Kanishka Goonewardena (University of Toronto) - Mike Davis as Theoretician and Storyteller

Abstract: What makes Mike Davis--the author of such coruscating works as City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts--one of the greatest writers of our time? Although there’s widespread acknowledgement of the incomparable range and radicality of Davis, whose oeuvre encompasses urbanization, political ecology and class struggle, the extraordinary scholarly achievement of this former meat cutter, truck driver, Getty Scholar and MacArthur Fellow as a historian, journalist and editor of New Left Review remains to be adequately assessed. I therefore argue that Davis’s writings, of inherent interest to geographers, planners and activists, are distinguished by his Marxist theoretical sensibility and art of storytelling.

Speaker: Kanishka Goonewardena, Professor, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto