GRID Postdoctoral Fellow

2015-2017 Postdoctoral Fellow

Max Hantel

Contact: amhantel@gmail.com

     My research intertwines feminist and Afro-Caribbean philosophy to explore alternative political and ecological imaginaries of humanism. My dissertation, "Revolutionary Humanism and Geographies of Survival in Afro-Caribbean and Feminist Thought,” traces a distinct materialist tradition borne of the Caribbean's history as a site of both intense violence and creolization, often mobilized around the distinction between different kinds of humanity and between humans and nonhumans. I look especially to sites where who counts symbolically is a matter of life and death and the environment impinges on the supposed sovereignty of the human: "natural disaster" zones like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or the Mississippi flood of 1927. Finally, I address the increasing importance of the discourse of the "Anthropocene," the idea that humanity is not longer just a biological agent but a geological agent. Broadening out from the Caribbean, I argue that thinkers from the Global South have continually developed survival tactics in the face of these dangerous interpenetrations of colonial power, economic exploitation and environmental destruction (conditions faced throughout the world since at least the fifteenth-century) and generated new ways of making livable worlds. 

     I look forward to joining the community of the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth to further this research in various ways, especially by engaging the different approaches to climate change from science and engineering fields and expanding the geographical scope of my argument to places "archipelagically" connected to the Caribbean such as Oceania or South Asia. As a Postdoctoral Fellow, I will collaborate with Professor Aimee Bahng, The GRID Faculty Seminar Leader for the 2016 theme, "Gender Matters: Feminist Ecologies and Materialities," and co-teach GRID's annual seminar during the first year. In addition, I will teach WGST 96: Advanced Research in Women's and Gender Studies, a course that runs parallel to the Seminar. Along with turning my dissertation into a book manuscript and continuing to publish articles on feminist and Caribbean philosophy, I am especially excited to join the intellectual community at Dartmouth. I look forward to the transformative ethical challenge of thinking together with students, faculty, and staff, or what Caribbean thought might call a pedagogy of creolization.