“How the Arts and Literature May Destabilize the Abyssal Line Structuring: The Spatio-temporal Cartography of Western Modernity”
7 July 2021.
Presented in Part 2 of the Panel “Competing Notions of the Global” moderated by Jasmin Wrobel. 19:00 – 20:30 (Berlin time).
Since the XVII century a radical and ideologically invisible abyssal line divides humanity in two worlds , the world of the fully human beings and the world of the subhuman beings. The line has been relentlessly produced and reproduced by an insidious conjunction of three main modes of domination: capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. The line is not fixed and I have been arguing that it can only be destabilized by social struggles. In this presentation I will discuss the possible role that art and literature may play in destabilizing the abyssal line in such a way as expanding the world of the fully human beings and shrinking the world of subhuman beings.
Introduction by Jasmin Wrobel, Postdoctoral Researcher RA 4 “Literary Currencies”
Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a sociologist and legal scholar. He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as the director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. He has written and published widely on the issues of globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, democracy, human rights, social movements and the World Social Forum. His most recent publications include If God Were a Human Rights Activist (2015), Epistemologies of the South. Justice against the Epistemicide (2014), and Toward a New Legal Common Sense: Law, Globalization, and Emancipation (2002).
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