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#5THE INSTITUTE FOR COMPARATIVEMODERNITIES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

3 Scholar in Residence Program

4 Events Schedule, 2013/2014

5 ICM 2014 Annual Conference

8 Events in Review, 2012/2013

32 Graduate Reading Groups

42 Graduate Reading Group Proposal Guidelines, 2014/2015

43 Recent Publications by ICM Members

Advisory BoardBenedict Anderson, Professor Emeritus, Government, Cornell University

Susan Buck-Morss, Distinguished Professor, Political Science, CUNY Graduate Center

Brett de Bary, Professor, Asian Studies; Comparative Literature, Cornell University

Manthia Diawara, University Professor of the Arts and Humanities; Comparative Literature; Director, Institute of African American Affairs; Director, Africana Studies, New York University

Okwui Enwezor, Director, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany

George E. Lewis, Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, Music, Columbia University

Lisa Lowe, Professor, English, Tufts University

Timothy Mitchell, Professor, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University

Naoki Sakai, Professor, Asian Studies; Comparative Literature, Cornell University

Shirley Samuels, Professor, English; History of Art and Visual Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Cornell University

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Iftikhar Dadi History of Art and Visual Studies

Natalie Melas Comparative Literature

Alexis Boyce Program Coordinator

Sunn Shelley Wong English; Asian American Studies

Viranjini Munasinghe Anthropology; Asian American Studies

staff

ICM members

Salah M. Hassan Director, ICM; Africana Studies and Research Center; History of Art and Visual Studies

Fouad Makki Development Sociology

Barry Maxwell Comparative Literature; American Studies

Scholar in Residence Program

ahia Shehab  is a Lebanese- Egyptian artist, designer, and Islamic art historian studying ancient Arabic script and visual heritage in order to

solve modern-day design issues. Shehab is a creative director with

Mi7-Cairo, working on projects relevant to cultural heritage. She is associate professor of professional practice at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and developed a new four-year graphic design program for the department of the arts, with the first specialized courses on the history of Arab design and communication as a discipline in the Arab world.

She is also a PhD candidate at Leiden University in Holland. Her research is focused on Fatimid Kufic inscriptions and epigraphic evidence in the decorative arts

and on portable items

B in the Mediterranean basin and beyond. It is concerned with form versus content and the extent to which the medium dictates the message. Her M.A. thesis entitled “Floriated Kufic on the Monuments of Fatimid Cairo” received the Nadia Niazi Thesis Award at AUC in 2009.

Shehab’s work has been on display at Traffic Gallery in Dubai, UAE; Beijing International Typography Exhibition in Beijing, China; Haus Der Kunst in Munich, Germany; Palazzo Lucarini Contemporary in Trevi, Italy; and Bielefelder Kunstverein in Bielefeld, Germany.

Graduating from American University of Beirut with a degree in graphic design in 1999, she worked as a creative director with several multinational advertising agencies in Beirut, Dubai, and Cairo, developing international and regional advertising campaigns. She notably created a De Beers campaign, which won an International Advertising Association gold award. Shehab is a TED Global Fellow for 2012. Her book A Thousand Times NO: The Visual History of Lam-Alif was published in 2010 by Khatt Books in Amsterdam.

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icm 2014 annual conference

An International Conference at Dak’Art 2014, the Biennale of Contemporary African Art, Dakar

May 11–12, 2014

Hôtel Sokhamon, Dakar, Senegal

Fall 2013Lecture SeriesBregtje van der HaakDirector of Documentaries, VPRO Television, Netherlands

PANEL DISCUSSION AND FILM SCREENING:DNA DreamsDirected by Bregtje van der Haak, 60 min.

Thursday, September 26, 2013, 4:45 p.m. • Africana Studies and Research Center, Multipurpose Room, 310 Triphammer Road

Chantal ThomasProfessor, Law, Cornell Law School

What Does the Emerging International Law of Migration Mean for Sovereignty?Tuesday, October 2, 2013, 4:45 p.m. • Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

Françoise VergèsConsulting Professor, Goldsmiths College, University of London; Research Associate, Collège d’études mondiales; President, Committee for the History and Memory of Slavery (2004–2012)

A Mutilated CartographyTuesday, October 29, 2013, 4:45 p.m. • Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

PANEL DISCUSSION AND FILM SCREENING:Maryse Conde: Une voix singuliereDirected by Jérôme Sesquin, 52 min.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013, 5:00 p.m. • Africana Studies and Research Center, Multipurpose Room, 310 Triphammer Road

New ConversationsAnne BlackburnProfessor, Department of Asian Studies; Director, South Asia Program, Cornell University

Monks, Texts, and Relics: Towards a Connected History of Buddhism in South and Southeast AsiaWednesday, November 13, 2013, 4:45 p.m. • Toboggan Lodge, 38 Forest Home Drive

Spring 2014Lecture SeriesPhilip McMichaelInternational Professor and Chair, Development Sociology, Cornell University

Historicizing the Land Grab: The Unfolding, and Unraveling, of the Global Food RegimeMonday, February 10, 2014, 4:45 p.m. • 165 McGraw Hall

Abdullahi An-Na’imCharles Howard Candler Professor of Law, School of Law, Emory University

American Muslims of Imagined and Re-Imagined CommunitiesWednesday, March 12, 2014, 4:45 p.m. • Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

SEMINARMuslims and the Secular StateThursday, March 13, 2014, 10:00 a.m. • Toboggan Lodge, 38 Forest Home Drive

WorkshopCritical Theory and (post)ColonialismA joint workshop with the Institute for German Cultural Studies

Organized by Natalie Melas and Paul Fleming

Saturday, March 15, 2014, 10:00 a.m. • A.D. White House, 27 East Avenue

*Registration required

New ConversationsEnzo TraversoSusan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities, Romance Studies, Cornell University

Marxism and Memory: From Teleology to MelancholyThursday, April 10, 2014, 4:45 p.m. • Toboggan Lodge, 38 Forest Home Drive

Jasbir K. PuarAssociate Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University; Fellow, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University

Disabled Diaspora, Rehabilitating State: The Queer Politics of Reproduction in Israel/PalestineTuesday, April 22, 2014, 4:45 p.m. • Toboggan Lodge, 38 Forest Home Drive

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An International Conference at Dak’Art 2014,the Biennale of Contemporary African Art, Dakar

May 11–12, 2014Hôtel Sokhamon, Dakar, Senegal

the space of the criss crossing that occurred as the Black freedom struggle became a layering of locations and dislocations and past, present, and future. 

The 1960s and 70s will be our pivot point as we think about the precursors and legacies of the 1960s and 70s black freedom struggles. From May 9 to June 8, 2014, Dak’Art, la Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain, will be held in Dakar. The theme and the occasion allow us to revisit major black and Pan-African intellectual movements and festivals (such as the Dakar’s Festival of World Negro Arts of 1966, Algiers of 1969, and the Festival of African Culture 1977 in Lagos, Nigeria, among others) in addition to revisiting individual artistic and intellectual work tied to Africa and the African diaspora.

As a keynote event, there will be a screening of Manthia Diawara’s film Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation (2010), on the Martiniquan philosopher and poet. 

The conference’s papers will be published in a co-edited volume entitled Global Black Consciousness. We aim to gather scholarship that opens up and complicates the key paradigms that have shaped the vibrant work on theories and cultural productions of the African dias pora. This conference aims to push the abundant current scholarship on the African diaspora to another dimension—the edge where we think about both the problem and promise of mobilizing “blackness” as a unifying concept. This conference (and by extension the book) brings together literary scholars, historians, visual art critics, and diaspora theorists.

he Institute for Comparative Modernities (Cornell University) and the Institute of African American Affairs (New York University) will hold the international conference “Global Black Consciousness”

on May 11–12, 2014, in Dakar, Senegal. The conference is coordinated by Margo Natalie Crawford and Salah Hassan (Cornell University) and Manthia Diawara (NYU). The conference will co incide with the opening days of the Dakar Biennale (Dak’Art 2014), which opens on May 9, 2014. The two-day gathering will focus on the theme of “Global Black Consciousness,” with invited participants who will present new and unpublished work.

Now that we have such rich scholarship on particular identities shaped by the African diaspora (Afro- German, Black British, African American, Afro-Latina/o, Afro-Caribbean, and many more) and theories of the value and limits of Pan-Africanism, Afro-pessimism, and many other “isms,” how do we create a space for the critical and nuanced analysis of global black consciousness as both a citing of diasporic flows and a grounded site of decolonizing movement? This multi-event and multi-site conference aims to explore the confluence between theories of diaspora and theories of decolonization. Moreover, the crisscrossing of visual art, literature, film, and other cultural productions will be explored alongside the crosscurrent that shaped the transnational flow of black consciousness. The scholars participating in this conference will situate their work in

THisham AidiLecturer, Columbia University

Ahmed BedjaouiJournalist, Film and Television Producer

Margo Natalie CrawfordAssociate Professor, Department of English, Cornell University

Souleymane Bachir DiagneProfessor, Department of French and Philosophy Department, Columbia University

Salah M. HassanGoldwin Smith Professor, Department of History of Art and Visual Studies; Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University

Shannen HillArt Historian

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Tsitsi JajiAssociate Professor, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania

Zita NunesAssociate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Maryland College Park

Ugochukwu-Smooth C. NzewiCurator of African Art, Hood Museum, Dartmouth University

Richard J. PowellJohn Spencer Bassett Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Duke University

Shana L. RedmondAssistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California

Ahmad Alawad SikaingaProfessor, Department of Humanities, Qatar University

Dagmawi WoubshetAssociate Professor, Department of English, Cornell University

Penny M. Von EschenProfessor, Department of History, University of Michigan

conference organizers

Margo N. CrawfordCornell University

Manthia DiawaraNew York University

Salah M. HassanCornell University

icm 2014 annual conference

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WANG HUIThe Decline of Representation: Another Inquiry on the Equality of WhatTuesday, September 4, 2012

In his talk, Wang Hui, a professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Tsinghua University, calls for a radical rethinking of the concept of equality in order to understand the current crisis in contemporary systems of democracy. Situating his analysis in the context of post–Cold War politics (with special emphasis on China’s case), where capitalism’s interpretation of “democracy” achieved hegemonic status as the only legitimate system of politics, Wang calls attention to the accompanying decline of the working class due to the heightened globality of capitalist relations. Capitalist democracy’s prevalence created a repudiation of the achievements of socialism (a legacy of the dichotomy constructed during the Cold War era), especially the latter system’s emphasis on equality, an important tenet of democracy itself. At the same time, Wang argues that the crisis of democracy is anchored in the disjuncture between political structures of democracy, on the one hand, where democracy traditionally has been linked to the rule of citizens, and democracy’s social dimension, on the other. In other words, democracy no longer represents the rule of the people because the notion of equality in which democracy was previously conceived (in socialism) is being displaced; the social dimension of democracy is lost and terms such as “democracy” and “human rights” become simply understood as existing in opposition to authoritarianism.

According to Wang, this decoupling of social form and political form is further aggravated by the gradual alliances between political parties and capital, alliances that form oligarchies of power. The fall of the socialist bloc led to the decline of parties of the proletariat, who traditionally represented the working class. This was at the same time reinforced by the decline of class politics and the rise of newer social movements (such as identity politics). What remained of the concept of “class” is its discriminating factor, but the movement toward equality in its name has been removed. In this sense, not only does the state no longer represent the citizens (as per democracy), but ordinary citizens are excluded from political democratization, “losing the means to defend themselves against it”—a right they enjoyed (previously) under socialism via the value of equality through the notion of class politics.

Here, Wang argues that it is necessary to readdress the question posed by Amartya Sen in 1979: “equality of what?” He argues that the current separation between

social and political forms of society can be understood via the historical change that has taken place in the epistemological understanding of equality. Tracing the legacies of the French Revolution, Wang emphasizes that historically equality means that each citizen holds “an equal portion of sovereignty” that goes past all forms of distinction (such as caste, class, and so forth). However, in the context of China, he laments that this value of equality previously accorded with the notion that everyone is equal as such is replaced by another equality that is in line with capitalism: the “equality of opportunity.” This latter equality can be summed up by the rhetoric: everyone can improve their economic conditions via their own efforts. That is to say, everyone has equal opportunities via the institutions of education, work, and so forth. Yet Wang claims that this equality is only represented by the value of commodified labor under market conditions; equality of opportunity rests on the logic of the exchange of commodities. Thus, equality of opportunity as such, measured by exchange value, is not a social ideal; rather, it is a formal equality within the logic of capital itself.

Amartya Sen’s essay that argued for the notion of “equality of capabilities” is an important intervention, according to Wang, as the essay redirects the discussion of just ice (and equal ity) away f rom economic preoccupations toward potential capabilities of individuals. Wang calls our attention to the fundamental assumption implicit in the notion of “equality of opportunity”: it is founded and only possible on the basis of the positing of “equality of capabilities” amongst individuals. According to Wang, Sen “shifts the discussion of equality away from institutions to the everyday overcoming of inequalities,” emphasizing the degree of freedom available to each individual to make labor contracts (that are not bound to the confines of the nation state), rather than the notion of a formal right of equality of opportunity. In other words, the previous epistemic shift of the concept of equality that accompanied the displacement of capitalism onto the socialist system of equality is not simply a denial of formal equality; it is also an assumption of equal capabilities among individuals that ignores real differences. It is clear that for Wang, Sen still works in the general schema of equality of opportunity, even though the latter takes into account differences of human capability. He argues that Sen is fundamentally also guilty of the commodification of things, and that to call for an analysis of human capabilities is also a call to analyze the usefulness (in commodity terms) of individuals.

This need to understand “things” leads Wang to propose an alternative schema of equality: the “equality of all things.” According to Wang, this concept is suggested in the writings of Zhang Taiyan (also known as Zhang Binglin; 1869–1936) and is anchored in a strain

of classical Chinese thought that emphasizes “the point of view of things.” As a concept, it thus contends for a certain singularity inherent in things that one should account for. “Things” are, hence, understood as dynamic subjects (and not simply objects for the satisfaction of human needs); therefore, as a category, it “covers all phenomena in the universe.” By putting forth this ethical principle, Wang argues that the “equality of all things” allows one to place humans in the larger context of nature, instead of focusing on the social relations, particularly those dictated by the logic of capital. In so doing, humans are also “things” whose singularity is on par with that of every-thing else. By emphasizing the commodification of objects as the basis for inequality between human subjects, Wang maintains that this vision of an “equality of all things” allows us to think past the “equality of opportunities,” because it posits that “things” cannot be named by their functions vis-à-vis humans, nor are they based on a notion of homogeneous similarity as commodity (which is the same logic that homogenizes individuals). By positing the singular differences between all things, “equality of all things,” for Wang, ultimately enables one to glimpse past the emphasis of equality of opportunity embedded in the crisis of representation.

—Clarence I-Zhuen Lee Department of Asian Studies, Graduate Student

ACHILLE MBEMBEFrantz Fanon and the Subject of EmancipationTuesday, October 16, 2012

Rather than a lecture on Fanon, Achille Mbembe offered a reflection on contemporary events in a Fanonian spirit. In the first half of his talk, Mbembe defined this “Fanonian spirit,” deriving it from both the texts Fanon left behind and the life that he led. Highlighting the continuity between Fanon’s life and work, Mbembe emphasized Fanon’s intellectual and biographical itinerancy. When Fanon traveled the same geographic and philosophical paths as others, he called this “marcher en compagnie de,” or “walking in the company of,” revealing an ethics of companionship. Twice in his life, travel meant war: first against Nazism, and then against the colonial forces in Algeria. Fanon was sensitive to the irony inherent in the fact that colonized blacks and Arabs who fought to liberate their colonizers, to save France from the shame of Nazism, were denied the very same rights that they had defended for France. Mbembe locates the summit of Fanon’s political thought as his theory of decolonization or emancipation, a theory that is simultaneously a hermeneutics or investigation into what constitutes

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the self or subject of decolonization, and a pedagogy or praxis of emancipation. Its originality resides in the fact that it rests almost entirely on a political theory of property and ownership, which opposed itself to racecraft—a technology of dispossession or disowning. This theory entailed Fanon’s rejection of imitation or “mimicry.” The time of decolonization is both a time of closure and a time of possibility, requiring a politics of difference rather than imitation or repetition. While the discourse of colonization saw natives as incapable of change or creation, locating them outside of time itself, Fanon called for “a new species of man,” one capable of difference.

In the second part to of the presentation, Mbembe gave a perspective on global capitalism coming from the African continent in our own present Fanonian moment. Commenting on the recent killing of 34 miners on strike by the police at Marikana in South Africa, Mbembe pointed out that this scene recalls the worst atrocities under apartheid. By killing these miners, the African National Congress, a former liberation movement now in power, has indicated that in a struggle between the poor and capital, they will side with capital. This situation should spur us to once more question

capitalism in a Fanonian spirit, asking where it is going and how it is implicated in the redefinition of the terms of emancipation. Seen from Africa, global capital seems to be moving in three directions. The first is toward an increasing exploitation of large parts of the world through primitive accumulation. In Africa, the raw economy is underpinned by the logic of extraction, which, though it may be different from the logic of deindustrialization prevalent in Northern economies, shares with them the quickened accumulation “equality of capabilities” surplus populations. As this process intensifies with the expansion of capitalism in this new phase of globalization and its transformation into a financial system, global unemployment and unemployability is confirmed as a general law. The second direction we can see global capital moving when viewed from Africa is toward expansion through racial subsidies or discounts. Capital needs to work across and through different scales of race in order to mark people either as disposable or as waste. It needs to segment and racialize surplus populations for various strategic ends. This can be seen in the incorporation of excess masculinity into the military market and in the increasing confinement of those marked as disposable in a planetarizing prison system. The third direction global capital takes, as seen from Africa, is toward a realization that capitalism is not naturally compatible with democracy.

What is called into question through the current spate of uprising and political mobilizations in Africa and the Arab world is a particular regime of existence. What is being protested is repression and corruption. In the language of these protests, repression and corruption are perceived as interconnected forms of bloodletting, drawing blood from the people in general and the poor in particular. Repression and corruption are empirically entangled because of the tight link that unites the security apparatus, the legal regime, and various technologies of privatization of the state. Under such corrupt and repressive postcolonial regimes, people are habitually faced with the stark choice between indignity and death. The revolution is the moment when death wins out. This choice of death over indignity is what Mbembe sees in the language of protesters in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and Libya, as well as with the miners’ strikes in South Africa. The willingness to give up everything, including life, turns death into a political weapon. The revolutionary movement becomes one that is capable of translating the struggles of the people in the face of death into a sustained alternative.

—Jan SteynDepartment of Comparative Literature, Graduate Student

SAREE MAKDISIMaking England WesternWednesday, March 6, 2013

England around 1800 was not yet a Western country, Saree Makdisi argues, nor even a metropolitan space distinct from the various colonial spaces over which it exercised political and economic power. At this point of crisis and transition, boundaries were “amorphous” and “porous” between Occident and Orient, metropolitan and colonial, here and there, us and them, black and white. It was only during the Romantic period when England—and specifically London—began to take on a Western metropolitan identity. In tracing how England became part of the West, Makdisi draws on the work of his uncle and fellow literary critic, Edward Said, showing how notions of a unified Occident developed in tandem with the orientalizing of the East. Makdisi showed that the decomposition and recomposition of a slew of formerly distinct groups of “internal others” within England was necessary in order to create a racially and culturally homogenous nation. Thus, a civilizing process occurred at home as well as overseas, as the metropolitan center and its colonial outposts were simultaneously brought under control. During his talk, Makdisi took his audience on a tour of London around 1800, mapping an occidentalized West End with large boulevards against the orientalized, small, and confusing labyrinths of the city, with the grand boulevard of Regent Street marking the boundary between them. Yet to produce this urban topography, a hundred thousand people were displaced in an area small enough to cover in twenty minutes’ walking, erasing—or possibly salvaging and assimilating—the narrow streets and buildings as well as the distinct identity of this area of London. As thoroughfares like New Oxford Street encroached into the city, they also opened and connected it into a rational, unified cityscape.

The spatial heterogeneity of England and London in particular (its “small islands”) also translated into a temporal unevenness. Rich West London progressed while poor East London remained static in time or

IBRAHIM El-SALAHIThe Artist in His Own WordsWednesday, November 28, 2012

Born in 1930 in the historic city of Omdurman, Sudan, and educated at the School of Design, Gordon Memorial College (subsequently renamed the Khartoum School of Fine and Applied Art), Ibrahim El-Salahi is one of the most impressive figures in the field of contemporary African art. He is an artist whose productivity has spanned more than five decades, and a powerful intellectual who remains morally conscientious, socially concerned, and uncompromising in his artistic integrity. El-Salahi’s prolific career is one of constant experimentation with different techniques, symbolic languages, and visions. His diverse body of work is not bound within one style, nor is it constrained by the early parameters of Sudanese aesthetic concerns. His paintings combine a critical understanding of Western art principles with an original visual sophistication in their reference to Sudanese and African as well as Islamic art forms. Revered throughout Africa and the Middle East, El-Salahi has inspired generations of artists with his meditative approach to imagery.

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even seemed to regress: contemporaries depicted its neighborhoods as disconnected from the flow of history and civilization. For Makdisi, Dickens’s novels dramatize this difference of timescapes; in them, people who visit the poor are “Belzoni-like time travelers.” And whereas The Mystery of Edwin Drood might be read as a meditation on stalled time, Oliver Twist has undeniable forward-moving momentum, with a civilizing, linear vision of time. Difference of time maps onto difference of space, and so the broad West End boulevards built into the city not only unified London spatially, but also connected the city to the flow of history and civilization.

The difference between West and East London persisted even in the orientalizing, racial language used to describe the city and its inhabitants. Makdisi noticed a linguistic and even physiological difference in Henry Mayhew’s classification of two races: the Nomadic and the Civilized. Walter Thornbury, in Old and New London, described a colony of Arabs sequestered as if part of Arabia Petraea. Yet the Londoners whom Mayhew, Thornbury, and others describe as street “Arabs” were in reality what we would now call “white.” While there were certainly Asians, Africans, and Irish living in the city at the time, the majority of the population was poor,

white, and English, who nonetheless were consistently orientalized to emphasize their difference from the West End’s wealthier and more civilized inhabitants. Likewise, in this period the area became known as a “rookery,” a word formerly reserved for bird habitats that effectively derogated city dwellers as animals. It was only in the process of reclaiming the “rookery” and its “Arabs” into West London that the notion of a unified London, England, and Occident began to coalesce.

The lecture was based on Makdisi’s forthcoming book, which should be published later this year under the title Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture.

—Christina BlackDepartment of English, Graduate Student

LESLIE A. ADELSONHorizons of Hope in Times of Despair: Alexander Kluge’s Cosmic and Global Miniatures for the 21st Century, A Literary PerspectiveTuesday, April 2, 2013

Leslie Adelson, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies at Cornell University, presented work in progress on the German author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge’s “cosmic and global miniatures” by focusing on literary form and futurity, a term that has attracted recent attention within both German studies

and the humanities at large. Underscoring her claim that “futurity is pressing,” Adelson situated her readings of short prose from Kluge’s Tür an Tür mit einem anderen Leben (Door to Door with Another Life, 2006) vis-à-vis a broad theoretical landscape that included figures such as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Miriam Hansen, Arjun Appadurai, David Harvey, David Herman, Reinhart Koselleck, Jacques Derrida, Jodi Dean, and Andreas Huyssen. Kluge himself is best known for his multimedial attention since the 1960s to alternative modernities in Europe.

Adelson invoked 1989 as a pivotal moment in modern German and world history that has raised questions about the “future of the future” and various threats to human survival since the fall of state-sponsored communism in Europe. Ours is a moment, Adelson continued, in which futurity becomes an acute “problem of thought.” This can be considered both with and against what systems theorist Niklas Luhmann once identified as an essential feature of European modernity, namely, the “open” structure of its orientation to the future. Also drawing on the work of Rüdiger Campe, Adelson stressed that today’s challenges to longstanding concepts of modernity and futurity alike can best be understood in terms of the widely varying and rapidly changing “uses” of the future. In this sense, Adelson suggested, futurity is not a fixed concept but a “protean abstraction” that lends itself to differentiated analysis.

Adelson next turned to Kluge’s Tür an Tür, a collection of “350 New Stories” united by their small forms, hence her chosen moniker: miniatures, a term she adapts from Huyssen’s work on the “modernist miniature” that emerged in the German-speaking world in the aftermath of World War I. Adelson first gave a close reading of Kluge’s “Hoffnung bei Sonnenaufgang” (“Hope at Sunrise”), which describes a hospital patient’s change in disposition from hopelessness to hopefulness, ostensibly tied to seeing the red of sunrise reflecting off medical instruments in her room. Under the influence of morphine, the patient quickly dies in the morning. Pointing to a semantically and grammatically ambiguous sentence fragment halfway through the text, which places its narrative authority into question and opens onto a temporal complexity informing the narration, Adelson asked if this is indeed a hopeful text, as the title suggests. In her assessment, the temporal complexity of this narrative intervention allows us to answer the question in the affirmative. The future in this case is not open and undecidable in the modern sense but becomes accessible to experience in reading Kluge’s prose.

In the next phase of the talk Adelson proposed that Kluge’s miniatures, with their ambiguously “floating” dialogues and temporal shifts, constellate the notions of hope (as distinguished from utopia), time (both human and cosmic), and narration in unusual and productive

ways. Fusing hetero- with homo-diegetic narrative, these literary experiments amount to a type of “puttering,” or working on futurity, hope, and destruction in ways that resist closure and stasis.

If Kluge’s cosmic miniatures give accounts of extraterrestrials and commingle astrophysics with human affect, his global miniatures continue to problematize distance, proximity, and time. The global miniatures addressed in this talk revolve around “revolutionary horizons” since 1989, resisting what Natalie Melas has called a “terminal presentism” in contemporary discussions of globalization. Whether these miniatures describe a fictional encounter between Karl Marx and Wilhelm Liebknecht about the lag time of revolutionary “locomotives,” a hapless ex-Soviet adjunct at Stanford concerned with planetary change and revolution, or a Chinese film about a man who runs “faster than fate,” they all contain forms of counterlogical narrative. Invoking Derrida’s reading of Marx, Adelson suggested that the interlocution of “ghosts” in these stories can be interpreted in terms of an ethical responsibility to both the past and the future. However, Kluge’s miniatures do not simply challenge or build upon inherited notions of the future; to engage their particular forms of storytelling is also to work on “future-making” as a distinct narrative practice that addresses Marxist as well as communist horizons in new ways.

After the presentation, Adelson fielded questions regarding the influence of the Frankfurt School on Kluge’s work, the role of destruction as a counterpart to the phenomenon of hope, and Kluge’s privileging of the invisible over the visible in his cosmic and global miniatures.

—Ari LindenDepartment of German Studies, Graduate Student

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ELIZABETH GIORGISThe Visual and the Text: Ethiopian Modernism, an Alternative ReadingTuesday, November 6, 2012

In a lecture presenting material from a work in progress, Giorgis explored Ethiopian modern art and literature within their sociohistorical context. She began with a brief overview of Ethiopia’s history, emphasizing that Ethiopia is “unique in the colonial discourse of modernity and modernism” because it has never been colonized,

strong hold upon him; for example, his painting Golgotha, an abstracted crucifixion scene with slashes of bloody red upon a bleak black cross, is a “satanic” deconstruction of a motif central to the Orthodox Church. In addition, Giorgis hypothesized that the mummified imagery in Desta’s painting The Grotto demonstrates strong thematic inspiration from Admassu’s Este Teteyeku and indicates dialogue between Ethiopian painting and literature. Although now considered a seminal figure of Ethiopian art history, Desta was received coolly by the Ethiopian public during his lifetime, as modern art was then underappreciated.

Following her analysis of Desta, Giorgis noted that Kosrof, who studied under both Desta and Desta’s colleague Skunder Boghossian, and who is known for being inspired by Ethiopian Orthodox debtera scrolls (believed to have healing powers), requires fuller scholarly attention because extant scholarship fails to discuss the implications of his relatively warm reception in the international art market or to recognize his creative debt to Boghossian, whom Giorgis identified as the first Ethiopian modern artist to utilize debtera scrolls.

Giorgis ended her presentation with a discussion of Sheriff, who enjoyed great popularity during his career and heavily influenced the trajectory of Ethiopian art during his 17 years as director of the School of Fine Arts and Design in Addis Ababa, yet was dramatically limited by the ideological limitations imposed by the Derg military junta that controlled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1987. Giorgis submitted that Sheriff ’s artistically inconsistent and politically tumultuous career exemplifies the paradoxical ambiguity that she sees as marking Ethiopian modernity.

—Jungmin KimDepartment of English, Graduate Student

ANINDITA BANERJEEPetromodernity: Post-Soviet Fiction and the Biopolitics of OilTuesday, February 5, 2013

The geopolitical significance of contemporary Russia, which rests wholly on oil and natural gas production, has been the subject of much economic and political analysis in recent years. Yet the curiously spectral but ubiquitous presence of petroleum in the post-Soviet body politic, which in turn produces a uniquely post-Soviet poetics of being, thinking, and acting in the globalized modern world, remains unexplored. Through the representational strategies and institutional particularities of post-Soviet fiction, this talk attempts to theorize a biopolitical ecology of cultural production and consumption that is completely mediated by oil.

PAULINA AROCH-FUGELLIELeverage: Art and Disavowal, Mexico 2012Thursday, February 21, 2013

“Leverage” is an inquiry into the work of the artistic branch of the 2012 Mexican student movement. Excluded from the usual circuits of aesthetic and economic value production, the work of Artistas Aliados provides an opportunity to explore contemporary geopolitics of value from a position of relative exteriority. Aroch departs from the thesis that neoliberalism has appropriated the formal dimension of our imaginations as a result of its global hegemony over economics and mass media. Neoliberalism’s colonization of form mobilizes unconscious affective content to the advantage of capital, which Artistas Aliados strive to leverage to their own advantage.

suffering only a brief Italian occupation from 1936 to 1941. This unique status has inspired oversimplified narratives of Ethiopian modernism, which neglect the reality of Ethiopia being “far from free of colonial influence or domination” and ignore the complexity of colonialism’s impact upon Ethiopia’s political, educational, literary, and artistic development. Giorgis explained that her work in progress seeks to remedy the dearth of scholarship on Ethiopian modernism, modern art history, and intellectual history by providing a more nuanced, ambivalent, and historicist narrative of Ethiopian modernism.

Giorgis then discussed a variety of Ethiopian literary and visual artists, describing artists’ backgrounds, analyzing especially salient pieces, and sometimes providing a color slide or reading aloud an excerpt in translation for the audience in Toboggan Lodge. Giorgis identified three particularly significant Ethiopian texts from the 1950s and 1960s: Dagnachew Worku’s novel Adefres, Beaalu Girma’s novel KeAdmas Bashager, and Yohannes Admassu’s poetry collection Este Teteyeku. She explicated Worku’s Adefres (meaning “to disturb or to upset the order of things”) as a sensationalist deconstructionist narrative where the university-educated protagonist, initially aggressively Eurocentric but later disillusioned and killed by fellow radicals, represents radical young African intellectuals of the time who privileged European culture by uncritically embracing Westernization. Giorgis next analyzed Girma’s KeAdmas Bashager (Beyond the Horizon) as a reductionist struggle between Western individualism and Ethiopian collectivity played out by protagonist Abera, an American-educated, directionless, amoral womanizer; Abera’s brother, Ato Abate, a staunch traditionalist; and Abera’s friend Hailemariam, a quester pursuing an elusive “self ” that “vacillates between romantic individualism and revolutionary collectivism.” Abera and Hailemariam perceive traditional collectivity as stifling and Western individualism as liberating, but cannot escape collective ideas and values.

In discussing Admassu’s Este Teteyeku (Let You Be Asked) Giorgis focused on the eponymous poem “Este Teteyeku” and evaluated it as a work that succeeds where Adefres and KeAdmas Bashager fall short; Admassu advocates “collective agency” as a social system wherein individuals “serve each other for mutual benefit,” recognizes and addresses Ethiopia’s then objective realities of poverty and ignorance, and offers a richly nuanced perspective on Ethiopian modernity.

Moving to the visual arts Giorgis examined Gebre Kristos Desta, Wossene Kosrof, and Abdurahman Sheriff. According to Giorgis, Desta, a poet-painter who studied in Europe and whose father illuminated manuscripts for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, publicly devalued Ethiopian traditions in favor of Europeanization, and yet his works testify that Ethiopian traditions maintained a

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2013annual conference In REVIEW

ecolonization has led to the rise of a new international order, which in turn continues to challenge and expose the insufficiency of classic concepts and definitions of modernity, culture,

art, and politics. Focusing on the reconfig uration of these concepts within the notion of cosmopolitanism, the conference considered the consequences of the historical, cultural, and artistic entanglement of Africa and Europe.

The conference revisited mid-twentieth-century debates through this prism of cosmopolitanism, invoking its potential as a notion that implies the possibilities of mutual coexistence and living with difference. Cosmopolitanism is conceived here to indicate the need for members of any community to imagine entities other than their own locales or national boundaries that will be more inclusive on a global scale.

Hence, cosmopolitanism is perceived as a metaphor for mobility, migrancy, and coexistence with difference, in opposition to parochialism, xenophobia, fixity, and limited notions of sovereignty. In that sense, the focus was on the antihegemonic and antihomogenizing potential of cosmopolitanism, in opposition to power as it has been associated with Western imperial tendencies,

transnational capital, and its corollary neoliberal economic policies. Cosmopolitanism is also perceived as a pursuit of peace through the development of a strong sense of ethics and moral obligation toward other human beings everywhere.

An important focus of the conference was the practice of artists who can no longer be classified and located either inside or outside the “West,” or as occupying an in-between space. In that sense, the conference sought to establish a platform for knowledge production to fill the glaring gaps in understanding the cultural and political dynamics of a world in motion, and to focus on unearthing the root causes and consequences of new migrations in Africa and Europe.

Finally, in reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism, as articulated above, even the apparently adequate conceptual ideas of “European,” “Western,” or “African” art may no longer be helpful. Perhaps these terms need to be dismissed in order to open up a space of debate. This conference considered more adequate definitions of current art practices and their respective ways of envisaging and defining their relationship to distinct, but unevenly connected, worlds.

The two-day conference

revisited the intersection of

modernity and decolonization

and was organized by the

Goethe-Institut (Lisbon) in

collaboration with Akademie

der Künste, Berlin; Maumaus

School of Visual Arts,

Lisbon; and the Institute for

Comparative Modernities.

It was supported by Allianz

Cultural Foundation.

February 2–3, 2013

Akademie Der Künste, Pariser Platz, Berlin, Germany

rethinking cosmopolitanism:africa in Europeeurope in africa

D

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program and abstracts

February 2, 2013

Session I: 10:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

Europe/Africa, and Universal HistorySusan Buck-MorssDistinguished Professor of Political Science, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Hegel, Haiti and Universal History: A Response to the CriticsUniversal History is a method, a practice of theorizing, not an ontological claim. The fact that the Haitian Revolution inspired Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave allows us to think of the historical logic of freedom differently. The point is not just to provide a less Eurocentric narrative of the past, but rather to transform our own historical imagination. It argues that keeping cultures intact cannot be the sine qua non of political ethics. The abolition of slavery is a gift that the slaves of Saint-Domingue bequeathed, intentionally, to all of humanity. This model suggests a communist mode of inheriting the past that has the capacity to alter the structure of collective memory.

Siegfried ZielinskiMichel Foucault Chair, European Graduate School; Chair, Media Theory, Institute for Time Based Media, Berlin University of Arts

Means & SeasHegel’s The Philosophy of World History is a mental construction based on territory. Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, however, was developed with a view to the (oceanic) sea. The concept of the German philosopher is imperialistic in a more profound sense of the word. The poetry philosopher from Martinique celebrates the heterogenic and the heresy; he abhors all universal. In Hegel’s concept, means of transport need wheels; Glissant evokes ships and boats and the capacity to navigate . . . By understanding territories and the sea as mediating instances, as media in the direct sense, this paper seeks to discuss, on a media theory level, the question of quality of cultural values and relationships from a variantological perspective.

HANS BELTING was co-founder of the Karlsruhe University for Arts and Design (HfG) in Karlsruhe, Germany, (1992) and professor of art history and media theory (until 2002). He previously held chairs in art history at the universities of Heidelberg and Munich. He was visiting professor at Harvard (1984), Columbia University (1989), and Northwestern University (2004). In 2003, he lectured at the Collège de France, Paris, and received an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute, London. He served as director of the International Center for Cultural Science in Vienna from 2004–2007. He currently serves as advisor of the project Global Art and the Museum at ZKM, Karlsruhe. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Academia Europea. He published numerous book in English, including The End of the History of Art? (1987), Max Beckmann: Modern Painting and Tradition (1989), The Image and its Public in the Middle Ages (1990), Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (1994), The Germans and Their Art: A Difficult Heritage (2000), The Invisible Masterpiece (2001), Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (2003), Art History after Modernism (2003), Thomas Struth: Museum Photographs (2006), Duchamp’s

participant biographies

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DiscussantsTejumola Olaniyan, Louise Durham Mead Professor of English; Professor, African Languages; Literature; Senior Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon

12:30–1:00 p.m.

Artist Talk IBahia ShehabAssociate Professor of Practice, American University in Cairo; Creative Director, MI7-Cairo

Practicing Art in Revolutionary TimesThe rise of the Egyptian revolution and the Arab citizen’s democratic uprising—known as the Arab Spring—has ushered a new path in all arenas of creativity and public life, including the visual arts. Artists, like other sectors of society in Egypt, have played a significant role not only in political mobilization, but also in opening up new possibilities of artistic practices. Yet, two years into the Egyptian revolution people are still being shot at, tear gassed, and brutally beaten on the streets. Despite the facade of a democratic election that brought the first post-revolution president, activists are still targeted; corruption is still rampant in most government institutions.

In this presentation, Shehab reflects on her own artistic practice in the context of a changing society and in revolutionary times. She offers a perspective on how her own work has been transformed by the revolution and new forms of public interventions and genres such as graffiti and collective work she resorted to in her own unfolding practice.

Session II: 2:30–4:30 p.m.

Dislocating Africa and EuropeAchille MbembeVisiting Professor, Romance Studies; The Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University; Research Professor, History and Politics, University of the Witwatersrand

Provincializing France?In the rest of the world, the “postcolonial turn” in the social sciences and humanities took place nearly a quarter century ago. Since then, the method or style of critique associated with that movement has influenced myriad political, epistemological, institutional, and disciplinary debates in the United States, the United Kingdom, and regions across the Southern Hemisphere (South America, Australia, New Zealand, the Indian subcontinent, and South Africa).

From its inception postcolonial studies has been interpreted in extremely diverse ways; over time, it has spawned robust waves of polemic and controversy, not to mention the many objections, each contradicting the previous, that continue today. It has also given rise to an abundance of profoundly rich and tremendously divergent intellectual, political, and aesthetic practices—so much so that one might earnestly ask where the unity of “postcolonial studies” lies.

But despite this logic of segmentation, one can assert that, at its core, the object of postcolonial critique is best described in terms of the interlacing of histories and the concatenation of distinct worlds. Given that slavery and especially colonization (but also migrations; the ordering of sex and sexuality; and the circulation of forms, imaginaries, goods, ideas, and people) played such decisive roles in this process of human collision and entanglement, it is logical that postcolonial studies has made them the privileged objects of its inquiry.

Manuela Ribeiro SanchesAssistant Professor, Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon

Decolonizing Post-National Europe: Some Thoughts on Nationalism and CosmopolitanismThe economic crisis that is traversing Europe, and the way in which poverty predominantly located in the South is expanding into the peripheral zones of “the old continent,” introduce new challenges and conflicts that risk jeopardizing the European “cosmopolitan” project. New forms of ethnic absolutism and racism are emerging in the areas subject to structural adjustments and neoliberal policies, a situation with which theories of hybridity and multiculturalism seem to be unable to deal.

Speaking from a Portuguese perspective this paper proposes a rereading of two anticolonial authors—Franz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral—to test the way in which their nationalist and pan-African utopias may help decolonize Europe and dislocate the ways in which it defines itself at the level of its nation-states as well as its Eurocentric cosmopolitan project. In other words, can the crisis contribute to a renewed understanding of Europe and its histories, namely its colonial pasts? What can one learn from anticolonial thinking in postcolonial times?

DiscussantsFatima El-Tayeb, Associate Professor, Ethnic Studies; Literature; Associate Director, Critical Gender Studies, University of California, San Diego

Jeanette S. Jouili, Postdoctoral Fellow, Women’s Studies, Duke University

Session III: 5:00–7:00 p.m.

Hans BeltingCofounder, Karisruhe University for Arts and Design

When Was Modern Art? The Museum of Modern Art and the History of ModernismIt is the author’s intention to reconstruct the creation of the discourse of Modernism in the art world and prove that the Museum of Modern Art in New York was most instrumental for establishing the myth of Modernism, which at the same time, in the 1930s, was about to be abolished by the political situation in Europe. Thus, paradoxically, Europe received its own myth of modern art from a US institution, which was created for this purpose. It is important to acknowledge the fabrication of Modernism at a time when, usually, Western Modernism is seen as a given to be bypassed in the meanwhile by other modernities.

Fatima El-TayebAssociate Professor, Ethnic Studies; Literature; Associate Director, Critical Gender Studies, University of California, San Diego

European Others: Whiteness and Racial Violence in Colorblind EuropeThis talk aims at deconstructing the narrative of “raceblindness” at the center of Europe’s post–World War II self-image. El-Tayeb argues that this image not only defines how Europe envisions its place in the contemporary world, but also shapes narratives of Europe’s past, in particular of colonialism, which is largely perceived as having no lasting impact on the

continent itself. This externalization of “race” from Europe also means that racialized (i.e., nonwhite/non-Christian) Europeans are positioned as not belonging, as permanently “just arriving” (as expressed in terms like “third generation migrant” commonly used across the continent).

The author proposes that the reappropriation of postcolonial and African diaspora discourse by European artists and activists of color successfully challenges these narratives of exclusion and that it is particularly important to recognize the political potential in this vernacular art and activism that originates in the very same urban communities that have become the prime target of the latest stage of Europe’s clash with its others.

DiscussantsSusan Buck-Morss, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Achille Mbembe, Visiting Professor, Romance Studies; The Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University; Research Professor, History and Politics, University of the Witwatersrand

minority cultures, Muslim communities in the West, queer of color critique, visual cultural studies, and media theory. She has published two books, European Others. Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and Schwarze Deutsche: Der Diskurs um ‘Rasse’ und nationale Identität 1890–1933 (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 2001), as well as several articles, including “‘The Forces of Creolization’: Colorblindness and Visible Minorities in the New Europe,” in The Creolization of Theory (2011), “The Birth of a European Public: Migration, Postnationality, and Race in the Uniting of Europe” in American Quarterly (2008), “Limited Horizons: Queer Identity in Fortress Europe” in Can the Subaltern Speak German? Migration and Postcolonial Criticism (2004), and “‘If You Cannot Pronounce My Name, You Can Just Call Me Pride’: Afro-German Activism, Gender, and Hip Hop” in Gender and History 15 no. 3 (2003). El Tayeb also produced and directed a film entitled Alles Wird Gut/Everything Will Be Fine, Germany, 1997 (with Angelina Maccarone). 

LEONHARD EMMERLING studied art history, musicology, German literature and Byzantine art history. He finished his thesis on the art theory of Jean Dubuffet in 1996 and worked as a curator at the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, the Krefelder Kunstmuseen, and the Kunstverein Ludwigsburg before he moved to Auckland in 2006 to take the position of director of St. Paul Street Gallery, Auckland University of Technology. He authored books, among others on Renaissance and Gothic Art in the Palatinate, Jackson Pollock, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and several exhibition catalogues. He worked as a lecturer at Kunsthochschule Weissensee, Berlin; University Koblenz-Landau; School for Applied Arts, Mainz; and the Art Academy of Düsseldorf. Since 2010, Leonhard is head of the Visual Arts division at the Goethe Institute’s head office in Munich.

ELIZABETH WOLDE GIORGIS served as dean of the Skunder Boghossian College of Performing and Visual Arts and director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University. She is currently director of the Modern Art Museum and the Gebre Kristos Desta Center at Addis Ababa University and teaches art theory and criticism in the graduate school of the College of Performing and Visual Arts. She is the author of several publications, most recently as guest editor of “Charting Ethiopian Modernity and Modernism,” a special issue of Callaloo: Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters on Ethiopian art and literature. She is also editor of the first catalogue of contemporary art published in Ethiopia, Gebre Kristos Desta: The Painter Poet (a joint project of the German Federal Foreign Office and the Institute of Ethiopian Studies). She served as curator of several exhibitions. More recently she authored Revolutionary Motherland or Death: Students’ Work during the Derg

Regime (1974–1991), published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title that focused on the relationship between the socialist realist ideology of the Derg’s dictatorship and the imposed Soviet style art pedagogy as manifested in the curricula and student art works of the School of Fine Arts and Design, Addis Ababa University. 

SALAH M. HASSAN is the Goldwin Smith Professor and director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities, and Professor of African and African Diaspora Art History and Visual Culture in the Africana Studies and Research Center and the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University. He is also a curator and art critic. He is editor and founder of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and consulting editor for Atlantica and Journal of Curatorial Studies. He authored, edited, and coedited several books, including Ibrahim El Salahi: A Visionary Modernist (2012); Diaspora, Memory, Place (2008); Unpacking Europe (2001); Authentic/Ex-Centric (2001); Gendered Visions: The Art of Contemporary Africana Women Artists (1997); Art and Islamic Literacy among the Hausa of Northern Nigeria (1992); Darfur and the Crisis of Governance: A Critical Reader (2009), and guest edited a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on “African Modernism” (2010). He has contributed essays to journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogues of contemporary art. He has curated several international exhibitions, including at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 and the Dakar Biennale in 2004. He is the recipient of several fellowships such as the J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, as well as major grants from the Ford, Rockefeller, Andy Warhol, and Prince Claus Fund foundations.

JEANETTE S. JOUILI is a postdoctoral fellow at the Women’s Studies Program at Duke University. In 2011–2012, she was a fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University and previously held research positions at Amsterdam University and the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, Netherlands. She currently conducts research on the Islamic cultural and artistic scene in the United Kingdom. Jouili has published in various journals, including Feminist Review, Social Anthropology, and Muslim World. She is also completing a book manuscript tentatively titled “Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in France and Germany.” Her research and teaching interests include Islam in Europe, secularism, pluralism, popular culture, moral and aesthetic practices, and gender.

ACHILLE MBEMBE is a research professor in history and politics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, and a visiting professor in t he Romance Studies D ep ar t ment and t he

Perspective: Duchamp, Sugimoto, Jeff Wall (2009); The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, Museums, coedited with Andrea Buddensieg (2009); Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (2011); An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (2011), The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, coeditor (2013).

JÜRGEN BOCK works as a curator, publisher, and art theorist. He is the director of the Maumaus Visual Arts School in Lisbon, Portugal, the program of the Maumaus residency program, and the exhibition space Lumiar Cité. His curatorships have included the Project Room at the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon in 2000/2001 (Eleanor Antin, Harun Farocki, Renée Green, Allan Sekula, among others), the 2003 Maia Biennial, and the German participation in the 2005 Triennial of India in New Delhi (Andreas Siekmann). In 2007 Bock curated the Portuguese Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennial (Ângela Ferreira). In 2011, he co-organized the international conference “Modernities in the Making” in Dakar. In 2012, he was the curator of Allan Sekula: The Docker’s Museum at La Criée, Rennes; the panel discussion “The Next Revolution Will Not Be Funded” at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin; and the exhibition Heimo Zobernig at the Museu Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. His publications include the book From Work to Text: Dialogues on Practise and Criticism in Contemporary Art (2002) and the Portuguese version of the artist’s book TITANIC’s wake by Allan Sekula (2003). In 2008, he produced Manthia Diawara’s film Maison Tropicale. 

SUSAN BUCK-MORSS is Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Graduate Center, CUNY, New York. Until recently, Buck-Morss held the Jan Rock Zubrow ’77 Professorship in Government, and is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory in the Department of Government, Cornell University. Buck-Morss’s earlier research and teaching encompass a range of areas, including continental theory, specifically German critical philosophy and the Frankfurt School. In addition, she works on Islamism, sovereignty, globalization, visual culture and social theory, legitimacy and faith, and the economies of political vision. Buck-Morss’s newest book is Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), which will appear in Korean, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, and German translations. Her other books include Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (Verso, 2003); Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (MIT Press, 2000); The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1989); and The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School (Free Press, 1977; 2nd ed., 2002).

ANDREA BUDDENSIEG is curator and project manager of the project GAM (Global Art and the Museum) at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Karlsruhe. She received her PhD in art history from the University of Bonn. She worked at KPM Porzellan Manufaktur Berlin and was part of the project management team for the exhibition Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art in 2001–2002 at ZKM. From 2002 to 2006 she ran the Public Relations Department at ZKM. In 2011 –2012, she curated together with Peter Weibel the exhibition The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds after 1989 at ZKM. Her main research interests include twentieth-century design and contemporary art. She has lectured at several academies, and in 2008, she was guest scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), National Gallery of Art, in Washington D.C. She has contributed to exhibition catalogues and is coeditor of several books, including Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective (2007), The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, Museums (2009), Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture (2011), and The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (2013).

ELVIRA DYANGANI OSE is curator international art, supported by Guaranty Trust Bank at Tate Modern, London. Before joining Tate Modern, Dyangani Ose worked as curator at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville. She served as guest curator for the Triennial SUD–Salon Urbain de Douala in Douala in 2010, and is currently the artistic director of the third edition of Rencontres Picha—Biennale de Lubumbashi 2012–2013. As curator she has developed numerous interdisciplinary projects, focusing on the politics of representation, social and urban imaginaries, and the role of artists in history making. Her recent curatorial projects include major exhibitions such as Carrie Mae Weems: Social Studies (2010) and Nontsikelelo Veleko: Welcome to Paradise (2009), as well as interdisciplinary collective projects such as Attempt to Exhaust an African Place (2007 –2008), Africalls? (2007), and Olvida quién soy/ Erase me from who I am (2006). She was general curator of the Arte inVisible program at ARCO Madrid, in 2009 and 2010. She is currently completing her PhD in history of art and visual studies at Cornell University, New York. She holds a master’s degree in theory and history of architecture and a BA degree in history of art.

FATIMA EL-TAYEB is associate professor in the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Literature and associate director of Critical Gender Studies, University of California San Diego. Her scholarly interests include African and comparative diaspora studies, queer theory, transnational feminism, European migrant and

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Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. A contributing editor for ten years for the U.S.-based journal Public Culture, he is also a senior researcher at the Witwatersrand Institute of Social and Economic Research. He is the author of numerous books in French and is mostly known in the English-speaking world for his classic On the Postcolony (2001). His latest book Sortir de la grande nuit (Editions La Decouverte, Paris, 2010) will be published in 2013 by Columbia University Press.

SANDY PRITA MEIER is assistant professor of African art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the visual culture of east African port cities. She has a book in preparation titled Architecture of the Elsewhere: Swahili Port Cities, Empire and Desire and has publications in African Arts, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Artforum, and Arab Studies Journal, as well as contributions to several exhibition catalogues and edited volumes.

TEJUMOLA OLANIYAN is Louise Durham Mead Professor of English and African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also senior fellow of the Institute for Research in the Humanities. He is founding chair of the African Diaspora and the Atlantic World Research Circle (2003–2010) and currently codirects the Music, Race, and Empire Research Circle. His research and teaching interests include African, African American, and postcolonial literatures and cultural studies. He has published widely in these areas, including African Diaspora and the Disciplines (2010, coedited with James H. Sweet); African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (2007, coedited with Ato Quayson); Arrest the Music!: Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics (2004, 2009; nominated for Best Research in World Music by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections in 2005); African Drama and Performance (2004, coedited with John Conteh-Morgan); and Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African American and Caribbean Drama (1995). One of his current projects is a book, Political Cartooning in Africa, forthcoming from Indiana University Press, and an online encyclopedia of African political cartoonists.

MANUELA RIBEIRO SANCHES is assistant professor with aggregation at the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon. She edits Artafrica and is coordinating the project Dislocating Europe: Post-Colonial Perspectives in Literary, Anthropological, and Historical Studies at the University of Lisbon. She edited the books Portugal não é um país pequeno: Contar a Império na pós-colonialidade (Cotovia, 2006) and Deslocalizar a ‘Europa’ Antropologia, arte, literatura e história na pós-colonialidade (Cotovia, 2005), and coedited with Carlos Branco Mendes and João Ferreira Duarte Connecting

Peoples: Transcultural and Disciplinary Identities (Colibri 2004).

BERNI SEARLE  is a world-renowned South African artist who works with photography, video, and film to produce lens-based installations that stage narratives connected to history, memory, and place.  Often politically and socially engaged, her work also draws on the universal emotions associated with vulnerability, loss, and beauty. She received her master of arts in fine art degree from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town (1995). Solo exhibitions during 2011 included Shimmer at Stevenson gallery, Cape Town, and Interlaced, which featured new commissioned work, opened at De Hallen in Bruges, Belgium, and traveled to the Museum for Moderne Kunst Arnhem in the Netherlands and Frac Lorraine in Metz France. Recent group exhibitions include Figures and Fictions at Victoria and Albert Museum, London; She Devil at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome; The Dissolve, SITE Santa Fe, 8th International Biennial, Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York. She participated in the second Johannesburg Biennale (1997) and the Venice Biennales of 2001 and 2005. She received the Minister of Culture Prize at the 2000 Dakar Biennale and the UNESCO/AICA Award at the 1998 Cairo Biennale. Searle lives and works in Cape Town and is currently associate professor at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.

BAHIA SHEHAB is a Lebanese-Egyptian artist, designer, and Islamic art historian. She is a creative director with MI7-Cairo, working on projects relevant to cultural heritage. She is associate professor of practice at American University in Cairo and head of the Graphic Design program for the Department of the Arts. Shehab is also a PhD candidate at Leiden University, Netherlands. Her work has been on display at Traffic Gallery in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Beijing International Typography Exhibition in Beijing, China; Haus Der Kunst in Munich, Germany; Palazzo Lucarini Contemporary in Trevi, Italy; and Bielefelder Kunstverein in Bielefeld, Germany. Graduating from the American University in Beirut with a degree in graphic design in 1999, Shehab worked as a creative director with several multinational advertising agencies in Beirut, Dubai, and Cairo, developing international and regional advertising campaigns. Her book A Thousand Times NO: The Visual History of Lam-Alif was published in 2010 by Khatt Books in Amsterdam.

PETER WEIBEL is an artist, curator, and theorist. He is professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. From 1984–1989 he served as head of the digital arts laboratory at the Media Department of New York

University in Buffalo, and in 1989 he founded the Institute of New Media at the Städelschule in Frankfurt-on-Main, Germany, which he directed until 1995. Between 1986 and 1995, he was in charge of the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria. He commissioned the Austrian pavilions at the Venice Biennale from 1993–1999. From 1993–1998 he was chief curator at the Neue Galerie Graz, Austria, and since 1999 he is chairman and CEO of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany. In 2008 he served as artistic director of the Biennial of Sevilla and as artistic director of the Fourth Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2011. Among the numerous awards he received are the Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge-Preis fuer unkonventionelle Kunstvermittlung of Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung, with the Verdienstmedail le des Landes Baden-Wuerttemberg and the Europäische Kultur-Projektpreis of the European Foundation for Culture. Weibel has been appointed as a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts Munich and the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste, Düsseldorf, Germany. He was also a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2009–2012). 

SELENE WENDT is an art historian, curator, and writer based in Oslo, Norway. She has been working as director of the Stenersen Museum since 2004 and as chief curator at Henie Onstad Art Centre from 1997–2004. She has curated numerous international exhibitions, including Shirin Neshat: Beyond Orientalism, Ghada Amer: Reading Between the Threads, Liza Lou: Leaves of Glass, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons: Mil Maneras Para Decir Adios, Daniele Buetti: Will Beauty Save the World, Abbas Kiarostami: Shadows in the Snow, and Crispin Gurholt: Live Photo, in addition to thematic group exhibitions such as Art through the Eye of the Needle, which addressed the breakdown of barriers between art and fashion; A Doll’s House, which included artists whose works are influenced by doll symbolism; Equatorial Rhythms, which featured visual artists whose works are influenced by music; and Beauty and Pleasure in South African Contemporary Art. She has written and edited numerous exhibition catalogues and books, including Marianne Heske +/o (Skira), Crispin Gurholt Live Photo II (Skira), When a Painting Moves . . . Something Must be Rotten! (Edizione Charta), and Fresh Paint (Edizione Charta). She has also written articles and essays for various international publications. Her most recent large-scale exhibition, The Storytellers: Narratives in International Contemporary Art, was curated in collaboration with Gerardo Mosquera. The exhibition featured international artists whose work is directly inspired by literature; it is accompanied by a Skira publication and a special-edition book featuring the work of Eloisa Cartonera.

SIEGFRIED ZIELINSKI is Michel Foucault Chair at the European Graduate School and chair of media theory, with a focus on archaeology and variantology of media, at the Institute of Time-Based Media at the Berlin University of Arts. He is also the founding and former president and professor of communication theory and audiovision at the Academy of Media Arts (Kunsthochschule für Medien), Cologne. He studied theatre, philology, philosophy, linguistics, and political science and was a media specialist in the 1980s at the Technical University of Berlin. Zielinski has been professor for communication and media studies since 1993. He was professor from 1990–1993 for audiovisual studies at the University of Salzburg, where he developed the teaching, production, and research department Audiovisionen. Zielinski’s research focuses on the history, theory, and practice of audiovisual media with an emphasis on media archeology and a hermeneutics of electronic media. He has published numerous books and essays on the history, theory, and practice of cinema, television, and video, including Veit Harlan, Zur Geschichte des Videorecorders, Audiovisions, Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History, and more recently, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (with Gloria Custance and Timothy Druckrey, 2006). Since 2005, he has been developing a five-volume Variantology of the Media and has thus far published three volumes (vol. 1 edited with Silvia Wagnermaier, 2005; vol. 2 with David Link, 2006; and vol. 3ff with Ekchard Fuerlus, 2008).

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The conference was organized by Ray Craib (History) and Barry Maxwell (ICM, Comparative Literature, and American Studies). All of the conference sessions are available on the ICM website (icm.arts.cornell.edu). Craib and Maxwell are at work on a volume of collected essays by the conference participants, to be published by PM Press.

narchism: no gods, no masters. Enough with religion and the state. This workshop made an additional demand: no peripheries.

The diffusionist line—anarchism was in areas outside of Europe an import and a script

to be mimicked—has faced challenges in recent years from research that reveals anarchism’s pluralistic origins and sheer multiplicity of local variants. In this sense one might go so far as to argue that early twentieth-century anarchists were the first postcolonial theorists in their emphasis on the world as their home, in their peripatetic radicalism, in the fact that anarchist perspectives could be born from (rather than prior to) migration, in their critique of the constant efforts to divide (and hierarchize) people.

To reflect on the histories and cultures of the

program

September 21, 2012

Session I: 11:15 a.m.–12:45 p.m.

Learning from Indigenous Experience: Anarchism and IndigeneityModerator: Eric Cheyfitz, Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters, English, Cornell University

In the opening talk of the conference, titled “Visualizing Indigenous Resistance,” Jolene Rickard, associate professor in the Department of History of Art at Cornell, argued for the need to think through indigenous visual resistance in terms of sovereignty, a term linked to a

larger, global condition of indigeneity. In order to work through some of this, Rickard turns to Jacques Rancier’s Aesthetics and Its Discontents, which she suggests offers insight into both the “political possibilities” and “ perennial problems of critical art and the modernist project.” Rickard also looks to the artist Skeena Reece’s performance at the 2010 Sydney Biennale. At its core, the talk wrestled with art as a means of resistance that could also build community for indigenous peoples and their visual audiences. Although the initial slide of the presentation prompted the relationship between aesthetics and anarchy through the equation aesthetics + anarchy?, anarchy was mostly bracketed; I wonder how this politics of indigenous visual resistance might interact with anarchist ideas in a more explicit way, which might include how some of these artists think of their politics in relationship to anarchist ideas and practice, or if they view their work as anarchistic critique of settler colonialism.

In his talk titled “Place Against Empire,” Glen Coulthard, assistant professor in the First Nations Studies Program and Political Science at the University of British Columbia, pushed the audience to rethink Marxist thought, turn to the last section of Capital, Volume 1, and start with a close reading of primitive accumulation. For Coulthard, Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation entailed a cofoundational process of dispossession of land and proletarianization, but in both Marx’s writing and that of others, the dispossession of land as a spatial register has been undervalued within this theory. Any theory or critique of capitalism, though, must confront this dispossession of land, and any critique that does not reinforces the subjugation of indigenous peoples, settler colonialism, white supremacy, and, in the end, capitalism itself. Coulthard suggests that we can read Marx through a less temporally rigid and “normative developmentalism” lens via critiques of these ideas by people like Peter Kropotkin. There needs to be a shift from a focus on the capital relation to the colonial relation, which will help to “anticipate and interrogate” state-based and/or other leftist forms of dispossession. Coulthard argues that our critiques of capitalism and capitalist accumulation must situate indigenous peoples and their ongoing role in land dispossession and by doing so we can gain “invaluable glimpses into indigenous place based ethical practices.” 

Closing out the panel, Hilary Klein spoke on the Zapatista movement and the “blending of indigenous traditions with revolutionary praxis.” Klein provided a brief overview history of the founding of the Zapatistas (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN), from local liberation theology to urban Marxists going to Chiapas and the blending of these concepts to create a political philosophy that acted as a central node in the antiglobalization movement of the 1990s. Relating her talk directly to the theme of the conference, Klein noted that although the EZLN is not an explicitly anarchist organization, it does share quite a few political affinities

with anarchism such as a critique of the state and an emphasis on social transformation through building alternative institutions rather than attempts at taking state power; yet the EZLN also has a hierarchically organized military. Klein emphasized Zapatista willingness to adapt and evolve over time, pointing to the shift from the initial push to take over the state through arms to their current strategy of not taking state power and focus on building new ways of living in Chiapas through good governance councils and direct democracy. In the question and answer section, Klein discussed the ways in which the movement was initiated with a somewhat flat concept of patriarchy to a much more nuanced gender analysis, due in large part to women organizing for a change.

—Joshua SavalaDepartment of History, Graduate Student

Session II: 2:00–4:00 p.m.

A Thousand Links: Transnational Lines in an Anarchist AgeModerator: Barry Carr, La Trobe University

The panel “A Thousand Links: Transnational Lines in an Anarchist Age” featured four speakers: David Porter (professor emeritus of political science, SUNY Empire State College), Maia Ramnath (author, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Anti-Authoritarian History of Indian’s Liberation Struggle), Adrienne Hurley (associate professor of East Asian studies, McGill University), and Steven Hirsch (professor of international and area studies, Washington University, St. Louis). Moderated by Barry Carr, the panel addressed two issues. First, all four speakers challenged the diffusionist line, which asserts that most of the important “modern” ideas, including anarchism, have emanated from Europe and disseminated throughout other parts of the world. Second, they localized particular examples to reveal the conversational and circulative nature of transnational anarchism, as well as the need to dispute conservative conceptualization of anarchism and problematic political hierarchies within anarchist thought. In other words, the panel sought to elaborate one of the conference’s central themes: to call into question encyclopedic and purist definitions and histories of anarchism.

David Porter’s talk “Competing Conceptions of Kabylia’s Insurrectionary Assemblies Movement of 2001” examined the horizontalist political movement in Kabylia, Algeria from 2001–2004. What began as an escalating situation between police and Algerian youth turned into a regional challenge to Algerian state authority. In the midst of the insurrection, the Kabyle people employed long-standing traditions of consensus

2012annual conference In REVIEW

antistatist mutual aid movements of the last century, then, was one aim of this conference. It had a second aim that dovetailed with the first: the reexamination of the historical relationships between anarchism and communism, without starting from the position of sectarian difference (Marxism versus anarchism). Rather, we looked at how anarchism and communism intersected; how the insurgent Left could appear—and in fact was—much more ecumenical, capacious, and eclectic than frequently portrayed; and how such capaciousness is a hallmark of anarchist practice, which is prefigurative in its politics and antihierarchical and antidogmatic in its ethics. Co-sponsorsAfricana Studies and Research Center; American Indian Program; American Studies; Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future; Comparative Literature; Development Sociology; English; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Government; History; History of Art and Visual Studies; Institute for German Cultural Studies; Latin American Studies Program; Latino Studies Program; Near Eastern Studies; Romance Studies; Rose Goldsen Lecture Series; and the Society for the Humanities

Global Anarchisms:no gods, no masters, no peripheries September 21–22, 2012

Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell

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democracy, local assemblies, and federated political organization. They used these traditions to defend the movement against outside attack and internal breaches of trust while practicing self-governance and making practical and revolutionary demands.

The implications of Porter’s presentation are wide-ranging. As Porter noted, anarchists and postsituationists in France embraced the movement. While the movement was not explicitly anarchist, its organization and development along flexible, horizontalist, and democratic principles reveal that practicing and learning from what looks anarchist does not necessitate nominalizing and adjectivizing it as such.

For her part, Maia Ramnath described the dual intervention of her recent book Decolonizing Anarchism in her talk, “Anarchism’s Third Worlds: Third Ways?” She presented anarchism not as a rational modernist movement, nor as a romantic reaction to modernization processes. Instead, she asserted that it provides a third way, both as a modern response to modernization processes and as a rejection of premodern hierarchies. Her dual intervention was to demonstrate, on the one hand, how anticolonial movements reveal anarchism as a decolonizing force, and on the other, how an anticolonial approach to anarchism challenges the diffusionist model. For Ramnath, decolonizing anarchism requires emphasizing the role of colonial relations in shaping modernization processes and decentering Western anarchist traditions in antiauthoritarian and egalitarian tendencies. For anticolonial movements in South Asia, she stressed separating anticolonialism from nationalism. She argued that an anarchist approach to anticolonialism recasts the colonial struggle as one against traditional colonialism, postcolonial neoliberalism, and internal colonialism practiced by nation states. Ramnath finished by giving a brief history of the intersection between anticolonial struggles and anarchism in early twentieth-century South Asia.

Adrienne Hurley’s presentation “Global Anarchist Skills: Ditching School, Being Unmanageable, and Practicing Fearlessness” explored the topics of fear, transnational skill sharing, and overcoming the barriers of political hierarchies. In discussing both student strikes in Quebec and antinuke protests in post–Fukushima, Japan, Hurley emphasized two key points. First, she addressed the “ooh, scary” reaction some have to anarchism by embracing it as an empowering idea. Second, she asserted the need for expanding the scope of skill sharing in terms of both geography and political ideas. She highlighted how the concerns of the Japanese regarding nuclear power were not, by the nature of the crisis, limited to Japan. In a similar fashion, she reminded anarchists how the concerns of primitive anarchists and anticivilization activists are not limited to these groups. Thus, she illustrated the need for greater transnational and transpolitical openness and conversation in a world

that demands collective action and common goals for mutual survival.

In his talk, “Regional Variations of Transnational Anarchist Influence in Peru, 1903–1929” Steven Hirsch addressed the case of transnationalism and the Peruvian anarchists. He sought to challenge the narrative maintained by some that Latin American anarchism was a product of high-density trans-Atlantic connections, primarily through immigration, such as in Argentina and Brazil. He used the case of Peru to demonstrate that anarchist movements were sustained by three additional transnational characteristics. First, Hirsch demonstrated the role of a robust transnational anarchist press that connected Peru to other anarchist movements throughout Latin America and other parts of the world. Second, he illustrated the role of symbolic mobilization by combining transnational celebrations such as May Day and martyrs with local events and historical figures. Additionally, he emphasized the institutional connections Peruvian anarchists had with the Industrial Workers of the World and the Argentine anarchist movement. Last, he examined the role of anarchist exiles in Peru in establishing transnational links between Peru and other movements.

The brief question and answer session emphasized two points. First, questions reflected an elaboration of Hurley’s “ooh scary” factor in the popular reception of anarchism, particularly in the construction of anarchist subjectivity. Second, the panelists finished by highlighting the importance of intergenerational links, in addition to transnational ones, in creating and maintaining a robust anarchist movement.

—Kyle HarveyDepartment of History, Graduate Student

Session III: 4:30–6:00 p.m.

The Horizon at the Centre: No PeripheriesModerator: Mecke Nagel, Professor, Philosophy, State University of New York, Cortland

The horizon shapes our setting. It is, as Jodi Dean says, a dimension of experience that we can never lose even if we fail to see it. In this sense, the three conferences gathered around the topic of “The Horizon at the Center” attempted to reshape the setting of how anarchist movements in the Southern Cone and the Balkans are seen from the “center.”

Ray Craib centered on the figure of an anarchist poet, José Domingo Gómez Rojas, originally from La Rioja, Spain, but who lived most of his life in Chile. On the edges of any classification, Gómez Rojas was accused of being a “foreign anarchist” in the common language of the police; nevertheless, as Craib argued, his activity

was deeply rooted in Santiago and involved in labor protests. To make a case for this, Craib used the term “sedentary anarchist,” putting forward a very precise intent of challenging the mainstream idea that America was a “tabula rasa” ready for Europe’s enlightenment. One of the most interesting issues raised by this talk was the notion of ideas being transported as if they could be “shipped” over the Atlantic physically, but not without changes or needing a good ironing to regain their form after such a long trip. This “importation paradigm” that ideas can travel as luggage dismisses, for example, Chile as not being capable of producing its own notions and needing ideas to come from somewhere else in order for them to be supposedly more coherent. It is as if ideas had an inherently proprietary right granted to Europe. In this sense, the reshaping of the setting would be thinking Gómez Roja’s thoughts and organization skills are in their rightful place and are not “misplaced ideas.”

Geoffroy de Laforcade provided a descriptive historic over view of this f lexibi l ity and l iteral transportation of anarchist ideas specifically through anarchist and syndicalist federations. These federations had a horizontal nonbureaucratic organization that was assembled specifically in Argentina in larger syndicalist movements. In this sense, conceiving labor history within this paradigm also allows the opening up of a space of voluntary association that works and develops people’s consciousness, departing from a local level and facilitating an integrative role. As such, this “sedentary anarchism” starts to foster an educational function within a kind of propaganda that has an important networking function.

The Balkans have usually been dismissed as an “undeveloped land.” Nevertheless, as de Laforcade argued, the Balkans have a rich socialist tradition nurtured by many groups and perspectives. Given this position, it turned out to be the site of a radical synthesis whose emblematic trenching site is embodied in the figure of Svetozar Marković. Marković was a socialist educated in Russia who organized the first socialist newspaper of the region and was involved in cooperative movements. At the end, Grubačic’s outline managed to provide some interesting and fundamental guidelines in order to trace anarchism in the Balkans and redefine the whole tradition.

This panel served the purpose of outlining with broad brushstrokes a horizon of peripheral figures who were nevertheless central for the anarchist tradition, not only locally as one would suppose, but also globally, since they contributed to a unique networking. Nevertheless, precisely because of this descriptive and wide perspective the three talks settled upon, the panel lacked, and very much called for, a further theoretical approach to this problem that still unsettles our horizon.

—Christina Soto van der PlasDepartment of Romance Studies, Graduate Student

September 22, 2012

Session I: 10:15–11:45 a.m.

The Black Mirror: Anarchism, Surrealism, and the SituationistsModerator: Barry Maxwell, Senior Lecturer, Comparative Literature and Program in American Studies, Cornell University

Gavin Arnall‘Masters without Slaves’: Vaneigem contra NietzscheThe Belgian situationist Raoul Vaneigem’s Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations, popularly known in English as  The Revolution of Everyday Life, is an explosive text saturated with Nietzschean concepts. Nevertheless, this paper argues that Vaneigem is deceptively Nietzschean, for he subtly critiques and refashions Nietzsche’s ideas in ways that are antithetical to the latter’s thought.  Vaneigem, in other words, confronts Nietzsche with anarchist principles.  To elucidate this point, we consider Nietzsche and Vaneigem on the master/slave dichotomy, the will to power, and the relationship between the individual and the community.

Iain Boal‘Vùng sâu Vùng xa’ (The Deep and the Far): Anarchism, History, and a World in Common

Penelope RosemontSurrealism and Situationism: An Attempt at a Comparison and Critique by an Admirer and Participant, Including a Brief Look at a Seemingly Far-away Place in Space and Time, or King Kong meets Godzilla . . . How New Thoughts are Let Loose in the World

Presentation: 1:00–2:00 p.m.

Bahia ShehabArtist, Designer, and Islamic Art Historian; Associate Professor of Professional Practice, American University in Cairo; Creative Director at Mi7-Cairo; PhD Candidate at Leiden University

A Thousand Times NOShehab reflects on her own artistic practice in the context of revolutionary times. She demonstrates how her

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own work has been transformed by the revolution and discusses new forms of public interventions and genres such as graffiti and collective work she resorted to in her own unfolding practice.

Session II: 2:00–3:30 p.m.

Black, Red, and Grey: Anarchism, Communism, and Political TheoryModerator: Satya Mohanty, Professor, English, Cornell University

Mohammed BamyehAnarchy, Enlightenment, Tradition: A Perspective from the Arab SpringThe current Arab revolutions, with their spontaneous dynamism, and absence of hierarchical guidance, rigid structure, or unified leadership, seem to possess clear anarchist features. While these features do not make the revolutions anarchist in ideology or intent, they must be clearly based on familiar traditions of spontaneous mobilization, a memory of the experiences of past revolts, and an open vision of the future. There are two fundamental consequences for anarchist theory and practice that could be gleaned from the experiences of these revolts. The first has to do with the relationship between anarchism and tradition; the second with the “anarchist enlightenment,” namely, how leaderless revolutions become venues for constant learning through broadly practiced debates and conversations of a new type, not dominated by received wisdom. Both of these processes have received little attention in the emerging literature on the Arab revolutions, and the first has also received little attention in anarchist theory itself. This paper aims to clarify both themes, and in the process, contribute to developing a more globally informed, dynamic, and culturally enriched conception of anarchism.

Banu BarguAnti-anticommunizationThis talk is about the communization literature, which constitutes one of the most important theoretical bridges between anarchism and communism in the contemporary period. The paper discusses and critically evaluates the approaches to communization proposed by TC, Endnotes, and others and will consider points of tension, stagnation, and problems in search of how to move forward.

participant biographies GAVIN ARNALL holds a bachelor’s degree in the College Scholar Program from Cornell University and is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Princeton University. His current work focuses on the transformation of Marxism in Latin American and French Caribbean poetry, literature, and film. He has published articles in journals such as Critical Inquiry, The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Theory & Event. He is also an active participant in the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City and a volunteer professor of English literature at Garden State Penitentiary.

MOHAMMED A. BAMYEH i s pro f e s s or of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, with research and teaching interests in cultural and political globalization, Islamic studies, culture and revolution, civil society, and comparative social theory. He is the author, most recently, of Anarchy as Order: The History and Future of Civic Humanity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), Of Death and Dominion: The Existential Foundations of Governance (Northwestern University Press, 2007), and The Ends of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 2nd printing, 2002).  BANU BARGU (PhD, Cornell University, 2008) is an assistant professor of politics at the New School,

New York City, where she teaches political theory. Her main areas of interest are early modern, modern, and contemporary political theory, with particular interest in theories of sovereignty and resistance, Marxist, post-Marxist, and anarchist thought, and thinkers such as Machiavelli, Marx, Stirner, Schmitt, and Althusser. She has been the recipient of numerous teaching and research awards, including the Janice N. and Milton J. Esman Graduate Prize for Distinguished Scholarship (Best Dissertation Award); the Luigi Einaudi, Mellon, and Sage Fellowships; and the John M. and Emily B. Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching from Cornell University. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Theory & Event and Constellations, as well as various edited volumes: Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion (Columbia University Press, 2010), After Secular Law (Stanford University Press, 2011), “How Not to Be Governed”: Readings and Interpretations from a Critical Anarchist Left (Lexington, 2011), and The Anarchist Turn (Pluto Press, forthcoming). Her book manuscript Biopolitics and the Death Fast is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. 

IAIN BOAL is an Irish social historian of science, technics, and the commons, associated with Retort, a group of antinomian writers, artisans, and artists based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is one of the coauthors, with T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts, of Retort’s Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso). He is affiliated with the Institute of Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, and codirector of MayDay Rooms, a safe haven for “archives from below.” He is coeditor of West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California (PM Press) and author of The Green Machine (Notting Hill Editions), a brief planetary history of the bicycle. In 2005/2006, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Science and Technology.

BRUNO BOSTEELS is professor of romance studies at Cornell University. He is the author of several books, including  Alain Badiou, une trajectoire polémique (2007), The Actuality of Communism (2011), Badiou and Politics  (2011), and Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Religion, and Psychoanalysis in Times of Terror (2012). He is the translator of Theory of the Subject (2009) and Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy (2011), both by Alain Badiou. From 2005 until 2011 he served as general editor of diacritics.

GLEN COULTHARD (PhD, University of Victoria) is a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation and an assistant professor in the First Nations Studies Program and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. Coulthard has written and published numerous articles and chapters in the

areas of indigenous thought and politics, contemporary political theory, and radical social and political thought. He is currently writing a book on indigenous peoples and recognition politics in Canada. Coulthard lives in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories.

RAYMOND CRAIB teaches in the Department of History at Cornell University and is the author of Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Duke University Press, 2004; forthcoming in Spanish translation, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2013). He is currently completing a book on the persecution of “subversives” in Chile in 1920 and the death of the poet Jose Domingo Gomez Rojas. A number of his translations of Gomez Rojas’s poems can be found in New Letters: A Magazine of Writing & Art (fall 2011).

GEOFFROY DE LAFORCADE (PhD, Yale University, 2001) is an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean history and the director of internationalization at Norfolk State University in Virginia. He is the coeditor, with Kirk Shaffer, of an anthology on anarchism in Latin American history (University of Florida Press, forthcoming). His previous publications include a chapter in Steven Hirsch and Lucien Van Der Walt (eds,), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World, 1870–1940 (Brill, 2010) and an article in the special issue of Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina on “Transnational Anarchism in Latin America” (vol. 22, no. 2, July–December 2011). De Laforcade, a labor historian with interests in immigration, diaspora, and comparative history has also coauthored Transculturality and Perceptions of the Immigrant Other (Cambridge Scholars, 2011) and The How and Why of World History (Kendall-Hunt, 2011).

SILVIA FEDERICI is a feminist activist, writer, and teacher. In 1972, she was one of the cofounders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the international campaign for Wages for Housework. Among her writings are Revolution at Point Zero (PM Press, 2012) and Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004).

ANDREJ GRUBAČIĆ specializes in historical sociology of nonstate spaces, a comparative research endeavor of stateless spaces in the modern capitalist world system. Other interests include the sociology of global social movements and history of the Balkans. He is the author of several books, including Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays after Yugoslavia (PM Press, 2010), and is associate professor of anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Grubačić is a member of

Bruno BosteelsNeither Proletarian nor VanguardThis paper revisits the problematic links between communism, anarchism, and the Mexican revolution by returning to an often cited but much understudied work by José Revueltas, Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza. The paper also reflects upon the formation of the ideology of the Mexican revolution, both in terms of the echoes (accurate or not) from the Bolshevik revolution and in terms of the local formations of magonismo, Zapatismo, and villismo.

Session III: 4:00–6:00 p.m.

Improvocations: Silvia Federici, Iain Boal, and Peter LinebaughModerator: Sasha Lilley, Writer, Journalist, and Radio Broadcaster; Editor of PM Press’s imprint Spectre

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the Global Balkans network, Serbian Freedom Fight Movement, Retort Collective, the Industrial Workers of the World ( Wobblies), and World Social Forum International Council. A past organizer of Peoples’ Global Action, he is a fellow traveler of Zapatista-inspired direct action and Occupy movements.

STEVEN J. HIRSCH is professor of practice at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches courses on anarchism, Latin American history, and global labor movements in the Department of International and Area Studies. He coedited, with Lucien van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940, (Leiden: Brill Academic Press, 2010). He is currently preparing a book manuscript entitled “‘Study, Organize, Rebel’: A History of Peruvian Anarchism, 1898–1932.”

ADRIENNE HURLEY is an assistant professor in East Asian Studies and an associate member of the Department of Integrated Studies in Education. She earned a PhD in East Asian languages and literatures at the University of California, Irvine, in 2000. She served as a court appointed special advocate for abused youth in Orange County and was awarded a Japan Foundation dissertation fellowship in 1997–1998 for her research on child abuse and youth violence in contemporary Japan. She held a postdoctoral fellowship in Japan studies at Stanford University from 2002–2005. From 2005–2008 she was assistant professor in Asian and Slavic languages and literature at the University of Iowa, where she was also the founder and director of the University of Iowa Youth Empowerment Academy and coordinator of the University of Iowa’s One World Foundation Young Leader Scholarship program. Hurley’s translation of Tomoyuki Hoshino’s novel Lonely Hearts Killer was published by PM Press in 2009 and is the first book-length work by the award-winning novelist to be translated into English. She is the author of Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures: Narratives of Youth and Violence from Japan and the United States (Duke University Press, 2011).

Film director G. PETER JEMISON (Seneca) is the manager of Ganondagan State Historic Site, a recreation of a seventeenth-century Seneca village, located in Victor, New York. Jemison represents the Seneca Nation of Indians on repatriation issues; he serves on the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and formerly served on the board of directors of the American Association of Museums. He is also an artist whose work has been widely shown for more than two decades. His paintings and drawings have shown in solo exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. He was the founding director of the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York City. Jemison

received a BS in art education and an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Buffalo State College in Buffalo, New York.

HILARY KLEIN is a lead organizer at Make the Road New York, where she oversees the workers’ rights, affordable housing, and leadership development programs. Klein is originally from Washington, DC, and has been engaged in social justice and community organizing work for more than 15 years on issues such as affordable housing, immigrants’ rights, and violence against women. She spent six years in Chiapas, Mexico, working with women’s projects in Zapatista communities and is currently working on a book about women’s participation in the Zapatista movement.

SASHA LILLEY is a writer and radio broadcaster. She is cofounder and host of the critically acclaimed program of radical ideas, Against the Grain. She is the series editor of PM Press’s political economy imprint, Spectre; author of Capital and Its Discontents; and coauthor of Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth.

BARRY MAXWELL holds graduate degrees from Stanford (PhD) and Simon Fraser (MA). At work on a book called A Grammar of Enclosure, which takes up the theft of the commons in the Americas, he is also in the last stages of editing Recognition at the Crossroads, the selected prose of the poet Lorenzo Thomas.  He has published on Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Michael Ondaatje, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin. Two further articles from this hand are “Jazz in Jail: The Supplement of the Musicians’ Narratives” (Genre 35, no. 3–4, 2002, a special issue on prison writing), and “‘I hate it when things become so pat as to be oppressive’: Staying Out of Range of the Commonplace in Nathaniel Mackey’s Bedouin Hornbook” in Holding Their Own: Perspectives on the Multi-Cultural Literature of the United States (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2000).  Maxwell’s “Chromatic Shadows, So What: Notes toward Clearer Reception of David Hammons’s Signals” appears in Diaspora Memory Place: David Hammons/ Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons/ Pamela Z, edited by Cheryl Finley and Salah M. Hassan (Munich: Prestel, 2008). In 2008, Maxwell was a fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

PETER LINEBAUGH, professor, a student of E.P. Thompson, received his PhD in British social history from the University of Warwick in 1975. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Columbia University, he taught at the University of Rochester, New York University, University of Massachusetts (Boston), Harvard, and Tufts before joining the University of Toledo in 1994. He is the author of the acclaimed social history of crime

and the death penalty, The London Hanged (1991). With Doug Hay and E.P. Thompson he edited Albion’s Fatal Tree (1975). With Marcus Rediker he wrote The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon, 2000), which has been translated into German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Korean, and with a Japanese edition in progress. His most recent book is the Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (California, 2008), which has become a reference point in the international discussion of the commons. He has written for The New Left Review, the Radical History Review, Social History, the Times Literary Supplement, and the online magazine CounterPunch. He was an active member of the Midnight Notes Collective. For Verso Book’s Revolutions Series he wrote Peter Linebaugh Presents Thomas Paine (Verso 2009), and for PM Press he has written an introduction to the republication of Edward Thompson’s William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (Spring 2011). Currently Linebaugh is working on the relation between commoning and Atlantic revolutionary aspirations of two hundred years ago.

DAVID PORTER is professor emeritus of political science at SUNY/Empire State College, where since 1979 he taught courses on comparative politics, revolution, and modern Algeria, among others. He previously taught in Montreal and Maryland. In Algeria in 1965–1966, he studied the ideals and realities of the country’s post-independence, large-scale experience with workers’ self-management for his doctoral dissertation. He edited Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman and the Spanish Revolution, originally published in 1983, and he has also written on anarchic dimensions of the American revolutionary period. He is the author of a new book, Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria (AK Press, 2011) on the perspectives and activities of French anarchists concerning Algeria from 1954 to the present. For the past few years he has written articles periodically on current Algerian developments for ZNet, Counterpunch, Common Dreams, Pambazuka News and other political websites.

MAIA RAMNATH is a teacher, writer, activist, and artist living in New York City. She is the author of Decolonizing Anarchism (AK Press, 2012) and The Haj  to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (UC Press, 2011). She is currently a member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies board, South Asia Solidarity Initiative, and the Occupy Wall Street Global Justice working group.

PENELOPE ROSEMONT is a painter, photogra-pher, collagist, and writer. She is editor of Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (University of Texas,

1998) and author of Dreams & Everyday Life: André Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, SDS & the Seven Cities of Cibola (Kerr, 2008). With Franklin Rosemont (1943–2009) she met Breton and Debord in 1966. Since 1983, she has served as a director of Charles H. Kerr  Publishing Company, a Chicago-based publisher of books on history and radical history.

JOLENE RICKARD is a visual historian, artist, and curator interested in the issues of indigeneity within a global context. She is currently a recipient of a Ford Foundation Research Grant and is conducting research in the Americas, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia, culminating in a new journal on indigenous aesthetics, and has a forthcoming book on visualizing sovereignty. She served as interim chair for the Department of Art from 2009–2010 and is an affiliated faculty member in the American Indian Program at Cornell University. She is a 2010–2011 recipient of a Cornell University Society of the Humanities Fellowship on the thematic topic of global aesthetics.

BAHIA SHEHAB is a Lebanese-Egyptian artist, designer, and Islamic art historian studying ancient Arabic script and visual heritage to solve modern-day design issues. Shehab is a creative director with Mi7-Cairo, working on projects relevant to cultural heritage. She is associate professor of professional practice at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and developed a new four-year graphic design program for the Department of the Arts, with the first specialized courses on the History of Arab Design and communication as a discipline in the Arab world. She is also a PhD candidate at Leiden University in Netherlands. Her research is focused on Fatimid Kufic inscriptions and epigraphic evidence in the decorative arts and on portable items in the Mediterranean basin and beyond; it is concerned with form versus content and the extent to which the medium dictated the message. Her MA thesis entitled “Floriated Kufic on the Monuments of Fatimid Cairo” received the Nadia Niazi Thesis Award at AUC in 2009. Shehab’s work has been on display at Traffic Gallery in Dubai, UAE; Beijing International Typography Exhibition in Beijing, China; Haus Der Kunst in Munich, Germany; Palazzo Lucarini Contemporary in Trevi, Italy; and Bielefelder Kunstverein in Bielefeld, Germany. Graduating from the American University of Beirut with a degree in graphic design in 1999, she worked as a creative director with several multinational advertising agencies in Beirut, Dubai, and Cairo, developing international and regional advertising campaigns. She notably created a De Beers campaign, which won an International Advertising Association gold award. Shehab is a TED Global Fellow for 2012. Her book A Thousand Times NO: The Visual History of Lam-Alif was published in 2010 by Khatt Books in Amsterdam.

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Caribbean Theory: Creole, Créolité, CreolizationNeal Allar, Department of Romance Studies

Nicolette Lee, Department of English

Alex Lenoble, Department of Romance Studies

Elise Finielz, Department of Romance Studies

Melissa Rosario, Department of Anthropology

Juan Manuel Espinosa, Department of Romance Studies

Michael Reyes, Department of Romance Studies

Kavita Singh, Department of Comparative Literature

Jan Steyn, Department of Comparative Literature

As Caribbeanists, we tend to be isolated in our respective departments. The ICM Caribbean Theory reading group allowed us to participate in an invaluable and intellectually stimulating experience of collaborative scholarship. Participants included students from a diversity of fields: French, comparative literature, anthropology, English, and Africana studies. After organizing two public events and meeting every other week to share our different perspectives about Caribbean literature, culture, and theory, we have become actively

graduate reading groups 2012/2013 recipients The ICM Graduate Reading Group Program supported five groups in 2012–2013. Summaries of the groups’ findings follow.

involved in the burgeoning field of Caribbean studies. The project of our reading group was to investigate

how the concepts of creole, creolité, and creolization emerged in different linguistic, literary, and artistic traditions of the region (principally Hispanophone, Francophone, and Anglophone) and to analyze their contemporary elaborations and theoretical uses. Questions of interest for us included: How do the different Caribbean traditions define these terms? Are there common linguistic traits that will allow us to understand how Creole and creolized language function in the social realm? Is creolization a necessarily anticolonial phenomenon? What are the dangers of universalizing creolization to speak of a global modernity? To address these questions we started by reading some of the main authors of Caribbean linguistics before moving on to authors writing more generally about the Caribbean area, including Edouard Glissant; Antonio Benitez-Rojo; Kamau Brathwaite; and the Martinican “créolistes” Raphaël Confiant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Jean Bernabé. During the second semester, we broadened our approach by reading recent theoretical texts to ask the question of creole, creolité, and creolization in regard to the question of the specific and the singular that has emerged in the recent years. To that purpose we read Peter Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial along with excerpts from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, as well as Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Empire.

We spent a good part of the first semester working

through the various treatments of creole, creolization, and creoleness in different disciplines, from anthropology to linguistics to history to literary studies. We paid particular attention to the intersecting and divergent understanding of these terms not only between the disciplines, but also within them. In our second meeting, for example, in which each group member was responsible for reading and reporting on a different book of Creole linguistics, we discovered a striking amount of disagreement among the small cadre of linguists who study creoles. Hot-button issues include the following: where most creoles began to take form—West African staging areas for transportation of enslaved Africans or the New World Plantations that were their destination; the role of pidgins in the development of creoles; the placement of superstrate and substrate languages—for example, whether a French creole primarily lays French vocabulary onto a grammatical structure resembling African languages, or vice versa; and the controversial notion that Creoles are zero degree of natural languages, relatively untainted by arbitrary ornamentation because so recently formed.

The linguistic discussion overlapped with other texts that we read, in which creole and creoleness acquires a cultural and metaphorical meaning. Kamau Brathwaite’s History of the Voice presents both an account of how nation language has formed in the Anglophone Caribbean and also the ways in which this language has been rendered into a new kind of poetry with innovative rhythms and oral styles. As we read through other accounts of language and poetics from the French and Spanish Caribbean such as Patrick Chamoiseau’s and Raphaël Confiant’s Lettre Créoles and Fernando Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint, we saw how much the conception of Creole changes not only within and across the disciplines, but also between language groupings, whose colonial histories diverge significantly.

In our second semester, in which we read more general postcolonial theory and philosophy, our focus shifted to the theoretical and political viability of creolization and its transportations and appropriations. The thread that connected our discussion of Hallward, Hardt and Negri, Deleuze and Guattari—all of whom we read in the light of Glissant—was the pertinence of place to creolization: does creolization belong to the local or the global? Hallward’s discussion of the relative worth of the singular and the specific; Negri’s and Hardt’s concept of a global, machinic, total Empire; and their engagement with Deleuze and Guattari re-posed the question of place, its necessity, its fragility, and even its possibility. These theorists ask us to think about both the pain and the promise of dispossession, and both the exclusivity and the security of belonging.

Our regular meetings were supplemented and focused by two events with more advanced scholars in the field. First, on March 11, 2013, Professor Jean Jonassaint from Syracuse University, a specialist in Caribbean

literature, gave a talk about a controversial essay written by three Francophone authors—Jean Barnabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant—published for the first time in 1989 under the title In Praise of Creoleness. Though his talk was in French, we decided to open it up to a broader audience (mainly the Romance Studies department and the comparative literature department). His presentation gave us an historical overview of the term “creole,” the concept “creoleness,” and the politics of these terms in the French publishing world. Indeed, according to Jonassaint, the publication of In Praise of Creoleness, which is the transcription of a conference given in Paris, appears to be a work of propaganda operated by one of the major French publishing houses. This manifesto inspired a lot of critique and opposition, especially with regard to the term “creoleness,” which describes not only identity or an ontology (Creoleness vs Americanness or Frenchness), but also writing practices that already existed before the publication of In Praise of Creoleness.

Our second special event took place April 22, 2013. We gathered three of our “local” scholars in the field of Caribbean studies: Gerard Aching (professor of Romance studies, director of the Africana Center), Natalie Melas (professor of comparative literature), and Viranjini Munasinghe (professor of anthropology). Each scholar gave a brief presentation on one of their articles, after which there was a roundtable discussion.

Inquiries in Latin American Philosophy and Critical ThoughtGeraldine Monterroso, Department of Romance Studies

Bret Leraul, Department of Comparative Literature

Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, Department of English

Lacie Buckwalter, Department of Romance Studies

Rebecca Kosick, Department of Comparative Literature

Christina Soto van der Plas, Department of Romance Studies

It was immediately clear to us that surveying the thought of a diverse geographical region such as Latin America poses a problem of categories. We had to ask ourselves, can we even speak of a single Latin American critical tradition? It appeared that our object formed neither a coherent, unified, nor unassailable philosophical discourse. That elusiveness also motivated our investigation. For heuristic purposes, we approached the Latin American critical tradition as a mosaic-like mode of inquiry composed of a complex multitude or interrelated trends.

One of our first readings affirmed our intuition. In his 2007 The Border and the Pendulum: Forms of the Frontier and of Transit in Latin American Thought 1928–2004, Fernando Zalamea, a Colombian mathematician

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and self-designated philosopher, recasts our initial problem in these terms: “the multiplicity of forms of Latin American thought throughout the 20th century prevents an accurate mapping of the panorama. . . . The different perspectives, concretions, and tensions of the Latin American ‘place’ make it possible to discern diverse sedimentations, stratifications, and breaks throughout the century.” Zalamea goes on to describe his methodology, which mobilizes certain themes to cut transversally through recent Latin American thought, from 1920s ensayismo to theories of hybridity in the 1970s and 80s. “Some of these themes include perspectives on the complex make up of our social fabric, about the absences and deformations of our political traditions, about . . . Latin American creativity, [and] about forms and practices of knowing the ‘sub’ continent.”

In other words, Zalamea looks to the social, the political, the aesthetic and the epistemological, all as necessary ways of approaching the Latin American object. Our readings bear out the necessity of an anamorphic, or multiperspectival method. Among the authors we read, Chilean literary critic Nelly Richard and Puerto Rican writer Eduardo Lalo speak to the aesthetic, while Enrique Dussel, Fidel Castro, Eduardo Grüner, Oscar del Barco, and Néstor Kohan, among others, address the social and the political. It fell to our group to seek out some outline of a contemporary Latin American epistemology or at least some sort of intellectual history.

Among the authors that we read with keen perspectives on aesthetics were Nelly Richard from Chile and Eduardo Lalo from Puerto Rico. Through language and style, these authors proved representative of two sides of our quandary (inclusion or exclusion, pertinence or difference to the Occident). In Richard’s The Insubordination of Signs, we found that even though her object of analysis is one that belongs to “Latin American” aesthetics, her language and her mode of attribution betray an academic approach deeply indebted to French deconstruction. On the other hand, in Lalo’s Dónde (Where), form and content coincided. He emphasizes how Latin American thought does indeed pertain to the Western tradition, but only as the other West or the sub-west. He argues that the writing and thought of this place called Latin America has been and continues to be la escritura rayada, or the crossed-out writing, a constitutive outside or else that is included through exclusion. While this crossed-out writing appeals to that famous sous rature [ (putting under erasure) that Derrida draws from Heidegger, Lalo appropriates the procedure by subtracting it from the deconstruction of the Western metaphysics of presence and refunctionalizing it in service of a historically specific and situated identitarian discourse. If Fernando Zalamea presented Latin American particularity in terms of a supposedly universal mathematical formalism, and Richard theorizes Latin American cultural objects from the periphery

by recurring to hegemonic, North Atlantic modes of presentation, Lalo appropriates strategies deriving from that tradition as the tactics of a Latin American mode of thought in conversation with, but not subsumed to, the hegemon.

One of the most salient and enduring critical traditions in Latin America is that of social thought closely tied in the twentieth century to humanist Marxism. From the national models being debated all throughout the nineteenth century to the Cuban Revolution and the theorization of Marea Rosada in the present day, social thought has been cast and shaped by politics. As Mexican thinker Bolívar Echeverría constantly reminds us in his 2006 Vuelta del Siglo (Turn of the Century), Latin American modernity is ultimately shaped by the development of capitalism and its corresponding “civilizing” project. That is why for many of the thinkers we read Marxism is an inlay leading to alternatives not only of a different kind of politics, but also of thought based in material practices and particular contradictions of social formations. The Argentine Oscar del Barco’s Other Marx, published in the 1980s, is an attempt in this same vein not only to criticize capitalism, but also to think through the failures of Marxism and thus formulate a social theory that is critical of its own way of positing “reason” as the ultimate core of theory when, in fact, the scission of “reason” is modern capitalism’s way of defusing the contradictory structure of society. This also allowed us to shed light on our previous enthusiasm for some of the social thinkers we read and to be critical of what could be defined as the “capitalization of social thought” in Latin America by self-affirmed Marxists.

If social thought and political philosophy seem to dominate twentieth-century Latin American critical production, why should a humanist Marxism be its standard bearer? Are there structural affinities between social life on the “subcontinent” and the tenets of Marxism that make the latter more adequate to the former? Certainly, Marxism provided Latin American thinkers with a paradigm within which to address their capitalist modernity. But perhaps the multidimensional nature of Marx’s thought—often described as a combination of German idealism, French political philosophy, and British political economy—allows it to accommodate itself to the hybrid nature of Latin American reality. Or perhaps it is Marx’s epistemological revolution that in some way allows Latin America to think its social reality in relation to other social realities without collapsing one into the other. As Louis Althusser has it in Reading Capital, Marx’s epistemological revolution can be framed by the questions “by means of what concept is it possible to think the new type of determination which has just been identified as the determination of the phenomena of a given region by the structure of that region?. . . In other words, how is

it possible to define the concept of structural causality?” Marx’s discovery in Capital is that “every theory is in its essence a problematic, i.e., the theoretico-systematic matrix for posing every problem concerning the object of theory.” Perhaps it is this understanding of theory that Latin American social thought articulates in its escritura rayada and from its position of inclusion-exclusion with respect to the Occident.

In 1969, in response to the question that titles his seminal work—“Is there a philosophy of the Americas?”—Peruvian intellectual historian Augusto Salazar Bondy concluded that there was not. In light of changes over the last five decades throughout the region, we felt it was time to ask Bondy’s question again. But as Marx reminds us in the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, we only ask questions that we are able to solve, “since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.” From our debates with each other and with the absent voices of our authors, we may have discovered that our object as much as our problematic beg the question in the sense of a hysteron proteron or circulus in probando. Much like Althusser and Marx, Bolivar Echeverría tells us with regard to Latin American thought in the twentieth century, “La necesidad de pensar el proceso revolucionario resulta ser, simultaneamente, necesidad de revolucionar el proceso de pensar (The necessity of thinking the revolutionary process ends up being, simultaneously, the necessity of revolutionizing the thinking process).”

Nationalism(s): Alternative Approaches and Writing in “the ordinary”Andrew Simon, Department of Near Eastern Studies

Adem Birson, Department of Musicology

John Robbins, Department of English

Aaron Gavin, Department of Government

Jungmin Kim, Department of English

Kevin Duong, Department of Government

Brian Thiede, Department of Development Sociology

Kyle Anderson, Department of Near Eastern Studies

Conventional approaches to the study of nationalism are typically organized into either “top-down” or “bottom-up” approaches. Moreover, organizing studies of nationalism into these two classes often serves to indict the former, accused as it is of treating the masses as little more than the repositories of an elite-engineered ideology that is distributed by a select vanguard and subsequently consumed by the majority of the nation. Nationalism, as “top-down” theories describe it, is something that

happens to ordinary people, who are neither stakeholders nor progenitors but simply recipients in the nationalist project.

Through a yearlong engagement with scholarly literature on the subject of nationalism from a variety of disciplines, our reading group attempted partly to unsettle such “top-down” readings of nationalism, but also to rethink the twofold classification more generally. At the start of the fall semester, we familiarized ourselves with some of the dominant theories on nationalism and identified potential limits of “modular” models. In particular, we used Benedict Anderson’s landmark text Imagined Communities (1983) as a baseline. Anderson describes nationalism as cultural artifact that is historically contingent on the development of print capitalism and the elevation of vernacular dialects concomitant with the decline of sacred languages. Drawing heavily from the discipline of anthropology and postcolonial theory, we found a variety of case studies that complicate this picture. Lila Abu-Lughod’s Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (2004) shifts the focus from print capitalism to mass media and illuminates the importance of audiovisual culture for a nation in which the sacred language has not undergone a significant decline. Liisa Malkki’s Purity and Exile: The National Cosmology of Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (1995) focuses on oral tellings of “mythico-histories” of the nation, which underpin an entire worldview that naturalizes the nation as the community of belonging par excellence. Michael Herzfeld’s Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation State (2005) highlights the central role of vernacular culture—what he terms “cultural intimacy”—in modern Greek national identity. For politicians and national officials, cultural intimacy represents the unspoken experiences that underpin official self-presentation and supplement public discourse. For nonelite citizens, it provides a space to formulate a critique of the state. However, according to

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Herzfeld, in times of crisis nonelite critics of the state can also employ cultural intimacy to appeal to the state as the guardian of civic and moral purity. His study, in particular, allows us to see how critiques of the state end up creating the very effects they lament, reifying the state and reinforcing national identity. “Top-down” and “bottom-up” experiences of nationalism work in tandem to engender a wide-ranging repertoire of practices available to citizens and state officials in order to adopt differentiated, often contradictory, and shifting attitudes toward state power and national belonging. All three of these important case studies articulate a theory of nationalism that can account for both elite and mass conceptions of nationalism, providing us with an important framework for our own investigations of global national modernity.

Reimagining Global Politics: Power, Freedom, and CultureMichael ‘Fritz’ Bartel, Department of History

Nanjie Caihua, Department of Anthropology

Toby Susan Goldbach, Law School

Matt Hill, Department of Government

Wendy Leutert, Department of Government

Chan Suk Suh, Department of Sociology

This graduate reading group aims to critically engage mainstream narratives in international relations and global politics. Its focus is the intellectual tension between critical theory’s critique of structural power and its narratives of freedom and agency. It examines works challenging yet still framed by the power hierarchies that often narrow contemporary discourse in international relations to the interaction among major powers (particularly the United States and European countries). At the same time, it explores agency and freedom through the diversity of ways in which nations and individuals understand, interpret, act upon, and reimagine processes of globalization, sovereignty, and transnationalism. Through emphasis on developing countries’ historical experiences and contemporary perspectives, it examines the plurality and contestation of understandings of hierarchy and agency, the state and subject, and power and culture. It will do so not by merely reifying synthesis between dominant paradigms and critiques, from feminist, critical race, subaltern studies, and development literature, but focusing on the discursive space itself and the limitations of both hegemonic and critical perspectives.

Specific topics the reading group will discuss include: sovereignty, nationalism and self-determination, imposition of imperial or colonial constructions of region and time, construction of North-South identities, gender,

globalization, transnationalism, the role of framing and psychology in structuring the perspectives of actors and institutions, and the nature of power and strategic behavior. Drawing upon works primarily in political science, sociology, and anthropology, these topics will be discussed in the context of specific political and historical events as well as at the theoretical level.

The readings begin by critically engaging the constitutive impact of power hierarchies on discourse and knowledge creation through a selection of works by Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. It continues to consider the production and contestation of state sovereignty and its constitutive implications for societal relations and identity in works by writers, including Christian Reus-Smit, Antony Anghie, and Catherine MacKinnon. Building on this topic, a further cluster of readings examines understandings of nationalism and movements toward self-determination as both instances of internal structural political change and externally-inspired ideological entrepreneurship, through writings by authors, including Eric Hobsbawm, Omar Dahbour, and Partha Chatterjee. The impact of imperial construction of spatial region and historical time is explored in works by James Ferguson, Uma Narayan, Edward Said, and Marshall Sahlins. The construction of North-South identities and the powerful impact of gender are discussed in writings, including those by Faranak Miraftab, Louise Fawcett and Yezid Sayid, Judith Butler, and Cynthia Enloe. Focusing on developing countries’ and individual experiences of globalization and transnationalism reveals the central tension between power and culture, and hierarchy and agency, as it emerges in pieces by authors, including Sidney Tarrow, Aihwa Ong, Saskia Sassen, Peter Katzenstein, and Arjun Appadurai.

Sonorial Cartographies: Sound, Space, and Social PraxisSam Dwinell, Department of Music

Arina Rotaru, Department of German Studies

Clare Hane, Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance

Caroline Waight, Department of Music

Jen-Hao Walter Hsu, Department of Theater, Dance and Film

Pei Jean Chen, Department of Asian Studies

This year our reading group met to discuss scholarship in the field of sound studies. Against the question of what unites the field of sound studies, often posed retrospectively by editors and compilers of sound studies scholarship, we also considered where sound studies might go next with regard to our “home” disciplines. This inquiry might be more widely productive, however,

because the relationship of sound studies to discrete disciplines is one perhaps strategically and conspicuously avoided by the (many) adherents of a purportedly new and inter- or met-disciplinary field.

The past ten years has seen the publication of a number of prominent collections of new sound studies scholarship, which both construct a basis and precedent for the field out of European philosophy and cultural production and aim to point beyond themselves to a much greater wealth of current sound studies. Finding legitimacy in a “hidden history” of sound within philosophy and theory across the modern era, hidden, it is routinely claimed, by the “primacy of the visual,” sound studies has nevertheless consistently claimed a space of novelty among the crowded fields of cultural studies. Through this rhetoric of novelty, sound studies has indeed been highly productive of published work. For Keeling and Kun, sound studies, as well as some of the cultural production a shared interest in the specificity of the sonic has initiated, perhaps promises temporarily to arrest the accelerating flow of information by taking a time out to listen to its products and effects. Similarly, for Chow and Steintrager in their introduction to the 2011 sound studies special issue of the journal differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, noted that what connects the expansive and varied field of sound studies is “the question of sonic objectivity.” Sound, as the phrase has it, travels, whereas the contribution of sound studies is to map or document its trajectories in the world.

Despite—or perhaps because of—its claims of novelty, therefore, sound studies habitually “looks”

backward. What seems very often to go unspoken in the sound studies literature, however, is the nature of this loss with respect to disciplinary theory and methodology. Sound studies looks backward to register its own achievements but does not often highlight its inevitable omissions or occlusions. Sound studies seems always to reverberate outward from the sonic, leaving its exterior uncharted. This is particularly a problem when sound studies scholarship locates itself within a discipline, for this type of maneuver tends to represent the host field as also only backward-looking. For example, the sound studies special issue of differences includes the word feminism only once in the complete text of its dozen or so articles, as if feminist cultural studies, after the poststructuralist turn in feminist theory from the late 1980s onward and the rise of “post-feminist” popular culture in the 1990s, had prohibited any mention of the f-word. In the one use of the word in this special issue, feminism attaches specifically to 1970s French feminism, as if l’écriture feminine could unproblematically stand in for “feminism” in 2011. In differences, sound studies marks a retreat from feminist commitments in concert with the discourse of “post-feminism.” In the special issue of American Quarterly, only one of twenty articles treat transnational topics, despite the “postnational turn” of American studies. The rigorous, invaluable, and contemporaneous efforts by both women’s studies and American studies since the 1990s to critique, decenter, and deconstruct their respective objects of study—woman/women and America/the US—remains unrepresented by these collections of sound studies.

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graduate reading groups 2013/2014 recipients

Caribbean TheoryHoney Crawford, Department of Performing and Media Arts

Elise Finielz, Department of Romance Studies

Jan Steyn, Department of Comparative Literature

Alex Lenoble, Department of Romance Studies

Neal Allar, Department of Romance Studies

Following what the participants considered a successful and edifying initial year, the Caribbean Theory group hopes to continue meeting in 2013/2014, organized this time around a new special topic: “Strategies of Resistance and Survival.”

If the Caribbean is characterized by a history of genocide of the native peoples, colonial oppression, slavery, and plantation labor, the various forms of resistance engendered by that history equally define it. For the purposes of this reading group our focus will be broad, paying attention to a large variety of forms of resistance, including its violent, political, cultural, and linguistic varieties. In the first year of our reading group, when we dealt with questions of creole and creolization, we focused exclusively on theoretical texts. This year we hope to incorporate into our meetings literary and cultural materials, including novels, poems, visual art, films, music, food, and performance. Our geographic and linguistic focus extends to the Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone Caribbean.

In the second semester, while still looking at specific instances of resistance and survival throughout the Caribbean, we will begin to shift our emphasis from the empirical task of mapping out paths of resistance in the region to asking theoretical questions about the value and limitations an emphasis on resistance has in current postcolonial theory. These discussions will inevitably include a critical engagement with the concept of “writing back,” which has been an important term in postcolonial theory for the last few decades. We will investigate the ways in which this concept has informed the treatment of resistance and survival in postcolonial studies, and we will evaluate its applicability across artistic genres and cultural practices.

The ICM Graduate Reading Group Program is supporting six groups in 2013–2014. The groups’ proposals follow.

As was the case in 2012/13, we hope to meet once every two weeks, this time with the possibility of extra time built in for film screenings or music sessions. We also hope to have at least one event open to the public.

Exploring Diasporic Concepts of Blackness through the ArtsHoney Crawford, Department of Performing and Media Arts

Kanitra Fletcher, Department of History of Art and Visual Studies

Aricka Foreman, Department of English

Mariamma Kambon, Department of Art, Architecture, and Planning

Jan Steyn, Department of Comparative Literature

Kimberly Williams, Department of English

The aim of this reading group is to explore concepts of blackness across the shifting landscape of time and space that connects African diasporas, as well as how these ideas might manifest in visual, literary, musical, and performative art forms. A term as fluid as the oceans it spans, the idea of blackness is often imbued with a doctrinal rigidity within individual contexts, thus belying its variability.

For instance, historically in the United States the “one-drop rule” claimed anyone with African ancestry was black. In the Francophone Caribbean, black referred to people of “pure” African descent, while the term mulatto identified people of European and African descent. In the Hispanic Americas, a variety of definitions exist to describe the varying phenotypes of the population, often to avoid labeling oneself as black. Furthermore, with the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States, the phrase “black power” was coined and became the rallying cry for social justice movements the world over. In Australia, aboriginal populations define themselves as black, and in England, South Asian immigrants also call themselves black, as do the Dalits in India. In fact, in certain communities, the term black has been used to define all nonwhite people. At the same time, a significant amount of artwork that has sprung out of the diaspora is either a direct or indirect response to the assault on black identities resulting from processes and structures of (forced) migration, colonization, and enslavement. Having been subjected to definitions of self from external sources, artists of African descent have often turned to the representation of blackness.

From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement to so-called “postblack” art, artists have continually grappled with defining, resisting, and expressing blackness as well as many other productive challenges that skin color, subject matter, and social dynamics might bring. Likewise, we also hope to contend with these issues by engaging a variety of texts, artists, and theories throughout the upcoming year.

From “¡Tierra y Libertad!” to Urbanizacionalidades: Labor, State, and the Stateless in Latin American UrbanizationJoseph C. Bazler, School of Industrial and Labor Relations

Paulo E. Ferreira de Souza Marzionna, School of Industrial and Labor Relations

Kyle Harvey, Department of History

Walter Omar Manky Bonilla, School of Industrial and Labor Relations

Geraldine Yvonne Monterroso, Department of Romance Studies

Joshua Savala, Department of History

In 2012, the United Nations reported that Latin America overtook North America as the world’s most urbanized region (UN-Habitat, “The State of Latin American and Caribbean Cities: Towards a New Urban Transition”). Throughout the twentieth century, urbanization has transformed the region’s economy, environment, and social ecology.

Our group proposes to use labor, the state, and the stateless as the heuristic framework through which we will explore urbanization processes in and beyond the city. We aim to challenge the typical conceptions of both the state, often seen as a complete, homogenous national blanket, and labor, generally restricted to traditional industrial sectors and actors. Our project is divisible into two contested and overlapping themes: labor and perpetual state formation, on the one hand, and stateless labor and the informal economy, on the other.

These broad themes are essential to understanding urbanization’s fluidity and its permutational effects on Latin America. There has been a great amount of scholarship in recent years on the environment, gender, indigeneity, and labor radicalism. We seek to put these works into the larger context of urbanization and the always incompleteness of state formation. Thus, we will demonstrate how urbanization has been a long-term social process in Latin America, constantly in dialogue with the environment, politics, and nonurban spaces. Theoretically, our group will filter topics of urbanization, labor, and the state through questions of structure and agency, on the one hand, and cultural imperialism and Latin American modernity, on the other.

In our section on labor and state formation, we will focus on several themes. Through scholars such as Daniel James, Thomas Miller Klubock, and John French, we will explore the state’s fluidity and labor’s centrality in state formation, nationalism, and dictatorship. Beyond the city, Myrna I. Santiago’s work—The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900–1938—will provide us with an environmental perspective on urbanization and the global industrial economy’s effects on land and labor.

While labor was essential to shaping many Latin American states in the twentieth century, extra-state forms of labor and everyday life were equally fundamental to twentieth-century urbanization in the region. Using works by scholars such as Dona Guy and Barbara Weinstein will illuminate topics of nonstate labor and gender while underscoring the centrality of unregulated labor sectors in the state’s social and cultural imagination. Kirk Shaffer, Edilene Toledo, Luigi Biondi, and others will allow us to examine transnational anarchism across Latin America and the broader Atlantic world. Lastly, Nancy Scheper-Hugher’s book, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, is one example in our quest to explore the intersections of poverty, the family, and violence in urbanization processes.

Indigenizing Sovereignty: Native Challenges to Modern ThoughtDaniel Radus, Department of English

Emily Hong, Department of Anthropology

Emily Levitt, Department of Anthropology

Kianga Lucas, Department of Anthropology

Lauren Alex Harmon, Department of English

Lena Krian, Department of English

Mariangela Jordan, Department of Anthropology

Namgyal Tsepak, Department of Anthropology

Ting Hui Lau, Department of Anthropology

The reading group’s aim is to reflect on the ways the concept of sovereignty, as an effectively modern idea, may operate—or fail to do so—in the context of indigenous modernities. These modernities often resist characteristics attributed to modernity at large, such as being anthropocentric, individualist, state-based, or centered around social and political hierarchies. Indigenous modernities, therefore, render ambivalent these essential ideas behind sovereignty as well as the status of the term itself. We would like to begin our discussions by exploring the European “origins” of the notion of sovereignty and the later critiques that challenge the general validity of the term. Thus, the questions that we pose are: How do indigenous people

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adapt sovereignty to fit their interests? Is sovereignty as a model of autonomous governance applicable for the creation and sustainment of modern Native nations and political communities?

Since indigenous sovereignty is typically defined by a circumscribed state of autonomy that is dominated by other, more powerful sovereign assertions, we are interested in looking at infringements on indigenous sovereignty. In this context, questions regarding the authority and imposition of legal and state systems, as well as the impact of international law and neoliberal economies will be particularly important. This sort of legal encroachment on sovereignty is, for instance, exemplified by the federally recognized Native American tribes’ legal status of constituting “domestic, dependent nations” to the federal US government (30 U.S. 1 (1831)). Therefore, we see it as an important part of our project to explore the abrogation of certain assertions of American Indian sovereignty through the construction of US federal Indian law as a corpus, a process that largely took place in the course of the nineteenth century.

Lastly, we will look at assertions of indigenous sovereignty. Since indigenous epistemologies and cultures are so radically different from traditional Western thought, we would like to consider possibilities of cultural sovereignty and cultural revitalization inherent in this dissimilarity. This perspective on the concept will help us think about the ways culture and epistemology act as significant forces in the assertion of political sovereignty. Further, we will explore this impact of culture and epistemology in international social movements as they occur, for instance, in Chiapas, Mexico, and in Bolivia, and the ways these claims to sovereignty have been productive in terms of self‐governance and recuperation of previously privatized lands.

Moreover, we would like to consider how these sorts of movements can be read with and against other contemporary movements across the globe (e.g., Canada, USA, Finland, Tibet, etc.) as well as how global indigenous modernities might be permitted or constrained in certain ways by claims of sovereignty that are both alike and dissimilar from Western assertions of the same. We hope that looking at these particular cases of political and cultural indigenous sovereignty in a comparative manner might help expand, question, or even further undermine the underlying definitions of sovereignty and help reconsider the state of global modernities.

Political EcologiesYoujin Chung, Department of Development Sociology

Darragh Hare, Department of Natural Resources

Tim McLellan, Department of Anthropology

Elizabeth Plantan, Department of Government

Kasia Paprocki, Department of Sociology

Murodbek Laldjebaev, Department of Natural Resources

Since December 2012, graduate students from the development sociology, natural resources, anthropology, and government departments have been meeting biweekly to discuss both foundational and newer, innovative texts in the broad field of political ecology. Our primary motive has been to develop an explicitly interdisciplinary forum in which to address political ecology’s central concern: an unraveling of the political forces at work in environmental access, management, and transformation. Our secondary goals include creating productive connections with colleagues in multiple departments, gaining a broader understanding of the ways in which the “field” of political ecology is understood in various disciplines, and making a space for constructive critique of one another’s work.

We are driven by recognition that the questions raised in political-ecological scholarship are vitally relevant to broader issues of our contemporary moment. In a time marked by burgeoning discussions around the question of anthropogenic climate change and state shifts in the structure and functions of ecosystems, it is important that we turn our critical scholarly attention to the ways in which resources are (de)politicized, (mis)appropriated, and (re)imagined. Political ecology seeks to transcend human/nature dichotomies to propagate a study of “socio-natures,” drawing on insights from across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In so doing, it proposes a new set of questions: How do the sciences, “social” and “natural,” articulate contemporary socio-ecological dilemmas? How do we attend to material realities that shape people’s material, embodied lives in a world suffused with conversation about, and concern

over, ecological crisis? Can critical interdisciplinary scholarship provide productive directions in which to focus existent and emerging practical, political energies for socio- ecological change?

By convening a group of critical scholars from across the schools at Cornell for the study of political ecology, we suggest that the answer to the final question posed here is “yes.” The opportunity to continue our work together with support through the ICM will allow us to deepen our engagement with the variety of approaches presented in the field of political ecology. Through this group we hope not only to have a forum for fomenting vigorous discussion and supporting one another’s critical scholarship; we also hope to be able to strengthen collaborations within the university in support of reaching out to a wider audience of graduate students, professors, and the public through various opportunities such as colloquia and public forums on political-ecological themes. Support from the ICM will reinforce our efforts to make more meaningful and material cross-disciplinary collaboration, allowing us to address with our exploration of political ecology such urgent subjects as how to imagine, maintain, or create the possibility for a livable future.

Rethinking MultiplicityGokhan Kodalak, History of Architecture and

Urban Development Program

Maayan Wayn, Department of Performing and Media Arts

Ozum Hatipoglu, Department of Performing and Media Arts

Stephen Low, Department of Performing and Media Arts

Wah Guan Lim, Department of Asian Studies

Whitten Overby, History of Architecture and Urban Development Program

In the Meditation One of Being and Event, Alain Badiou delineates the reciprocal determination of the one and the multiple as “a priori conditions of any possible ontology,” or rather, as “a priori conditions of ” constructing and deconstructing any ontology (23). Our reading group takes this formulation as a point of departure in approaching the question of one modernity or multiple modernities. We believe that in order to tackle the problematic of multiple modernities it is necessary to begin with a further elucidation of the notions of the one and the multiple. To this date, there have been many critical engagements with the formula of one or global modernity; however, what has been altogether neglected or perhaps only peripherally considered is the origin of the very question at hand: What is to be understood by the concepts of one and multiple? In this context, we think that these notions require a radical and profound rethinking.

Central to this rethinking is the idea of space and time. Therefore, the thesis we set forth is that the notion of multiplicity is relative and contingent upon space and time. By basing our conception of multiplicity on the idea that “multiplicity . . . is topological” (Deleuze 14), the reading group we propose to the Institute for Comparative Modernities basically aims at the topological examination and reassessment of the notion of multiplicity in conjunction with the structuration of power. In order to pursue this task, we will examine various theoretical conceptions of the singular/local and universal/global with a particular focus on the relationship between space-time and structure.

To identify the ways by which space and time determine the structuration of power we will turn to architecture, both as a philosophical and material practice. As a philosophical practice, the primary purpose of the philosophical architectonics is to examine the topological structure of thought by formulating ideas as spatial and temporal entities. Conceiving ideas as spatial and temporal movements posits the matter of truth as the problematic of space and time. In this regard, we will explore the problematic of space and time, and theoretically determine its relation to the notions of the singular/local and universal/global through a selection of works by Gilles Deleuze, Henri Lefebvre, Leslie Jayae Kavanaugh, Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Elizabeth Grosz, Kojin Karatani, Michael Warner, Bernard Cache, David Harvey, Lauren Berlant, Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Henri Bergson.

In Deleuze’s topology, ideas are conceived of as singularized structures whose exposition is evental: “singularities are ideal events” (97). Similarly, Badiou examines singularities in conjunction with the notion of the event: “the category of event is central, because it supports, envelops, dynamizes the category of singularity” (56). Both Deleuze and Badiou delineate the truth of ideas with regard to their local and global ex-positions by defining ideas as site-specific or situational occurrences. The works by these authors will provide us with a broad range of points of reference to employ these theoretical frameworks in order to examine the interaction between singular/local and universal/global manifestations of artworks and events.

As a group our primary objective is to analyze media-specific discourse such as architectural, cinematic, and theatrical media in transnational contexts by grounding our argument on the aforementioned theoretical frameworks.

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Alexis Boyce is the program coordinator for the Institute for Comparative Modernities. She received her BA in British and American literature from Wells College and her MA in gender and cultural studies from Simmons College, and continues to take courses in the French and Arabic languages, international relations, and human rights whenever she has time. She previously worked at Harvard Law School as the International Legal Studies program officer and the Institute for African Development at Cornell University as the outreach and publications coordinator.

Programcoordinator

The Institute for Comparative Modernities seeks to provide greater opportunities for graduate students from across the campus to engage each other through interdisciplinary and collaborative research working groups. To that end, the Institute provides meeting space as well as seed money for the establishment and the maintenance of a small number of graduate student research working groups each year.

PROPOSAL GUIDELINESThe Institute for Comparative Modernities invites proposals that include a 500-word statement of intent, a bibliography, and a list of the names and departmental affiliations of the proposed group members, along with the curriculum vitae of each participant. Cross-disciplinarity must be an integral part of both the design of the research proposal and the composition of the group; applications from groups composed of members from a single department will not be approved. We imagine most groups will consist of six to eight members. A minimum of six members is required to be eligible for the subvention. This program, which is announced annually, provides both a subvention of $1,000 that can be used for books, copying, and/or bringing outside

graduate reading group proposal guidelines 2014/2015

speakers to campus, as well as a comfortable, even congenial, meeting space at the ICM, housed in the Toboggan Lodge. We expect the sustained collaboration to culminate in a public presentation (oral or written) at the end of the award year. The subvention covers one year, but renewal may be possible under certain circumstances. It is likely that academic year 2014–15 will see four to five awards.

PROPOSAL SUBMISSIONSPlease include all of the following: • 500-word statement of intent

• Bibliography

• List of the names, departmental affiliations, and e-mail addresses of the proposed group members, along with the curriculum vitae of each participant.

Submit proposals to Alexis Boyce, ICM program coordinator: ab449@cornell.edu.

Deadline: Friday, April 11, 2014

Notifications will be sent out the week of May 5, 2014.

ICM vision and objectivesThe Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) addresses a key problem in the study of modern culture and society: the transnational history of modernity and its global scope. A broad range of scholarship over the last few decades has contested and complicated the two primary dimensions of the received narrative of modernity: that it arose strictly within the confines of Europe; and that its extension outside Europe was a matter of simple diffusion and imitation. What is emerging instead is an account of modernity as a global process in which deep and multifarious interconnections have created complementary cultural formations.

The Institute is dedicated to the study of modernity in such a transnational and comparative perspective. Its primary emphasis will fall on neglected or understudied articulations of modernity outside of the historically constituted hegemonic spaces of Europe and the United States, but it will also give serious attention to conflicts and complexities within the West. Inadequate

understandings of the complex history of modernity have led to simplist ic and untenable posit ions that unknowingly repeat colonialism’s ideological juxtapositions of “us” and “them,” with modernity (and all the positive connotations of historical progress that accrue to the term) all on one side and inscrutable backwardness all on the other. This results in ghettoized scholarship that is damaging to all.

The standard equation of modernity with the West needs to be problematized and opened up to comparative examination. The Institute hopes to galvanize work in this direction by encouraging cross-disciplinary collaborative research that advances a genuinely global analysis of modernity that is also empirically faithful to geographical and historical specificity. By bringing attention to less frequently studied aesthetic and social practices from non-Western and immigrant communities, the Institute hopes to correct accounts of modernity as primarily Western in origin and dynamics.

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Benedict AndersonAdvisory Board MemberThe Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand (New York: Seagull Books, 2012).

Introduction to Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (Brooklyn: Verso, 2012).

Susan Buck-MorssAdvisory Board MemberIntroduction to The Museological Unconscious: Communal (Post)Modernism in Russia by Victor Tupitsyn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012).

Salah M. HassanDirector and Executive Board MemberHow to Liberate Marx from His Eurocentrism: Notes on African/Black Marxism (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012).

Natalie MelasExecutive Board Member“Merely Comparative,” PMLA vol. 128, no. 3 (May 2013): 652–659.

“Comparative Non-Contemporaneities: Ernst Bloch and C.L.R. James,” Theory Aside, eds. Jason Potts and Daniel Stout (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

“Training in Cerebral Emotions,” in Greek Diaspora Intellectuals Reflect on Cavafy (University of Michigan, 2013). Available at http://lsa.umich.edu/modgreek/_nonav_window-to-greek-culture/c-p--cavafy-forum.html.

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The Institute for Comparative ModernitiesToboggan Lodge38 Forest Home DriveIthaca, NY 14853

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www.icm.arts.cornell.edu