Translation Lecture Series: Bethany Wiggins, Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pennsylvania
In dialogue with the mixed legacies Philadelphia's Quaker, colonial origins this talk considers the uses and abuses of utopia in the history of the Anthropocene: the proposal to name a new geological epoch recognizing humans impact on earth's systems. Situating our present planetary precarity in a 500-year history of global imperial projects surely suggests how the Anthropocene intersects with capitalist modernity. Yet a longer history might also draw on utopian counter-histories and cautionary examples, as well as a contemporary archive of social practice art, including the public WetLand Project on the Lower Schuylkill River, all pointing toward other possible pasts--and futures.
Bethany Wiggin is Associate Professor and Graduate Chair of German, Affiliate Faculty in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and Founding Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. She has published books and essays on transnational and world literatures, the birth of fashion and commodity culture, and utopian pasts and futures. She is now working on the book Germanopolis: Utopia Found, Lost, and Re-Imagined in Penn's Woods. In 2016-17, she is the Topic Director of the Penn Humanities Forum on Translation and is a recipient of a Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship for a series of collaborative public projects that aim to make a "hidden river's" pasts and futures visible.