In the wake of the global financial crisis, new forms of social organization are beginning to take shape. Disparate groups of people are coming together in order to resist corporate globalization and seek a more positive way forward. These movements are not based on hierarchy; rather than looking to those in power to solve their problems, participants are looking to one another.

The moments of political and economic crisis in Argentina in 2001, specifically the 19th and 20th of December do not merely mark an event, a day, or even a year. Rather 2001 is an active principle, a key to thinking about this past decade from the perspective of the crisis of neoliberalism between impasse and insurrection. It is a method, a way of looking by seeing the crisis in motion and in time. It becomes a premise with its multiple meanings, spaces, and temporalities.

Liberal ideas of human freedom were central to the founding of eighteenth-century republics, and to the international forms of empire, trade, and government taking shape throughout the nineteenth century. Lowe’s book, The Intimacies of Four Continents, examines liberal philosophies and institutions of citizenship, free labor, and free trade, in light of transatlantic and transpacific encounters in the “new world,” Africa, and Asia.

Please join us in a roundtable discussion with Jean and John Comaroff. Scholars Susan Buck-Morss, Caludio Lomnitz and Souleymane Bachir Diagne will engage the Comaroffs in conversation about their book, Theory from the South.

Mayanthi Fernando, author of “France is my Bled’: The Unpredictable Future of Impolite Citizenship” and Yarimar Bonilla, author of “Non-Sovereign Futures? French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment” be in discussion with Tony Alessandrini, Vincent Crapanzano, Kaiama L. Glover, Judith Surkis

This lecture, drawn from Demos’ forthcoming book Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (2013), examines Belgian artist Vincent Meesen’s film Vita Nova (2009), and opens up the aesthetics of its colonial hauntology.

The transoceanic voyages of the fifteenth century began a transformation of the planet’s ecology, economy, culture, and politics that produced the globalized world we live in today. From the exchange of capital to land use, from religious practice to cultural production, contact with hitherto separated peoples and places sparked ongoing changes worldwide.

In Ghosts of Revolution (2011), Shalah Talebi’s haunting account of her years as a political prisoner in Iran, she engages two interrelated premises put forth by Walter Benjamin: that telling stories of lived experiences opens the possibility of a true human connection, the transmission of wisdom, and individual and social transformation; and, to paraphrase Benjamin, that death sanctions everything the storyteller can tell, for the storyteller borrows her authority from death.

Please join Boris Groys for a gallery talk and reception from 6-8pm Wednesday April 10th for the conceptual and experimental exhibition “After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer,” which presents the photographs, collected postcards, and hand-drawn itineraries of the French-Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968) to compose a visual exposition of his philosophy.

A roundtable presentation featuring Alicia Borinsky, Arlene Dávila, Nora Glickman, Marta Savigliano, and Anahi Viladrich