POSTPONED UNTIL SPRING 2021: Meghan Sutherland, “Variety, Genealogy, History: On the Politics of Media Convergence”

This talk illuminates a bond between the variety form, the concept of genealogy, and the colonial logics of racial, ethnic and sexual differentiation that have defined the project of modern liberalism as one of social and technological development. In doing so, it aims to recast the phenomenon of “media convergence” as a matter of aesthetic form that is not only fundamental to the biopolitical imaginary of liberalism and neoliberalism, but is fundamental as well to the idea of governmental “technology” on which the latter is predicated–a scenario that stands to change how we think about the political entanglement of form and technology more broadly.

Meghan Sutherland is Associate Professor of Cinema and Visual Studies at the University of Toronto and a founding co-editor of the online journal World Picture. She is also the author of The Flip Wilson Show (Wayne State University Press, 2008) and a forthcoming book called Variety: The Extra Aesthetic and the Constitution of Modern Media (Duke University Press), and her essays on the intersections between media, philosophy and politics have appeared in a range of different journals and edited volumes.