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materia’s last event of the 2020-2021 academic term took place on Thursday, June 3, 2021 via Zoom. The session featured a talk by Professor Jennifer French (Spanish, Williams College), followed by a response by Professor Javier Uriarte (Hispanic Languages and Literatures, Stony Brook) and an open discussion with all attendees.

In the first part of the session, Prof. French delivered her talk "The Inhuman and the Anarchist: Rafael Barrett’s Anthropodecentric Writings," where she explored the work of Hispano-Paraguayan anarchist Rafael Barrett (1876-1910). In particular, French focused on the anthropodecentric aspects of Barrett’s unknown and renowned texts, including Lo que son los yerbales, which exposes to Paraguayan and regional audiences the exploitative labor practices associated with the yerba mate industry.

After this introductory section, French expanded her considerations on Barrett’s writings along two interrelated lines. On the one hand, she looked specifically at Barrett’s writings about natural and evolutionary science—especially iterations of his newspaper column, Mirando Vivir (“Looking at Life”)—to see how the boundary-breaking anarchist responds to Darwin’s blurring of the ontological divide between human and non-human species. On the other hand, the speaker proposed to read Barrett, and specifically his virtuosic prose style, in tandem with feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz, who writes about aesthetics and Darwin’s theory of sexual selection in her book Becoming Undone (2011).

Prof. French’s presentation was followed by a response by Prof. Javier Uriarte, who drew unexpected connections and posed intriguing questions concerning the relationship between Barrett’s work, indigenous cosmologies, and the concept of labor. The session continued with a Q&A and an open discussion. Inquiries posed in this part of the event addressed the relationships between activism, politics, inter-cosmological exchange, evolutionary biology, and prescient conceptualizations of the nature/culture dyad. The meeting also discussed centuries-old and contemporary issues tied to the exploitative history of the Americas.��

The event ended on a reflective and promising note, with challenging though encouraging remarks by both invited speakers and materia organizers.

A video of the talk is available .

materia is a DLCL Focal Group on anthropodecentric thinking. Since 2014, the group has served as a platform for graduate and faculty research. Our meetings combine reading discussion, student presentations, and guest speakers. Regular workshop meetings include some twenty-five participants from ILAC and Comp Lit (the pillars of the group), as well as from English, MTL, German, Anthropology, and Music, among others. We collaborate with several other groups on campus and correspond with similar projects in the Bay Area and elsewhere. Cognate courses, as well as completed and ongoing dissertation projects, speak to the continuing impact of the group. There have been sixteen workshops and an international conference to date. The former average twenty-five participants; the latter had over seventy. The convening theme for our sixth year of activities is “Life and Transmission.”

Session formats alternate to include discussions of readings moderated by faculty and graduate students, presentations of works-in-progress, and talks by guest speakers. All readings will be pre-distributed by email and are available to download from our DLCL site, dlcl.stanford.edu/content/materia.

We expect to focus our next year of activities on the theme of “Political Ecologies.”

For more information, please contact Romi Wainberg at rwain [at] stanford.edu (rwain[at]stanford[dot]edu)