Noted author and Princeton University professor Anne McClintock will talk about U.S. foundational violence during the upcoming Ericksen lecture at Linfield College.
McClintock will speak on Tuesday, Oct. 30, at 7:30 p.m. in the Austin Reading Room of the Nicholson Library on the college’s McMinnville campus.
In a talk shaped around photographs, McClintock asks how we can account for the ghosting from official U.S. history of its foundational violence: slavery, near-genocide of Native peoples and colonial ecocides. McClintock engages the long arc of settler colonialism from the 19th century to the present, engaging the militarization of environmental catastrophe and the environmental catastrophe of militarization.
McClintock explores her idea of ghostscapes as places of concealed violence, where traces of that violence still haunt photographs and the land itself. Through her own photographs, McClintock connects the melting of the ice caps, the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, and the drowning of Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana. On Isle de Jean Charles, the Biloxi Chitimacha Choctaw tribe (hailed now as the first federally-funded climate refugees) that fled the forced removals of the 10th century is now being forced to move again by the rising waters of climate change.
McClintock holds the Barton Hepburn Chair in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of the seminal “Imperial Leather,” and her writing and photographs have appeared in The Guardian, New York Times, Guernica, Village Voice, Nation, Jacobin, Chronicle of Higher Education, Transition, Truth Out, among other venues. Her work has been translated into 14 languages and her awards include two MacArthur Fellowships.
The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Ken and Donna Ericksen Endowed English Department Fund. Ericksen, professor emeritus of English at Linfield, created the endowment in memory of his wife, Donna, a Linfield alumna, who taught reading, writing and English in the Hillsboro School District for 25 years. The endowment allows the English Department to bring literary scholars to campus for several days to work with faculty and students.
For more information, contact Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt at rdutt-b@linfield.edu.
