Mushrooms and (Hu)men: A Radical Inquiry into Resistance and Decay

Hosted by the Humanities Center and featuring our co-teaching fellows, Kaliane Ung and Diana Nguyen.

Nguyen and Ung are proposing a half-literary survey, half-creative writing workshop inspired by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. In Tsing’s seminal interdisciplinary work, the journey of the matsutake guides readers through the diverse lifeways of Asian diasporic communities shaped by its trade and consumption. Our hybrid course engages with ways of living, creating, reading, and writing inspired by fungal processes, emphasizing interconnectedness, transformation, and resilience. The first half of the class, taught by Dr. Ung, is a literature in translation survey that hones in on cultural productions staging life in a polluted world, drawing on a mixed-media corpus (novels, films, graphic novels, art) on questions of animality, trauma, displacement and migration. The second half, taught by Dr. Nguyen, is a creative writing workshop that utilizes decay as a (de)compositional model for assemblage. Creative prompts will be derived from course texts, and scaffolded assignments will include individual and collaborative experiments to encourage safety amid risk-taking and play.

Respondents include Kale Doyen from HAA, Joy Priest from English + Dr. Summer Kim Lee, Assistant Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles . This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer. Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available here about two prior to the event.