Mark Dery Speaking on JG Ballard and More at San Diego State University! Sponsored by MALAS, SDSU Press, and Cool Kids in #papermirror23

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11am to 12:15pm 

Thursday, April 13, 2023

SDSU Main Campus, Physics 147

SPECIAL GUEST LECTURE

MARK DERY

“Earth is the Alien Planet” Concrete Island, Abject Landscapes, Posthuman Fictions

An Illustrated Lecture  

In the Late Anthropocene, we’re all castaways on a soon-to-be-desert island earth. Global weirding is here to stay, eco-pocalypse looms, existential dread is the new normal, and philosophy has taken a “nonhuman turn,” away from the anthropocentric worldview of classic humanism. Philosophers like Eugene Thacker and writers of weird eco-fiction like Jeff Vandermeer conjure an anti-anthropocentric, even post-anthropocentric worldview: a mythology of the world without us.  J.G. Ballard got there first. In his short novel Concrete Island, he relocates Robinson Crusoe to the abject landscapes of postwar London. His tale of a car-crash survivor marooned on a traffic island maps a new, posthuman psychology that de-centers not only the self but the species, too, in preparation for the day, not long off, when as Nietzsche puts it in Human, All Too Human, the earth is but the “gleaming and floating gravesite of humanity.”  In “Earth is the Alien Planet,” Dery considers the ways in which Ballard problematizes “the human” and humanism, auguring a post-anthropocentric fiction for a post-Anthropocene planet, a World Without Us that neither he nor any of us will inhabit. 

About the Author:

Mark Dery is a cultural critic, essayist, and the author of four books: Escape Velocity, a critique of the libertarian-bro ideology that dominated the Digital Revolution of the ‘90s; two studies of American mythologies (and pathologies) The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and the essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, and, most recently, the biography Born To Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. 

He has taught journalism at NYU and “dark aesthetics” at the Yale School of Art; been a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome, and a Poynter Journalism Fellow at Yale. His byline has appeared in a broad range of publications, including New York, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Elle, Bookforum, Boing Boing, Cabinet, The Daily Beast, Hyperallergic, Salon, Wired, The Washington Post, and The LA Review of Books. 

He popularized the concept of “culture jamming” and, in his 1993 essay, “Black to the Future,” coined the term “Afrofuturism.”