Deadline: December 20 2024
Contact: Andrew M. Rose, Christopher Newport University
Email: andrew.rose@cnu.edu

Panel call for ASLE 2025: Collective Atmospheres, July 8-11, 2025 at the University of Maryland.

Next year marks a decade since Jason W. Moore’s influential Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015). In the book’s robust, post-dualist critical engagement with capitalism, Moore details his theories of World Ecology, Cheap Nature, and the Capitalocene. He argues that late capitalism is not constituted by a duality of nature plus society, but a post-dualist World Ecology of an always-already imbricated nature-culture relation, what he terms the “web of life.” Given that the critical posthumanisms and new materialisms are currently facing significant critical attention (particularly, but not exclusively, focused on their conceptualizations of distributed subjectivity and agency, or agentic capacities), Moore’s incisive illumination of how capitalism works within the “web of life” appears more vital than ever.

This panel invites proposals that address the contemporary import of Moore’s elucidation of a posthuman and postnatural approach to Marxist thought. Proposals that grapple with the key theories stated above, assess, analyze, or update Moore’s arguments, or speak more generally to the potential of critical posthumanisms to more effectively engage with late capitalism are welcome. In what ways do post-dualist (post-Cartesian, disanthropocentric, etc.) approaches to Fossil Capital – as Andreas Malm famously labeled it – further our understanding of, and power to engage critically with, capitalism in the era of climate change?

Proposals of 250 words, and a short bio or cv, are requested by Friday December 20.

Posted on November 30, 2024