WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the figure of the Virus demands our attention. Elizabeth Povinelli’s conceptual work on the Virus feels prescient. Povinelli is a critical theorist, filmmaker, and Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late settler liberalism that would support an anthropology of what she calls, “the otherwise,” meaning something other than the late liberalism and settler colonialism we know as capitalism.
This potential theory has unfolded across her five books, numerous essays, and thirty-five years of collaboration with her Indigenous colleagues in north Australia including, most recently, six films they have created as members of the Karrabing Film Collective. Karrabing means “tide out” in the Emmiyengal language, which evokes the northwest coastline of Australia, a region to which most of the members are indigenous.
Episode producer Bella Bravo begins the interview asking about Povinelli’s most recent academic work, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. In 2017, Geontologies retheorized biopower and necropolitics in the age of climate change, and Povinelli’s theses about the shifting phases of capitalism are drawn from the observations of her indigenous collaborators in Northern Australia. The fact that the Virus is a symptom of capitalism seems like a simple conclusion, but Povinelli explains that the Virus reveals how historic modes of governance that regulate the distinction between Life and Nonlife don’t actually work. The Virus is both Life and Non-life, and the rhetorics of war and health don’t fix the danger of the structures that mark some people as worthy of health care, steady income and life, and others not so.
The novel coronavirus is “a virus pulled out of its habit and habitats by routes and worlds that hold and enhance extractive capitalism, she says in an essay accompanying excerpts from her forthcoming book. Tentatively entitled The Inheritance, this more personal work brings visuals to print in a new form for Povinelli. The book juxtaposes hand-drawn and montage images with memoir to investigate the social infrastructures that differentially define our individual and collective experience, past and future. The book follows Povinelli’s ancestral story beginning at the turn of the century on the violent frontier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Italian peninsula in the midst of national unification, up to her childhood in Louisiana during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of renewed struggle against white supremacy. But the effects of late liberalism and its twin late capitalism threaten once again to overwhelm as Louisiana has the highest rate of mortality from COVID-19 in the United States and black people in Louisiana make up 70 percent of the deaths.
GUEST
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University and the author of, most recently, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism and Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism, published by Duke University Press.
RELATED
Geontologies of the Otherwise by Elizabeth Povinelli
Inheritance, Part 1 by Elizabeth Povinelli
The Infrastructures of Inheritance by Elizabeth Povinelli
Karrabing Film Collective Tackles the Cultural and Environmental Devastation of Settler Colonialism
Forms of Concentration: Constructing Racialized Bodies (Interchange)
MUSIC
“3 Points and a Mountain” – Peter Brötzmann
“Last Desert I” – Liberty Ellman
“Tribe” – Enrico Rava
“Exosphere” – Clifford Thornton
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Episode Producer: Bella Bravo
Audio Editor: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
