Sara Mameni

Department: Comparative Ethnic Studies

I am an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world with an interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia. I am currently completing my first book titled Crude: The Art of Living in the Terracene, that considers the emergence of the Anthropocene as a new geological era in relation to the concurrent declaration of the War on Terror in the early 2000s. Playing on the words “terror” and “terra,” I propose the term “Terracene” in order to think the planetary in conjunction with ongoing militarization of transnational regions under terror. Crude engages contemporary art and aesthetic productions, paying particular attention to artists navigating the geopolitics of petrocultures and climate change.