2025-2026 Amit Rai's seminar: Attending to Erasure
The seminar is conceived and offered by: Amit S. Rai
The seminar from Confluence to Confluence
Seminar participants second year:
Dana Andrei, Dory Ikonen, Sanna J. Hirvonen, Hannah van der Schaaf, Fagner Lima, Javier Rodríguez PérezCuriel, Olfa Arfaoui
Seminar participants first year:
Josse Vessies, Amalie Sveske Ourø, Veronika Marxer, Rikke Lundgaard Ebling
Attending to Erasure
INTRODUCTION:
If the Palestinian people have been resisting erasure for over a hundred years, what is the role of ‘theory’ in that erasure? What forms of solidarity with Palestinian liberation have emerged or have been reinvigorated since the onset of Israel’s administration of genocide in Gaza?
We begin with these questions to situate what forms of epistemic and ontological violences we will be considering in the seminar under the general categories of attention and erasure. If the Zionist government in Israel has normalised a regime of debilitation (Puar 2018) through specific speech acts and discourses intended to depersonalize/dehumanize Palestinians (Glissant) and through military strategies of maiming and assassination have aimed to produce a controlled population as surplus and thus dispensable, this attempted erasure has nonetheless failed—even as the genocide continues. The seminar will consider how these genocidal strategies of epistemic and ontological erasure have also had effects on our resistant modes of perception.
Beginning with the question of Palestine through two recent works—Abourahme (2021) and Hanieh, Knox, and Ziadah (2025)—we will consider the problem of how to attend to erasure. An attention to erasure obliges us to read across disciplines and become aware of histories that have been written out of the history books—what kind of theory, what kind of research would open attention to erasure? This is a technological and affective question as much as a question of political theory after Gaza.
This seminar affirms an anti-colonial and collective practice of attention for the proliferation of attentions useless for fascism and racial capital (Benjamin, 1938; Harney and Moten, 2013, 2023; Wilderson, 2010, 2020). An affirmation of the revolutionary becomings of our attention within and against racial, caste, fascist capitalism. We understand racial capital as the constituted form of the relations of racially stratified socio-economic ‘reason’, and attention ecologies as modes of fetishized perception produced in and through the formula and spectacle of this contradictory ‘objectivity’ (Bonefeld, 2022: 21). An attention to the political ontologies of autonomous feminist pirate care, transnational hacker collectives, Dalit and feminist jugaad (work around) ecologies in contexts of class, gender, and caste struggle, is also an attention to revolutionary joy. We aim in short to reactivate the Indo-European etymology of attention: the Latin attendere means to bend to, notice, to turn/stretch towards, and to apply, while the Sanskrit adhyaan means meditation or concentration. All of this will be questioned in light of the shift to embodied experimentations in decolonising attention.
To decolonise attention is to stretch and move habituated perception toward an unfolding horizon of insurrection and emancipation. The right to armed struggle and self-determination for the Palestinian people has been repeatedly denied by the Zionist settlers but that right has been seized by the forces of Palestinian liberation itself: the Palestinians prefiguring their own liberation. As such this seminar is rooted in the affirmation of the necessity of prefigurative political ecology of perception. What “facultad” (Anzuldua) of intuitive attention is in hactivist practices? How does an attention to the erasure of women’s labour in the social reproduction of the commodity labour power contribute to subaltern struggles for intersectional emancipation within and against racial-caste capital and settler colonialism?
This seminar poses some methodological questions: What is a non-representational attention to erasure in experiments and practices of de-habituating attentional capacities, in contexts of armed insurgency and in cultural resistance? How can an attention to erasure generate sustainable solidarities? How can attending to erasure become critical to collective experiments of prefigurative politics? (NB: This seminar relates attention to bodily and collective capacities to affect and be affected rather than individualised human consciousness of a representable object.) We pursue these questions of method by collectively studying the political economy of attention beginning with the erasure of revolutionary Palestinian history amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.
You can start now: check the app usage on your mobile phone, make a diagram of the relations of force, value, and sense that you can intuit from your app usage chart. Share with comrades. What does your diagram suggest to you about your habits of attention? Where in your diagram can you trace the violence of erasure?
And:
Keep an attention diary every day for three weeks: Record in whatever way you want (poetry, prose, audio, phone movie clip, wood chips, something else) events of attention in habits, routines, consumption, and creative work. Make a relational ‘multiple causes, multiple effects’ diagram from this record of attention? What do you understand about the ecology and political economy of your attention?
Readings:
COMING SHORTLY