Friday, October 30 at 4:00 pm
UB Humanities Institute and Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center present
Join us for the inaugural Scholars@Hallwalls talk of the 2026-27 season! Complimentary beverages and light fare are served for a brief, pre-talk mingling session.
4:00pm | Mingling
4:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q + A
We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camraderie and conversation, but you can also join the livestream via the Hallwalls website.
This talk will present a portion of my current book project, The Communal Hypothesis, which grows out of an interest in what Colectivo Situaciones, among others, have termed the impasse in current Latin American politics. New far-right forces and climate catastrophe have blunted the appeal of prior forms of leftist address, and Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar and Gladys Tzul have positioned the communal as one possible (new) political horizon. Instead of arguing for either a new set of translations between prior forms of radical thought or a plurality of worlds, I intervene in these conversations by arguing that we must liberate the communal from under the weight of prior traditions and allow it to be, finally, the main character of politics.
Dr. Whitener is the author of Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), and editor and translator of numerous other volumes. In addition, he has published two books of experimental poetry, Face Down (2016) and The 90s (2022), and for many years he was a member of La Lleca, an artistic collective based in Mexico City. His most recent projects include the edited volume In Defense of Common Life: The Political Thought of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar (Common Notions, 2024) and a translation of Maurizio Lazzarato's Revolutions of Capitalism: The Politics of the Event (Duke UP, 2026).