In what some are calling “peak absurdity,” last week MIT’s Department of Global Studies and Languages sponsored a lecture entitled – really – “Is Islamophobia accelerating global warming?”
The lecture was given by “future generation professor” at Melbourne University named Ghassan Hage whose academic credentials included authorship of such tomes as “White Nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society” and “Against Paranoid Nationalism.”
The lecture description was as follows:
This talk examines the relation between Islamophobia as the dominant form of racism today and the ecological crisis. It looks at the three common ways in which the two phenomena are seen to be linked: as an entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms of capitalist accumulation. The talk proposes a fourth way of linking the two: an argument that they are both emanating from a similar mode of being, or enmeshment, in the world, what is referred to as ‘generalised domestication.’