The Catastrophic Event in Times of Permanent Catastrophe
Description
From ancient tragedy to early modernity, the concept of catastrophe referred to the denouement of a drama; it was by definition unexpected: a turning point, a temporal rupture, even a revolution. Robin Wagner-Pacifici conceives events as symbolic breaks in the unremarkable continuity of everyday life, but that definition seems inadequate when our news cycle is flooded with a constant stream of new disasters. Many such tragedies are not finite insofar as they reflect the cumulative impacts of global warming and in the long run contribute to “slow death.” At the same time, violent regional conflict in Sudan, Putin’s war on Ukraine, and Netanyahu’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza are not only unbearable to witness but also seemingly interminable. When catastrophe appears not as a finite exception but as a new norm, how might we reconceive this key historical-theoretical concept?
This question was a central concern of Walter Benjamin from his 1923 essay on “German Decline” to his late “On the Concept of History,” where he represented history itself as a single ongoing catastrophe. “That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe,” writes Benjamin. “It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given.” Benjamin’s revolutionary pessimism demanded the critical disruption of this catastrophic continuity, a process he likened to pulling the emergency brake on the runaway train of late capitalism. In solidarity with Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno tasked critical theory with exposing the fragility of a social order which insists that catastrophe is necessary.
Despite the insights of this tradition in dialogue with Freudian psychoanalysis, which conceived of trauma as a structure of repetition, an event-centric conception of catastrophe as a singular exception prevails. This seminar will explore processual approaches to theorizing catastrophe that illuminate our contemporary conjuncture of fast and slow disasters, from anti-migrant and racist carceral regimes to the “crisis ordinariness” of neoliberal precarity (Berlant). While Hayden White principally had the Holocaust in mind when he theorized “the modernist event,” which defies formal and perspectival unification, the challenge today is much more about grasping dispersed, peripheral, and structural “slow violence” (Nixon). Anthropocenic and “planetary” approaches (Latour/Chakrabarty) to the “hyperobject” (Morton) of climate change have, by now, successfully broken down the assumed finitude of catastrophes—a shift informed by postcolonial and indigenous understandings of settler violence and genocide as well as afropessimist emphases on the ongoing and structural anti-Black aftermaths of slavery. The organizers of this seminar invite presentations that draw upon various theoretical standpoints that help us to rethink the concept of catastrophe in light of the representational challenges and historical burdens of our moment.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Lee Medovoi is a Professor of English at the University of Arizona and Founding Chair of the Program in Social, Cultural and Critical Theory. Lee received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. He is the author of Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Duke 2005) and of The Inner Life of Race: Bodies, Souls and the History of Racial Power (Duke 2024). He publishes on biopolitical theory, critical race studies, and the environmental humanities.
Speaker Bio
Joelle Vitiello is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Macalester College, St Paul, Minnesota. She has published many articles and book chapters on Haitian literature and culture, including on the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. She has co-edited two books. Her current research bears on representations of oceanic perspectives, eco-criticism, and representations of toxicity in soil and water. She is currently annotating a digital version of a Haitian novel.
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Speaker Bio
Huda J. Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023).
Speaker Bio
Hatem N. Akil teaches Humanities at Embry Riddle University in Florida. His research centers on visual and cultural theory within the contexts of Islam and the West. He received his PhD in Texts and Technology from the University of Central Florida. His recent publications include Global Modernity from Coloniality to Pandemic (2022 Amsterdam University Press), and The Visual Divide: Visual Perception within Cross Cultural Settings (Palgrave Macmillan 2016).
Speaker Bio
John Culbert received his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at Williams College, UC Irvine, and Simon Fraser University. He currently teaches at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Paralyses (Nebraska, 2010), winner of the Modern Language Association Scaglione prize in French studies. Proximities, a study of contemporary migration, mobility, and human rights, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2025.
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Speaker Bio
Ben Ratskoff is Assistant Professor of Critical Theory & Social Justice at Occidental College. His current research interrogates the politics of Holocaust memory and representation and the theoretical and historical relationship between antisemitism, colonialism, and white supremacy.
Speaker Bio
Kanza Fatima Mirza is an eco-critical scholar at West Virginia University with a strong academic foundation in botany and literature. She is particularly interested in exploring how literature can illuminate urgent ecological challenges inspiring sustainable practices. Passionate about fusion of science and literature, she aims to develop innovative frameworks that highlight the interconnectedness of nature and culture deepening environmental consciousness through scholarship and pedagogy.
Speaker Bio
I am Fang Gao, a second-year PhD student in English Literature at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. I obtained my BA from Sichuan University, and I studied as an exchange student at KU Leuven, Belgium (2024) and the University of Pittsburgh, USA (2019). My research interests cover sci-fi, posthumanism, and affect theory. My current research explores affective complexity and social critical value of contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction, with a focus on how it engages with global risks.