{"520151":{"#nid":"520151","#data":{"type":"event","title":"LMC Distinguished Speaker Series: On Not Saving the World; Or, the Problem with Sustainability","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EThis talk\u0026nbsp;by Matthew A. Taylor, associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, contends that planetarity is insufficiently divorced from globalization\u2014its putative opposite\u2014to provide a critical lens for understanding and countering its effects: specifically, anthropogenic climate change and global economic inequality. \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe argument begins by documenting the affinities between planetarity\u2019s redemptive, world-building ambitions, on the one hand, and both Kantian cosmopolitanism and turn-of-the-twentieth-century articulations of \u201cplanetary consciousness\u201d (as particularly evident in speculative fiction) on the other. The common denominator of these discourses (explicit in the earlier texts, oblique in the later ones) is a logic of global improvement, control, and growth precipitated by an existential threat. In both H. G. Wells\u2019s\u0026nbsp;\u003Cem\u003EThe War of the Worlds\u003C\/em\u003E\u0026nbsp;and Dipesh Chakrabarty\u2019s seminal \u201cThe Climate of History: Four Theses,\u201d for instance, a suddenly changed Earth galvanizes humanity into collective existence, converting discrete individuals into a species aligned, paradoxically, both with and against the planet. \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe then considers the violent effects associated with such attempts to meet global problems with global solutions, asserting that the difficulty inheres in the planetary scale itself. Concluding that all contemporary planetarities\u2014like their early twentieth-century equivalents\u2014are at least partly attempts to remake the world in our preferred image, he closes by considering a humbler alternative inspired by fleeting moments in Jack London\u2019s socialist fiction: a general strike that would withdraw our maintenance of the world in favor of more plural and livable affiliations; a nonapocalyptic end to the world that might offer a means of surviving the Anthropocene.\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EThis talk by Matthew A. Taylor, associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, contends that planetarity is insufficiently divorced from globalization\u2014its putative opposite\u2014to provide a critical lens for understanding and countering its effects: specifically, anthropogenic climate change and global economic inequality.\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"This talk is by Matthew A. Taylor, associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina."}],"uid":"28513","created_gmt":"2016-03-31 17:16:48","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 02:17:18","author":"Daniel Singer","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","field_event_time":{"event_time_start":"2016-04-06T16:00:00-04:00","event_time_end":"2016-04-06T16:00:00-04:00","event_time_end_last":"2016-04-06T16:00:00-04:00","gmt_time_start":"2016-04-06 20:00:00","gmt_time_end":"2016-04-06 20:00:00","gmt_time_end_last":"2016-04-06 20:00:00","rrule":null,"timezone":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"groups":[{"id":"1281","name":"Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[{"id":"459","name":"globalization"},{"id":"99601","name":"inequality"}],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[{"id":"1795","name":"Seminar\/Lecture\/Colloquium"}],"invited_audience":[{"id":"78771","name":"Public"}],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003ERebecca Keane\u003Cbr \/\u003EDirector of Communications\u003Cbr \/\u003E404.894.1720\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:rebecca.keane@iac.gatech.edu\u0022\u003Erebecca.keane@iac.gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":[],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}