URGENT/EMERGENT Seminar Series Presents: Echoes in the Sublime – Attentional Infrastructures, the Anthropocene, and African Time
The Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) invites the public to the second installment of its URGENT/EMERGENT seminar and conversation series, featuring Professor Mohammad Shabangu (Colby College) and Professor Anaïs Nony (JIAS/Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation) in a critical dialogue titled Echoes in the Sublime.
Rooted in JIAS’s commitment to transdisciplinary thought, URGENT/EMERGENT convenes urgent conversations on pressing global questions—from climate collapse and AI to democracy, violence, and freedom. This session interrogates the intersections of attention, aesthetics, and the Anthropocene, drawing on Shabangu’s latest essay, “Zombies,” Attention, and the Sublime in the Digital Anthropocene (2025, European Journal of Literature, Culture, and Environment).
The essay offers a meta-critique of the aesthetic and political dimensions of “the Anthropocene sublime,” using Baloji’s short film Zombies (2019) as a lens to interrogate pressing questions about our digitally saturated present:
· What happens to the sublime in an age of fractured attention?
· How does the crisis of attention shape our engagement with ecological and political crises?
· Can aesthetic experience still provoke critical consciousness in the Capitalocene?
· What temporalities emerge when we resist the speed of networked capitalism?
This dialogue will unpack these questions while bridging philosophy, critical theory, and contemporary art. Professor Shabangu will elaborate on his analysis of Zombies as a call to rethink attention as an ecological and political practice, while Professor Nony will bring her expertise in technology, performative images, and the philosophy of digital culture to the conversation.
Event Details
Date: Thursday, 31 July 2025
Time: 3:00–5:00 PM SAST
Location: JIAS Microcampus (Westdene, Johannesburg) & Online
Registration: jiasinfo@uj.ac.za
Speakers
Mohammad Shabangu is Assistant Professor of English at Colby College, a music curator, and author of the forthcoming African Aesthetic Imagination and the Double Bind of Globality (Routledge). His work spans African and world literatures, postcolonial cultural production, and critical theory.
Anaïs Nony is a philosopher and senior researcher at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, where she leads the “AI and Life Matters” research stream. Her work focuses on technology, contemporary art, and performative media. She is the author of Performative Images: A Philosophy of Video Art Technology in France (2023) and a co-editor of the Edinburgh Companion to Gilbert Simondon (2025).
Hosted by Professor Victoria Collis-Buthelezi and Professor Anaïs Nony, this dialogue continues JIAS’s mission to bridge theory and praxis in confronting planetary emergencies.