Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Lee Hsiao Yen Fiona, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

The contemporary is obsessed with speed up and with good reason. Financialization is calculated by the micro-second and mediatization is calibrated by the instant. Benjamin Noys has explored the relationship between capitalism and “accelerationism” while James Gleick is content to describe its doxic impress (Faster). Postcolonial studies is dominated by the alternative modernity thesis, or by the appreciable intervention of Rob Nixon on how slowness enters the world of postcoloniality via the violence of climate catastrophe and the steady growth of pollution as a massive Western export industry. What this lecture analyzes is the conditions of variable velocity, the ways in which postcolonial space is experienced as a specific logic of identification in movement. Postcoloniality does not sit still, neither in the understanding of migration and diaspora, nor in the affective embrace of compressed modernity that is rewriting the meanings of the megacity in the postcolonial South. The imagination of the latter, particularly in contemporary fiction, urges a critique alive to the genuflections of speed, to the formations of velocity determinate in all manner of circulation (people, capital, carbon, city, state).

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is also on the faculties of Women’s Studies and Film Studies at the GC, and Associate Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. He is the author of five books, including The Long Space, (Stanford University Press). His most recent publications include, “Accumulating Fictions” for Representations, “Immolation” for Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights, “How to Read a Discipline” for Comparative Literature, “Culture and Anarchy in Thatcher’s London” for an anthology on Hanif Kureishi, “(   ) of Ghosts” in The Spectralities Reader, “Defining the World” in Literary Materialisms and “Everything’s Gone Green: The Environment of BP’s Narrative” for Imaginations. Forthcoming works include a co-edited book of essays on the new public intellectual for Palgrave, an essay, “Viscosity and Velocity,” for an anthology on oil (Cornell), and a review essay of Vivek Chibber for The Comparatist. His current projects include a study of the representation of labor, essays on the “worlds” of postcoloniality and world literature, and a work that juxtaposes commodity culture with financial instruments (“Trading Objects”).

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP to Ms Tay Minghua via email: minghua.tay@nus.edu.sg.