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.
SEMINAR 3: March 21, 22, 23 2025
Our three-day seminar focuses on the histories, politics and poetics of islands and seas. It situates itself in the centuries-long and still ongoing contested landscapes and seascapes of the Eastern Mediterranean. How is the Eastern Mediterranean a point of origin for western philosophy, history, politics and identity? How is the Mediterranean, as death world, a site of structural exclusion? How does a historical materialist analysis of anticolonial and anti-imperial class struggle also require a necessary engagement with the music, voices, poetry, thought, theory and art of those deemed ‘outside’ history? We will study the ways resistant articulations to colonial thought and language, through music, sounds, and poetry in particular, dissolve forced hierarchies, divisions, and borders. How does the duende for instance sound out another materialist history within an echo-monde? How is “internationalism” always already expressed across and within the life worlds of open seas and fields?
Readings:
Adnan, Etel. The Arab Apocalypse. Litmus Press, 2007.
Cariello, Marta & Iain Chambers, “Mediterranean blues: archives, repertoires and the black holes of modernity,” California Italian Studies, 10(2), 2020.
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. DICTEE. University of California Press, 2022.
Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Mackey, Nathaniel, “Cante Moro,” in Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adalaide Morris. Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Stephanos Stephanides, Norbert Bugeja, “Poetics of a Sea.” Journal of Mediterranean Studies, Volume 26, Number 1, 2017.
Wing, Betsy, “Translator’s Introduction,” Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Films & Documentaries:
Johan Grimonprez, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, 2024.
Stephanos Stephanides, Poets in No Man’s Land, 2012.
SEMINAR 4: May 24 & 25 2025
National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. – Frantz Fanon
And it is this discovery that not only shatters the myth of colonial invincibility but also reminds us that liberation is attainable, the future is within reach. Amid the unrelenting airstrikes and the havoc of demolished cities, it might seem frivolous to fixate on the blossoming jasmine. But we owe it ourselves to look at everything, to look for everything. To see the picture with all of its details. As deadly and treacherous and unrelenting as it is, the Nakba will not last forever. The world is changing because it must. If seeds can germinate in the inferno, so can revolution. On the phone, my mother tells me, rain is coming and God is almighty. - M. El-Kurd
The October 7, 2023, operation, like a lightning bolt, brought the relief and contours of the political terrain into view. – Max Ajl
Our final seminar will think through the concrete materialities of historical and ongoing acts and processes of decolonization. If decolonization is always a violent phenomenon, when we speak of “decolonizing the mind” (Ngūgĭ wa Thiong’o) what violent disavowals (for opening up earths of blossoming) are necessarily put into urgent practice? These are questions implicitly and explicitly touched upon in the assigned readings. How is our thinking framed and how is anticolonial resistance always already lightning bolt and “surround”? (Harney and Moten, “Politics Surrounded.”)
Readings:
Frantz Fanon, “Concerning Violence,” The Wretched of the Earth (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1963).
Max Ajl, “Palestine and the Ends of Theory.” Middle East Critique (18 Sep 2024).
Mohammed El-Kurd, Perfect Victims: and the Politics of Appeal. (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2025).
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. (NY: Autonomedia/Minor Compositions, 2013).
Film: Neptune Frost dir. Anisia Uzeyman & Saul Williams, 2021.
