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Penser le Présent with Mohamed Amer Meziane

Wednesday 29 May 2024

7:00pm - 8:30pm

Amphithéâtre des Loges

14 rue Bonaparte, 75006 Paris

ENTRÉE LIBRE

Mohamed Amer Meziane The desert and the underground, The environmental history of Orientalism

In many ways, the critique of Orientalism is the founding act of postcolonial studies. Criticised as a colonial system of representation, the question of the contribution of this discourse to the current climate crisis has been less frequently raised. This is what philosopher Mohamed Amer Meziane proposes in this lecture by analysing two non-human figures: the desert and the underground.

The desert has been the epitome of the Arab world and the Maghreb, as portrayed by Orientalism. Beyond the imaginary, what impact has it had on the environment, and how has it governed humans and the land? The second figure is that of the subterranean world, whose spiritual dimension will be analysed by looking at the way in which the bowels of the earth were seen to be inhabited by demons and dragons. We will see how Orientalism has played a part in transforming this relationship with the subsoil, and how this metaphysical mutation of the underground links up with the very material history of our dependence on fossil fuels.

Mohamed Amer Meziane is a professor at Brown University (Rhode Island) and a member of the editorial board of the journal Multitude. His book Des empires sous la terre. Histoire écologique et raciale de la sécularisation was published in 2021 by La Découverte. The book won the non-fiction prize at the Villa Albertine in New York in 2023, and was published in English by Verso Books in April 2024. His latest book, Au bord des mondes. Vers une anthropologie métaphysique was published by Vues de l'esprit in Brussels in 2023.

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