2025 - 2026 Sladja Blazan's seminar: Shapeshifting

The seminar is conceived and offered by: Sladja Blazan

The seminar from Confluence to Confluence

Seminar participants second year:  Liam Warren, Erik Peters, Asmaa Barakat, Jip van der Hek, Dimitris Chimonas, Agnese Krivade

Seminar participants first year: Shiva Yourdkhani, Lío Spinnewijn, Yindi Chen, Noah Storrs Gokul

Shapeshifting 

INTRODUCTION:

The legacy of and, in certain circles, ongoing insistence on Western humanism has been central to naturalizing and perpetuating combative individualism based on the dualism between the Self and the Other that in its collective form can and does peak in neo-Nazism, fanatical nationalism and genocide. It is therefore not a surprise that more and more theories invested in challenging humanism are reaching an ever wider audience. Particularly scholars in postcolonial studies have theorized the inadequacy of the term humanity to account for all humans. As repeatedly emphasized: the raison d’etre of Enlightenment humanism, the rational, autonomous, individual subject, uomo universal and homo economicus, is also the normative white male imperialist subject (Spivak 2006). Cultivated in the negative space of colonial violence, this “human” fails to represent the most of humanity. In fact, the ongoing genocide in Palestine builds on a long history of documented dehumanization (Fralhat and Aburamadan 2025). Sylvia Wynter is only one of the many, albeit prominent, more recent philosophers who scrutinized this imperial subject. In her history of Western humanity, the human is a convenient cover-up for the “Enlightenment Man” who – to use Sylvia Wynter’s phrase, “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself”. With this statement Wynter warned that, as she phrases it, any attempt to address the now collectively threatened “planetary environment of our human-species habitat” necessarily needs to begin with “the unsettling of this overrepresentation.” Rethinking what it means to be human, Wynter developed a “counterhumanism” that imagines humans as a “hybrid species” (p. 11), thus breaking away from classifications of humans in fixed, nonrelational categories.

In fact, Frantz Fanon already called out to his readers in the closing pages of his last book, The Wretched of the Earth, to imagine a “new humanism”. Calling upon anybody willing to listen, Fanon writes: “comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.”

In this seminar, we will look into theories, film, poetry, and visual art that has implicitly or explicitly responded to this call. After a few introductory sessions that will help us familiarize ourselves with the large body of work invested in criticizing Western humanism, we will quickly move on and take the time to dwell in spaces beyond humanism and empirical rationality. Our stops will include ecology, migration, animality or monstrosity. Building on history of science, animal studies, philosophy of race, transgender studies and biopolitical theory, we will intervene in posthumanist discourses to refigure the forces necessary for worldmaking. Mostly, we will read communitarian and feminist philosophers who argue for relational views that recognize the social embeddedness, relatedness and intersectionality of selves.

Instead of focusing on how and why and when certain groups were and are regarded as inhuman, we will depart from this track of Western humanism into regions yet to be defined; not only challenge humanism but, following Fanon’s call, imagine otherwise. Dwelling in spaces beyond humanism, we will explore the alternatives through the prism of shapeshifting.

Shapeshifters can embody various forms, reflecting the fluid nature of identity and existence. More often than not, they manage to story survival, symbolizing personal growth and evolution. And yet, shapeshifting trajectories repeatedly end in condemnation. Why? Or--to ask with Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing--what is it that “manages to live despite capitalism” through strategies of “collaborative survival” across difference? As throughout the seminar, we will have explored shapeshifting not only as a historical and aesthetic concept but as a form of resistance, in our last confluence we will return to the problem of universal humanism and focus on the question: how regimes of gendered and racialized accumulation depend on particular (fixed) ideas about the human.

Readings:

Sara Ahmed. „Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.“ GLQ, 1 October 2006, volume, 12, number 4, pp. 543–574. doi: https://doi-1org-1va3cz78002e0.erf.sbb.spk-berlin.de/10.1215/10642684-2006-002

Stacy Alaimo. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana UP, 2010.

Gloria Anzaldùa. “now let us shift…the path to conocimiento…inner works, public acts.” this bridge we call home: radical vision for transformation, edited by Gloria Anzaldùa and AnaLouise Keating, Routledge, 2002, pp. 540-578.

Karen Barad. "Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 21 no. 2, 2015, p. 387-422. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/581607.

Oliva Blanchette und Cathal Doherty. Intersubjective Existence: A Critical Reflection on the Theory and Practice of Selfhood. The Catholic University of America Press, 2023.

Samantha Frost. Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human. Duke University Press, 2016.

Suzanne Bost, Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism. University of Illinois Press, 2019.

Octavia Butler. Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, NED-New edition, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 3–25.

Mohammed el-Kurd. RIFQUA. Haymarket Books, 2021.

Laura Kromják und Ajlina Karamehić-Muratović. Intergenerational Trauma in Refugee Communities. Routledge, 2025. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003385820.

Larisa Lai. Salt Fish Girl. Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002.

Nam-in Lee. Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity: Husserl, Levinas and East-West Dialogue. Felix Meiner Verlag, 2022.

Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen. “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 2015, p. 183, https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2843215.

Marshall, Emily Zobel. "Liminal Anansi: Symbol of Order and Chaos An Exploration of Anansi's Roots Amongst the Asante of Ghana." Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 3, 2007, p. 30.

Emily Zobel Marshall. "“Nothing but Pleasant Memories of the Discipline of Slavery”: The Trickster and the Dynamics of Racial Representation." Marvels & Tales, vol. 32, no. 1, 2018, p. 59, https://doi.org/10.13110/marvelstales.32.1.0059.

M. NourbeSe Philip. Zong! As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng. Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

AnaLouise Keating. Transformation Now!: Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change. University of Illinois Press, 2013.

Adriana Knouf. „Xenological Temporalities in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Lovecraft, and Transgender Experiences.“ Studies in the Fantastic, volume 9, number 1, pp. 23-43, doi:10.1353/sif.2020.0001.

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. Penguin, 2014.

Jill Salberg and Sue Grand. Transgenerational Trauma: A Contemporary Introduction. Routledge, 2024.

Edward Said. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Foreword by Akeel Bilgrami. Columbia University Press, 2005.

Gilbert Simondon. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. Minnesota Press, 2020.

Susan Stryker. "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 1, no. 3, 1994, p. 237, https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1-3-237.

Kim TallBear, “Dossier: Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms: An Indigenous Reflection on Working Beyond the Human/Not Human,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 21, number 2-3, 2015, pp. 230-235.

Sylvia Wynter. "The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism." boundary 2, Spring 1984, pp. 19-71.