2024-2025 FROM CONFLUENCE TO CONFLUENCE ~ Hypatia Vourloumis' seminar: The Weapon of Theory
SEMINAR 1: DECEMBER 7 & 8 2024
We will read Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad paying attention to questions of ‘turning points’, ‘revelation’ and ‘recognition’. We will attend to the ways the two parts of the book speak to aforementioned questions. The first part of the book is a lecture. The second part is a reflection on the lecture due to what transpires a few days after the lecture. In the face of such turning points, what questions arise regarding our own histories and practices, receptions and conventions of narration, sensing, understanding, training, habits, assumptions?
The politics of reading and narration will also be thought through by critically engaging with two powerful texts: Fargo Tbakhi’s “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide” and Haytham el-Wardany’s “Labour of Listening.” How can we think of Tbakhi’s crafting militancy and el-Wardany’s poetics of listening and dismantling AR-CHI-TEC-TURE together?
Finally, for our first seminar, 2nd year student Tuba Kilic has assigned a text for all of us to read and discuss in class: “Decolonizing Education, a view from Palestine: an interview with Munir Fasheh” by Mayssoun Sukarieh. This year, each time we will meet one or more of the seminar’s students will assign a text for the seminar, present on it and why it resonated with them, (how did it operate as a turning point and/or revelation and/or recognition), and facilitate a collective study session and discussion on the text. We will also share our developing thoughts with each other during the course of the year in written form through letters and email chains.
Readings:
Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. New York: Black Cat, 2024.
Fargo Tbakhi, “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide.” Protean Magazine, 08 December, 2023. https://proteanmag.com/2023/12/08/notes-on-craft-writing-in-the-hour-of-genocide/
Haytham el-Wardany, “Labour of Listening.” Minor Literature[s], 23 July, 2024.
https://minorliteratures.com/2024/07/23/labour-of-listening-haytham-el-wardany/
Mayssoun Sukarieh, “Decolonizing Education, a view from Palestine: an interview with Munir Fasheh.” International Studies in Sociology of Education, 03 April 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/09620214.2019.1601584.
SEMINAR 2: January 10,11 &12 2025
This seminar seeks to put pressure on ideologically internalized understandings of ‘theory.’ One approach to Amilcar Cabral’s anticolonial and antiimperialist concept and practice of the “weapon of theory” entails a critical engagement with the ways hegemonic understandings of ‘theory’ are temporally and spatially normalized through repeated institutional practices. Historically situated and classed, institutional access and demands shore up and stabilize social order. The productive forces of theory, and the theory these forces produce, require a deep thinking around, and modes of analyses antagonistic to, the geo/political economies perpetuating ideological and practical disciplining. What techniques and self-criticisms are necessary to disrupt the social reproduction professionalized theory and art operate and circulate in, organizes and coerces?
The seminar is divided across three days/sessions:
Readings
Friday Jan 10 & Saturday Jan 11:
James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory.” The Nation, July 11, 1966.
Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” in Return to the Source: Selected Speeches by Amilcar Cabral. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973.
Amilcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979.
Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory.” The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.3, no.5, e-Document, December 2009.
Kevin Ochieng Okoth, Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics. London: Verso, 2023.
Sunday Jan 12:
Dilar Dirik, “A Self-Critique.” The Shedding, November 21, 2024. https://dilardirik.substack.com/p/a-self-critique
Domenico Losurdo, Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn. Ed.: Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024.
