Damage Control – with Professor Fred Moten and Professor Stefano Harney

Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute and the Institute of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies are delighted to announce the launch of Damage Control, a new annual event series.

Damage Control takes as its foundation the opening lines of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s 2012 book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization: “Globalization only takes place in capital and data. Everything else in damage control”.

The aim of the series is to host international thinkers at the University of Leeds to guide public conversations addressing historical and contemporary questions of empire and globalization as they pertain to the arenas of arts and culture.

For the first iteration of Damage Control, we are honoured to be hosting Professors Stefano Harney (Academy of Media Arts, Cologne) and Fred Moten (Performance Studies, New York University).

Over a number of years, Harney and Moten have crafted a practice of thinking and writing which has opened new intellectual vistas on the ways in which to extend the histories of the black radical tradition into the current predicaments we face under global capitalism. More than this, due to their insistence on the communal, informal and improvisational, they have showcased alternative modes for the generation of research that undermine the structures of individuation dominating our educational institutions. Much of this thinking and practice can be found in their two outstanding books, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), and All Incomplete (2021).

Harney and Moten will be in conversation with Dr Dhanveer Singh Brar (Lecturer in Black British History, School of History, University of Leeds). Their discussion will cover themes pertaining to their most recent book, All Incomplete, and its convergences with the ideas at play in the Damage Control project.

For further information or special requests, contact Dr Dhanveer Singh Brar D.S.Brar@Leeds.ac.uk