SALAR MAMENI

Salar Mameni is 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. Their first book titled Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Forthcoming with Duke University Press) 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,” the book proposes the term “Terracene” in order to think the planetary in conjunction with ongoing militarization of transnational regions under terror. Terracene engages contemporary art and aesthetic productions, paying particular attention to artists navigating the geopolitics of petrocultures and climate change. Mameni’s articles have appeared in Signs, Resilience, Women & Performance and Al-Raida Journal amongst others.