Professor Kanishka Goonewardena from the University of Toronto (Canada).
Photo: Personal collection.

Professor Kanishka Goonewardena, from the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto, Canada, will be at UFMG in March as a guest of the FUNDEP/IEAT Short-Term Professorship program. Professor Rita Velloso, from the School of Architecture at UFMG, will be his host during his stay at the university.

On March 26th, Kanishka Goonewardena will give the major lecture “Space, Time and the Politics of Totality” in Auditorium 1 of the Faculty of Economic Sciences at UFMG, starting at 2 PM. The event is open to the general public, upon registration through the Even3 platform, and will provide certificates of participation. The lecture will be held in English, without translation.

In his submitted summary, Kanishka Goonewardena proposes a reflection on the political implications of the philosophical concept of totality, a central idea in the Marxist tradition. According to him, this question inevitably leads us to Karl Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, concerning the need to interpret the world in order to transform it. From this point, Kanishka raises a fundamental question: how to understand the world in the very process of revolutionizing it, especially from the point of view of what Walter Benjamin called the “tradition of the oppressed,” which relates to those moments in history when the subaltern classes, even if for short periods, managed to break the continuity of history and oppression.

Revisiting other authors, such as Georg Lukács, Kanishka discusses Marxism’s emphasis as a revolutionary science. “The essence of Marxism lies precisely in confronting this philosophical and political challenge under the subjective and objective conditions of capitalist reification, by virtue of its commitment to the concept of totality, that is, to understanding the world holistically, with the aim of radically transforming it,” Kanishka emphasizes. Following Lukács’s classic theorization, the first part of the conference will reconstruct a series of developments of the concept of totality within the Marxist tradition and allied philosophical traditions, including reservations regarding the reification of the concept of totality itself, with special attention to the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser and their students.

Finally, Kanishka will present more recent evocations of the concept of totality in the writings of Henri Lefebvre and Fredric Jameson, who, in particular, elaborated on the narrative and spatial dimensions of social being. Ultimately, he intends to reflect on how totality presents itself today in the planetary politics of urbanization, daily life, and popular culture as an intensely contested, yet still indispensable, horizon for thinking about politics and social transformation on a planetary scale.

About the Professor
Kanishka Goonewardena holds a degree in Architecture from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka (1988), a master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Southern California (1991), and a doctorate in Architecture from Cornell University (1998). He began his academic and professional career in Sri Lanka, where he worked as an architect at the Urban Development Authority, developing an interest in issues related to space, Marxism, and imperialism. During his doctoral studies, he specialized in critical theory, with an emphasis on authors such as Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukács, Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, and Fredric Jameson.

Since 1999, she has been a faculty member at the University of Toronto, where she conducts research on the relationship between space and ideology, the politics of planning, and the triad of nationalism–imperialism–colonialism within the context of the contradictions of capitalism. She also engages with anti-colonial Marxist thought, highlighting authors such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and C. L. R. James, and dedicates herself to the work of Henri Lefebvre, especially his conceptions of everyday life, space, and the State.

His current projects address the historical geography of the concept of imperialism, the history of left-wing politics in Sri Lanka, and Marxist thought. He teaches subjects such as Critical Geographies, Global Cities, Urban Planning, Critical Theory, Introductory Studio in Design and Urban Planning, Space, Time, Revolution and Production of Space, guiding students interested in radical politics and social critique.