(Elizabeth Povinelli) Geontopower: The History of Thought as a Mode of Power

This lecture introduces the concept of geontopower--a form of settler liberal power that operates through the mobilization of a long-standing western division between Life and Nonlife--in order to probe the politics of ontology. The lecture asks what is at stake when we begin an analysis of being with a claim about what the world is and then proceed to see how these ontological conditions are socially distributed so that we can organize a counter-politics. What new insights about our world comes into sight when we begin within the multiple global sociopolitical entanglements that commenced as European ships began crossing the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans in search of wealth and continue to provide a matrix in which various people are allowed to move, how and the direction wealth move, and the ways that toxicities and harms are located? Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology, Gender and the Institute for Comparative Literature & Society at Columbia University and Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She has written eight books and numerous essays on the settler colonialism in late liberalism, including Geontolologies, A Requiem to Late Liberalism which won the Lionel Trilling Award. She is also a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective, with whom she has made multiple internationally lauded films. She is also a St. John's College, Santa Fe alumna!