Salar Mameni, "Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2023)

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May 5, 2024

Salar Mameni historicizes the emergence of the Anthropocene alongside the global war on terror, introducing the concept of Terracene. He discusses the racialized militarism and environmental destruction, the convergence of the Anthropos and terrorists, and the need for new engagements with the earth. Mameni explores how artists interrogate histories of land interests in regions affected by the war on terror, offering speculative paths into the aesthetics of the Terracene.

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Introduction

00:00 • 3min

Intersections of the Anthropocene, Global War on Terror, and Terracene

03:14 • 16min

Exploring Language and Epistemology in the Anthropocene Era

18:50 • 4min

Exploring Petroleum Economies and Aesthetics in the Anthropocene

22:52 • 19min

Exploring the Boundaries Between Scientist and Artist

42:21 • 3min

Reimagining Perception: Beyond Western Paradigms

44:55 • 17min

Exploring Demilitarization and Decolonization in Ongoing Conflicts

01:01:39 • 5min

In Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke UP, 2023), Salar Mameni historicizes the popularization of the scientific notion of the Anthropocene alongside the emergence of the global war on terror. Mameni theorizes the Terracene as an epoch marked by a convergence of racialized militarism and environmental destruction. Both the Anthropocene and the war on terror centered the antagonist figures of the Anthropos and the terrorist as responsible for epochal changes in the new geological and geopolitical world orders. In response, Mameni shows how the Terracene requires radically new engagements with terra (the earth), whose intelligence resides in matters such as oil and phenomena like earthquakes and fires. Drawing on the work of artists whose practices interrogate histories of settler-colonial and imperial interests in land and resources in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Kuwait, Syria, Palestine, and other regions most affected by the war on terror, Mameni offers speculative paths into the aesthetics of the Terracene.

Salar Mameni is an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world with an interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia. Mameni has published articles in Signs, Women & Performance, Al-Raida Journal, Fuse Magazine, Fillip Review and Canadian Art Journal, and has written for exhibition catalogues in Dubai, Sharjah and Istanbul. Mameni was the curator of “Snail Fever,” at the Third Line Gallery in Dubai that explored art as a pandemic bringing together artists from the region whose works consider the embodied, viral and contaminating nature of sonic and visual aesthetics.

Najwa Mayer is an interdisciplinary cultural scholar of race, gender, sexuality, and Islam in/and the United States, working at the intersections of politics, aesthetics, and critical theory. She is currently a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University.

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