Department of Comparative Literature

How Matter Comes to Matter: New Materialism in Ecology and the Arts

Speakers: Rick Dolphijn, Associate Professor, Utrecht University and Lucas van der Velden, Director of Sonic Acts, Amsterdam

Date: 16 October 2019 (Thur)
Time: 12:30-2:30pm
Venue: 4.36, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Since the mid-1990’s, scholars from across academia have been working with a “new materialism”. Critiquing the dualisms that had been organizing thought since Modernity (mind versus body, human versus animal, man versus woman, white versus black, culture versus nature), they aimed at liberating thought (and the world!) from this deeply Humanist perspective. Inspired by the critique of “man” coming from feminism and postcolonial theory – but also from how quantum physics, topology and systems theory offered us a “more than human world” – new materialist scholars today, are increasingly urging us to open our eyes to the ecological (and capitalist, and humanitarian) crises that mark our world today. Stressing “the imaginary” – understood in a particular sense – new materialism sees an important role for the arts in revealing how matter comes to matter. In this talk, Rick Dolphijn will introduce you to new materialism, after which Lucas van der Velden will give you several examples of how art witnesses the world otherwise.

For enquiries, please contact Christine Vicera at viceracn@hku.hk