Invasive Building

October 31, 2024, 12 pm EST
300S Buell Hall and online

Manu Karuka (Barnard)
Adrian Anagnost (Tulane)
A response by Lisa Trever (Columbia)

How is nature’s suitability for conquest represented? These two talks reveal that apportioning abundance–as natural wealth–has long been a visual, literary, and architectural business. Adrian Anagnost uncovers French cartographers’ struggle to represent the shores and ecology of the Lower Mississippi River in the 18th and 19th centuries. Manu Karuka posits a global dichotomy between jungle and garden (including its architectural derivatives, the garden-city and suburb) as a structuring trope in colonial and postcolonial discourse and governance. 

For in-person attendance (general public welcome), please RSVP here. For virtual attendance, register for the webinar here. 

Speakers

Adrian Anagnost is Associate Professor of Art History in the Newcomb Art Department and Core Faculty in the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. Anagnost's recent publications include Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art and the City in Modern Brazil, “Edo Spaces, European Images: Iterations of Art and Architecture of Benin," and "Antisocial Housing: Migration and Temporary Architectures in Berlin,” for an ASAP/Journal dossier on Precarity and Public Housing (2023). Anagnost's current research concerns race, space and territorialization in the Americas, especially la basse-Louisiane.

Manu Karuka is an Assistant Professor of American Studies, and affiliated faculty with Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, where he has taught since 2014. His work centers a critique of imperialism, with a particular focus on anti-racism and Indigenous decolonization. He is the author of Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad. With Juliana Hu Pegues and Alyosha Goldstein he co-edited a special issue of Theory & Event, “On Colonial Unknowing,” and with Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, and Sujani Reddy, he co-edited The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power. 

Lisa Trever (Associate Professor of Pre-Columbian Art History and Archaeology) is a specialist in early art history and archaeology of what is now Latin America, with a research focus on the ancient art and architecture of Pacific coastal South America. Trever's books include Image Encounters: Moche Murals and Archaeo Art History (2022), The Archaeology of Mural Painting at Pañamarca, Peru (2017), and the co-edited volume El arte antes de la historia: Para una historia del arte antiguo andino (2020). Her next book project, Seeing with Clay, examines the interplay between imagination and replication in ceramic practices of ancient coastal South America.