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Lecture

Self-Sustaining/Self-Devouring Growth

03.31.2023 12:00 PM

Event Summary

Untitled photo by Mozambican photographer Kok Nam, included the forthcoming book by Jennifer Wenzel, courtesy of the author.

Untitled photo by Mozambican photographer Kok Nam, included the forthcoming book by Jennifer Wenzel, courtesy of the author.

Jennifer Wenzel (Columbia University) will open this talk by positing Julie Livingston’s slim parable Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa as a salutary counterpoint to Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital, a sprawling, even novelistic account of the emergence of fossil capitalism within nineteenth century Britain. This contrapuntal approach – thinking between Global North and Global South – underwrites Wenzel’s consideration of fossil-fueled mobility as a highly uneven terrain of social imagination and political contestation. What is the relationship between slowness and speed? How can growth be self-sustaining and self-devouring at the same time? And what is the role of incremental change in an exponential world?

This lecture is presented as part of the Fossil Capitalism in the Global South research project at the Neubauer Collegium.