Dartmouth Events

The Anthropocene Group and the Leslie Center for the Humanities invite you to join us for a talk by Carolyn Fornoff, who will discuss her book, Subjunctive Aesthetics:exican Culture Production iin the Era of Climate Change. Fornoff works across the environmental humanities, Latin American cultural studies, and cinema & media studies, and her recently released book provides an exciting framework for thinking about climate change with film, literature, and visual art. Subjunctive Aesthetics is available online through the library. The event will take place Friday, April 19 in Dartmouth Hall Room 104, 3:30-5:00 PM.

"During the twenty-first century, Mexico has escalated extractive concessions at the same time that it has positioned itself as an international leader in the fight against climate change. Cultural production emergent from this contradiction frames this impasse as a crisis of imagination. Subjunctive Aesthetics studies how contemporary writers, filmmakers, and visual artistis grapple with the threat that climate change and extractivist policies pose to Mexico'spresent and future. It explores how artists rise to the challenge of envisioning alternative forms of territoriality (ways of being in relation to the environment) through strategies ranging from rewriting to counterfactual speculation. Whereas ecocritical studies have often focused on art's evidentiary role–its ability to visualize and prove the urgency of environmental damage–author Carolyn Fornoff argues that what unites the artists under consideration is their use of more hypothetical, uncertain representational modes, or 'subjunctive aesthetics."