Jaleh Mansoor: Political Agency in The Anthropocene

In this presentation, Jaleh Mansoor will draw upon recent Italian Marxist Feminist perspectives on ecology and discourses on the Anthropocene to question how Italian feminist analyses of invisible labor came to be elided with the question of a wider, post anthropocentric ecological horizon. Jaleh Mansoor is a writer and an associate professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where she teaches modern and contemporary art history with an emphasis on Post WWII European Art. Her areas of interest, in addition to art and its histories, include Materialist Formalism and Marxist Feminism. Mansoor’s first monographic book, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia was published by Duke UP in 2016.

Her latest primary project, titled after Picabia’s eponymous homage to a passage in Marx’s Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, is Universal Prostitution: A Counter History of Modernism, published by Duke University Press in May 2025. It traces the historical and structural entwinement of aesthetic and real (or concrete) abstraction — defined as the extraction of labor power valorized by transactional exchange on the market — over 20th-century art to offer a comprehensive account of the political-economic forces that motivated modernist abstraction and the advent of post-humanism.
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The Visual & Media Cultures Colloquium (VMCC) is an annual lecture series that brings cutting-edge scholars to speak on a broad range of subjects related to visual and media culture. The series is co-sponsored with the graduate programs in the History of Art & Visual Culture (HAVC) and the Arts Division.
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ADMISSION
– ONLINE EVENT Registration Required
– Open to UCSC affiliates only
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This program is open to all UC Santa Cruz affiliates consistent with state and federal law.