Weekly texts:

• Gloria Anzaldúa, “Cultures,” in Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Fourth Edition edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 120.

• Donna J. Haraway, “Making Kin in the Chthulucene: Reproducing Multispecies Justice,” in Making Kin Not Population: Reconceiving Generations, ed. Adele Clarke and Donna J. Haraway, 1 edition (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), 67–99.

Extras:

• Gloria Anzaldúa, “We Call Them Greasers,” in Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Fourth Edition edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 134-135.

• Marwa Sharafeldin, “A Revolutionary Woman,” Open Democracy (blog), 2012, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/revolutionary-woman/.

• Las Mujeres Zapatistas, “Carta de las zapatistas a las mujeres que luchan en el mundo « Enlace Zapatista,” Blog, Enlace Zapatista (blog), February 2019, http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2019/02/11/carta-de-las-zapatistas-a-las-mujeres-que-luchan-en-el-mundo/.

Week 11 — July 1, 2020: Plants, knowledge, and the reproduction of resistance

Weekly texts:

• Gloria Anzaldúa, “Curandera,” in Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Fourth Edition edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 176–77

• Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ Pr, 2007).

Extras:

• Michael Yellow Bird, “What We Want to Be Called: Indigenous Peoples’ Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Identity Labels,” American Indian Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1999): 1–21, https://doi.org/10.2307/1185964.

Week 12 — July 7, 2020: Plants, knowledge, and the reproduction of resistance

Weekly material:

• Ailton Krenak, Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo, Edição: 1 (São Paulo, SP: Companhia das Letras, 2019).

• Daniel Schweizer, Amazonian Cosmos, Documentary (Swiss Films, 2020), https://www.swissfilms.ch/en/film_search/filmdetails/-/id_film/829A489EAD744DD284D5BB0FEE14352B.

Extras:

• Barbara Marcel, Cine-Cipó - Cine-Liana: Atto - Amazon Tall Tower Observatory, 2020 2019, film, web, 2020 2019, https://critical-zones.zkm.de/#!/detail:cine-cipo-cine-liana-atto-amazon-tall-tower-observatory.

• Postcommodity, Repellent Fence, 2015, Earth, cinder block, para-cord, pvc spheres, helium, 2015, http://postcommodity.com/Repellent_Fence_English.html.

• Daiara Tukano, “Existence as Resistance: An Indigenous Perspective from Brazil,” https://vimeo.com/332291159.