In a new book on "The Wild" I try to develop a new critical vocabulary to access different, transdisciplinary ways of thinking about race, sexuality, alternative political imaginaries and queer futurity. Building on the legacy of José Esteban Muñoz on the one hand and dialoguing with new and older work in queer studies, I try to repurpose the language of wildness in order to create a switchpoint between different discursive tracks which generally do not intersect. By using a discarded critical term like "the wild" or "wildness," I seek to activate an arena of thinking that has been cordoned off due its colonization and exhaustion within imperial languages of civilization. However, words like the "wild" are packed not only with imperial debris but also with new signs of life, new shoots of thought that peek up out of the rubble, like weeds, showing that the ground we thought was lost, offers odd and suggestive harvests. This talk takes Stravinsky/Nijinsky's Rite of Spring as the starting point for a leap into the wild.
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