PUBLIC LECTURE by Elizabeth DeLoughrey (UCLA) 

The Globe Auditorium

The rise of postcolonial ecocriticism has resulted in an expanded discussion about how we theorize the relationship between people and place. This talk addresses the depiction of soil in literal and material terms by exploring how Caribbean artists and writers have called attention to the political and the aesthetic implications of making dirt, or waste, visible. Symbolically speaking, waste is a remainder, and can be understood as the uncanny, as deteriorating matter, as a figure of nature and natural time that exceeds our own temporal limits and suggests our own terminal assimilation into the earth. To render waste visible is to destabilize the hierarchies of social order and at the same time, according to Zizek, “recreate (an)...aesthetic dimension in...trash itself.” I explore this in relationship to the literary representation of “wasted lives” as well as the (literary) circulation of dirt. 

For more information contact: 
Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics

Florida State University

Tallahassee, Florida 32306-1540

Telephone 850.644.7636

Fax 850.644.9917

E-mail icffs@mailer.fsu.edu

Website www.winthropking.fsu.edu