October 4: Macarena Gómez-Barris, "The Occupied Forest and Future Archives"
In this talk, Macarena Gomez-Barris will consider how extractive corporate and state projects expand coloniality upon Indigenous territories in the Americas. By analyzing cultural production, anti-extractive view points, Indigenous aesthetics, and social movements, the cultural theorist will consider modes of thinking about archives, counter-visuality, resistance and recovery that work against the inevitability of the forest's elimination, particularly in Eastern Ecuador and Southern Chile.
Macarena Gomez-Barris is Chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies and Director of the Global South Center at Pratt Institute. Macarena is author of three books, including The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, that theorize social life, art, and decolonial praxis through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism impacting Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). Macarena is also the author of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas (2018), Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile(2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). Macarena is working on a new book project called Sea Edges: Military Capitalism, Extinction, and Decolonial Futures. She writes and teaches on social and cultural theory, decolonial thought, racial and extractive capitalism, social movements, queer and submerged perspectives, critical Indigenous studies, experimental film, and social / environmental transformation. Macarena received a Fulbright Fellowship for her research in Ecuador.