FALL 2024

Dead Reckonings

A reckoning is an act of accounting or a call to account for conduct or actions past or present.  It punctuates the ongoing transactions of everyday life with a collective adjudication that seeks to balance a ledger–if not the scales of justice–by holding to account.  Whether this account is conceived as a single “day of reckoning” or an ongoing recalculation of indebtedness and/or injustice, it often tallies time, as well as value, as (ac)countable.  This theme queries such notions of accountability by asking: with what methods, from what vantage, in what time or place, may the incalculable losses and gains wrought by the histories of slavery, genocide, settler colonialism, capitalism, and environmental devastation, be reckoned? What theoretical paradigms would afford such a pondering of the imponderable? What forms of reckoning–racial, religious, psychic, political, archival, aesthetic, economic, environmental, legal, linguistic–will call the present moment to account? What kind of “dead reckoning” and/or reckoning of death would these navigations steer toward?  And what forms of death would the tally take into account–whose losses would be mourned?  In this mourning time, what forms of temporality and spatiality would be reckoned, or themselves mourned as reckless or unreckonable or irrecoverable, and how? What miscalculations would be revealed, and in which archives of loss, or lost archives? This theme asks what the work of mourning might look like, what forms it may take, and what temporalities past, present, or future it might imagine in times of reckless and unreckonable reckonings.

Lectures 

All lectures begin at 6 p.m. in the Daniel Family Commons unless otherwise noted.