Abundance Talks: Invasive Building

Invasive Building

October 31, 2024, 12 pm EST 300S Buell Hall and online

Speakers: Manu Karuka (Barnard), Adrian Anagnost (Tulane)

How is nature’s suitability for conquest represented? These two talks reveal that apportioning abundance–as natural wealth–has long been a visual, literary, and architectural business. Adrian Anagnost uncovers French cartographers’ struggle to represent the shores and ecology of the Lower Mississippi River in the 18th and 19th centuries. Manu Karuka posits a global dichotomy between jungle and garden (including its architectural derivatives, the garden-city and suburb) as a structuring trope in colonial and postcolonial discourse and governance.

For in-person attendance (general public welcome): Email buellcenter@columbia.edu to RSVP. If you do not have an active Columbia ID card, please RSVP by September 25 with the following information: your full name as written on a government-issued ID and your preferred email address. You will receive an email from Columbia University Public Safety containing a QR code, which you will be asked to present along with a matching ID, at campus gates (116th St and Broadway or Amsterdam Ave). Please allow a few extra minutes to pass through campus security.

For virtual attendance, register for the webinar here.

Speakers

Adrian Anagnost is Associate Professor of Art History in the Newcomb Art Department and Core Faculty in the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. Anagnost’s recent publications include Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art and the City in Modern Brazil, “Edo Spaces, European Images: Iterations of Art and Architecture of Benin,“ and "Antisocial Housing: Migration and Temporary Architectures in Berlin,” for an ASAP/Journal dossier on Precarity and Public Housing (2023). Anagnost’s current research concerns race, space and territorialization in the Americas, especially la basse-Louisiane.

Manu Karuka is an Assistant Professor of American Studies, and affiliated faculty with Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, where he has taught since 2014. His work centers a critique of imperialism, with a particular focus on anti-racism and Indigenous decolonization. He is the author of Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad. With Juliana Hu Pegues and Alyosha Goldstein he co-edited a special issue of Theory & Event, “On Colonial Unknowing,” and with Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, and Sujani Reddy, he co-edited The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power.

Organized by GSAPP’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.