2023-2024 Hypatia Vourloumis' seminar: Anticolonial Acts
The seminar is conceived and offered by Hypatia Vourloumis
The seminar from Confluence to Confluence
Seminar participants second year: Baoxin Liao, Ian Nolan, Elif Cadoux, Yi-Hong Wang, Shaza Omran, Gabriel Acevedo and Francesca Pionati.
Seminar participants first year: Alkmini Gkousiari, Ivčo Ružić, Oykü Özgencil, Sara Alberani and Tuba Kılıç.
Anticolonial Acts
INTRODUCTION:
What Is Home? by Mosab Abu Toha
What is home:
It is the shade of trees on my way to school before they were uprooted.
It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding photo before the walls
crumbled.
It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants slept on wintry nights, before it was looted and put in a museum.
It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house to ashes.
It is the café where I watched football matches and played –
My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold all of these?
What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike by Mosab Abu Toha
Turn off the lights in every room / sit in the inner hallway of the house / away from the windows / stay away from the stove / stop thinking about making black tea / have a bottle of water nearby / big enough to cool down / children’s fear / get a child’s kindergarten backpack and stuff / tiny toys and whatever amount of money there is / and the ID cards / and photos of late grandparents, aunts, or uncles / and the grandparents’ wedding invitation that’s been kept for a long time / and if you are a farmer, you should put some strawberry seeds / in one pocket / and some soil from / the balcony flowerpot in the other / and hold on tight / to whatever number there was / on the cake / from the last birthday.
These two poems by Mosab Abu Toha were first published in May 2023 in the collection Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear (City Lights). He has asked us to read and circulate them during this time. A few weeks ago, he stood in front of his obliterated Gazan home on camera asking us to remember and recite them.
In the words of Palestinian American poet, writer and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan: “We bear witness because this is how we build new narratives.”
Neologism: Infrastudy. Constant Practices: Anticolonial Acts.
Seminar’s keywords:
Infrastructure, Infrapolitics, Infrastudy, Anticolonial Practice, Actions, Movements, Manoeuvres, Strategy; Settler-Colonialism, Nation-State, Fascism, Nazification, Empire, White Supremacy, Propaganda, Truth, Poetry, Song, Sound, Ululation, Communication and Communicability, Underground Resistance, Languages and Images of Resistance, Belowness, Subsistence, Tunnels, Things you may find Hidden, Practices of Freedom.
Readings will include:
Ariella Azoulay. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso, 2019.
Sa’ed Atshan. Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique. Stanford University Press, 2020.
James C. Scott. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Angela Y. Davis. Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books, 2016.
David Graeber and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London: Penguin Books, 2021
Samera Esmeir. “To Say and Think a Life Beyond What Settler-colonialism Has Made.” Mada, Oct 14, 2023. https://www.madamasr.com/en/2023/10/14/opinion/politics/to-say-and-think-a-life-beyond-what-settler-colonialism-has-made/
S. Hilal, A. Petti, and E. Weizman. Architecture After Revolution. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013.
Adriana Johnson, and Daniel Nemser. “Reading for Infrastructure: Worlds Made and Broken.” Social Text 40, nr. 4 (2022): 1–16.
Shoal Collective. Interviews with Radical Palestinian Women. PM press, 2021.
