This symposium explores the notion of afterlives, a term embodying interactions that trouble the neat linearity of past, present, and future. Afterlives speak to both continuities and discontinuities: legacies of the past and the anticipation of manifold futures in the constitution of the present. Examining afterlives through the themes of materiality, race, and colonial power, speakers will consider the potent vestiges of violence, toxicity, and waste in contemporary societies and environments and examine bodies as sites of decomposition, ancestral identity, and racial privilege. 

A program of the Wolf Humanities Center's 2017-18 Forum on Afterlives

9:00-9:30a | Registration and Breakfast

9:30-9:45a | Opening Remarks

9:45-11:15a | Keynote
Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University 
"Mood, Modality, and the Slippery Experience of Violence"

11:30a-1:00p | “Environmental Afterlives”
This panel will explore how environments register the legacies of power, violence, and toxicity. The panelists will explore the ways earlier power relations persist through infrastructure, spatial distribution, and the construction of distinct ideas about persistence, rupture, and time. The panelists will also consider the ways such material legacies have served as evidence of earlier inequalities.

• Kate Brown, University of Maryland
  “Learning to Read: Literacy in the More Than Human Landscapes”

• Brahim El Guabli, Princeton University
  "Writing Memories of Place: Literary Microhistories of the Loss of Jewish Morocco"

• Rahul Mukherjee, University of Pennsylvania
  "Anticipating Disasters: Media Archaeology and Media(ted) Ruins"

2:30-4:00p | "Embodied Afterlives”
After death, in life, and through metaphor, bodies evoke material relationships to intangible worlds. This panel follows bodies across multiple temporalities, including ancestral histories, lingering traumas, and genetic futures. It considers how certain bodies mark the limits of inclusion and the ways those exclusions overlap in complex ways with personhood. In doing so, panelists offer diverse case studies to explore the status of bodies as forms of truth-telling, environmental management, and social inquiry.

• Zoe Crossland, Columbia University
  "Corpse Life: The Afterlives of the Forensic Corpse"

• Lyra Monteiro, Rutgers University
  "Embodying the Antiquity of Whiteness: Egyptian Mummies and Classical Sculptures in the Antebellum United States"

• Ellen Stroud, Pennsylvania State University
  “Traveling Corpses: The Lives of Two Bodies in Motion”

4:15-5:15p | Open moderated discussion 

5:15-6:30p | Reception