2020-2021 seminar Ana Teixeira Pinto: The Life and Afterlife of Fascism: from month to month
Seminar 4 April (online)
In Hegel’s Philosophy of History the black subject is defined by a lack: “What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the condition of mere nature.” The African for Hegel, as David Marriott sustains, is a “figure whose difference does not pass beyond itself into work or history; the African not only has no consciousness of itself, no self-related in identity, but he also lacks the alienation from self that comes with the movement of Spirit away from Nature, the teleology that is alone capable of revealing Spirit.” For Hegel Africa is insufficiently alienated, or rather alienated from alienation. This seminar will survey the back and forth spiel between alienation and emancipation, from Kant to Lyotard, and examine the conflation of embodied and encultured experience that the discourse of philosophical aesthetic engenders.
reading:
Armstrong, Meg. “The Effects of Blackness: Gender, Race, and The Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burke and Kant.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54, no. 3 (June 1996): 213–236.
Marriott, David. "On Racial Fetishism." Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 18, no. 2 (2010): 215-248.
Seminar 3 March (online)
The missing information will be provided soon.
Seminar 2 February (online)
Immanuel Kant, the philosopher who introduced the scientific concept of race, indexed a preoccupation with history, progress and forward-moving processes to differences of skin colour. To this day, the legacies of colonialism tend to find expression in a language contemporary audiences find familiar and compelling, and hence remains largely unquestioned. Saturated by colonial formations, principles like openness, universalism, humanism, freedom, and individualism, function in lockstep with the development of a globally-integrated economy rooted in the imperative of frontier expansion.
Reading:
Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi. “The Color of Reason: The Idea of 'Race' in Kant's Anthropology.” In Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 1997.
Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Al-Saji, Alia. “Decolonizing Bergson: The Temporal Schema of the Open and the Closed.” In Beyond Bergson: Examining Race and Colonialism through the Writings of Henri Bergson, edited by Andrea Pitts. Albany, NY: Suny Press, 2019.
Tibebu, Teshale. Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Part 1.
Lloyd, David. “Representation's Coup.” Interventions, International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2012): 1-29.
Hesse, Barnor. “Escaping Liberty: Western Hegemony, Black Fugitivity.” Political Theory 42, nr. 3 (2014): 288–313.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “The Critique of Productive Reason.” In Toward a Global Idea of Race, 21-36. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Seminar 1 January (online)
The modern era has a somewhat paradoxical nature: it claims to have undone distinctions based on hereditary status, yet it introduced the racial differences by the backdoor. But the apparent contradiction is resolved if one considers that the modern nation state, as Mahmood Mamdani argues, did not precede colonialism. The two were co-constituted, when, in 1942, the same year Columbus landed in the Americas, the Castilian monarchy sought to establish a Christian polity by expelling Muslims and Jews: “The birth of the modern state amid ethnic cleansing and overseas domination teaches us a different lesson about what political modernity is: less an engine of tolerance than of conquest.”
reading:
Mamdani, Mahmood. Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2020.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina Press: 2000.
Moses, Dirk (ed.). Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008.