Ruin | United States

Date: Monday, January 24, 2022. 12:00 PM. Location: Zoom Join the Ruins of Modernity Focal Group for the first guest lecture of 2022.   Ruin in the Turkish Aegean: Futures in the Aftermath of Empire   Abstract: Ruin object has proved a productive conceptual anchor of critical theory in its capacity to hold past-present-future and raise questions about historical temporality. Ruin takes two distinct shapes in the Aegean, a regional space that is considered within the scope of the Mediterranean in the history and anthropology literature. On the one hand, the concept captures the prominent ruins of the classical past, and, on the other, it qualifies a form of a historical condition that refers to the aftermath of the violent foundation of the nation-state marked with a forced exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. In this talk, I will share some preliminary attempts to develop a conceptual framework to read these two genres of ruin against each other. I look at historical projects entailing a future ...