AbdouMaliq Simone - 7 November 2017 - Ensembles of the Uninhabitable

Smuts Memorial Lecture Series (7, 9, 13 November 2017)Series Title: The Uninhabitable: Afterlives of the Urban SouthSpeaker: AbdouMaliq Simone (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)Series Abstract So many forces are at work to make habitation impossible or nearly impossible in many urban contexts. So much work is devoted toward detailing the demise of urban life in all of its aspects, and the way this destruction is unequally distributed across different regions and populations. In this series of three lectures, I invoke the uninhabitable, not as a quality of urban conditions, but rather a method of living-with this urban—and all of its intensifications, extension, ambiguities, and apocalyptic implications—as something strange, productively dark, and seemingly impermeable to calculation or figuring.As such, this living-with is an arena of inexplicable conjunction, collaboration, unsettling; a profusion of undomesticated circulating details moment