Seminar: Andrin Albrecht (Jena), 'Towards a Red Humanities'

In the past one-and-a-half decades, the ‘Blue Humanities’ has emerged as one of the timeliest and most interdisciplinarily productive turns in anglophone cultural studies. Initiated by Steve Mentz in 2009, this field aims to rethink human relationships with water, both from a large-scale historical perspective and, acutely, in a contemporary context of exacerbating climate change. In my talk, I propose a ‘Red Humanities’ as a flipside to this coin, positioning fire as an equally pertinent but distinct concern of cultural studies. Adapting, on the one hand, the Blue Humanities’ propensity for interdisciplinary analysis and non-aqueous associations evoked by the colour blue, and, on the other hand, Caroline Levine’s concept of ‘affordances’ to assess the full range of latent potentiality of a given material or form, I begin to chart the poetics of fire and related concepts in imaginaries of affect, theories of creativity, in industrialization, urbanization, disenfranchised rural area, and…