2025-2026 Hypatia Vourloumis' seminar: Canon & Cannon

The seminar from Confluence to Confluence

Seminar participants second year: Despina Sanida Crezia, Anne van Ophem, Jamie Donald, Ayse Idil Idil, Ginevra Collini, Ivor Glavaš, Ratri Notosudirdjo, Masha Domracheva

Seminar participants first year: Andrea Illès,BiBi, Seta Astreou-Karides, Yuzhen Chen

Canon & Cannon

INTRODUCTION:

"There is a Critical Times Journal blog called In the Midst. In its own words, In the Midst “conveys the difficulties of writing during critical times, and registers the importance of writing from within concrete, unfolding situations, of thinking from particular grounds, and of allowing for responsive, experimental, and tentative interventions.”

Ghalya Saadawi shared a text by Samera Esmeir titled The Days Before from this blog. 

All of this is to say that the question of how to think; to read, write, study; to design a seminar, is to be honest in the midst of critical times of the difficulty of doing so. It is also to say that to be in the midst is to always already exist within collective thinking and struggle, in the midst of gestures and movements and acts of solidarity, critical dialogue and support. Read Dr. Saadawi’s essay just out in Salvage – “Against History: Art, Culture, and Business as Usual under the Gaza genocide.” 

So, in the midst, I came across an image a few days ago. It is an image of the words Of Canon & Cannon hand written in capital letters in red against a pale backdrop. It is from a recent work by the artist, poet, musician and filmmaker Saul Williams. He posted it on Instagram. You can see the image on his Instagram account in his post of September 18, 2025 and read there the description of the context of the work and the exhibition. 

I see Williams’s posts everyday now for almost 2 years. They appear on my feed because of the Gaza genocide. Saul Williams took up the call, like so many others, from the very first day, to fight back, to educate, to historicize and internationalize, to amplify, to not look away, to post and post and post in collaboration with the resistance on the ground, with the life that insists and speaks to us directly through our phones, demanding that we spread the word, show the truth, cut through the lies and fog.

This seminar takes its name from Saul William’s words and practice. In recognition of his artistry, poetry, militancy, solidarity and wisdom. In gratitude.

I’ve never met Saul Williams in person. But he has been a lifeline, like so many others I have never met in person who make up a collective of truth tellers and brave fighters across a web. Their virtual presence actualizes comradeship.

We flooded the algorithm. Because we had to. We still have to. A duty to confront, to join the front because we automatically follow the lead and calls to do so by the true communicators of our generation who directly face and address us as they directly face a merciless killing machine.

If genuinely concerned with practices of communicability within social totality, then any doing/saying is unquestionably inseparable from, and concretely confronted by, this interpellation. Regardless of whether it is ignored, suppressed or muted, relegated to a parallel timeline, literally killed, the force of the address unavoidably forces the forming of an already existing, and still emerging, material reality. This reality is shaped by an actualizing forming of a series of realities as processes made up of the material and ideological ramifications generated from willful listening and responses, and/or willful silencing and non-responses; the force of the address reveals the political terrain in all its totality. This interpellation continues in wills and testaments: Anas Al- Sharif’s will (03.12.1996 – 10.08.2025) he instructed be shared with the world, repeatedly uses the word “entrust.” Nora Barrows-Friedman reads it for all of us here. Another lifeline, a fierce sister never met in person and yet an irreplaceable journalist, teacher and comrade.

What then is critique in the face of such trust? What is theory? We cannot lose sight of how colonial genocides, historically and in the now, are perpetrated by, and in the name of, as Williams writes, “supremacist notions of “western civilization” preserved and institutionalized through canon and cannon.” (see the description to the Sep 18, 25 instagram post I mentioned above.)

The canon with one n is from the Greek κανόνας meaning “rule,” “measuring stick.” In time it marks a body of art or discourse understood as veritable material, a catalog of approved authors, a colonially universalized standardization.

The rules-based order of our world gave a podium to an Al-Qaeda leader, self-appointed president of Syria, at the United Nations a few days ago. The rules- based order recognized a concentration camp as a “state” as they continue to arm the regime exterminating the people trapped there. The rules-based order lures starving people with food and executes them. The rules-based order murders babies. Recent estimates suggest approx. 350,000 children under the age of 5 in Gaza alone so far. As we speak. Right now.

How then to face the canon and cannon. The resistance on the ground repurposes, harvests imperial materiel, the unexploded ordinance, to improvise indigenous weapons, shoulder held canons, in hand to tank combat. Or to cite three questions posed by the Mississippi Freedom School Curriculum in 1964: What does the dominant culture have that we want? What does the dominant culture have that we don’t want? What do we have that we want to keep?

A militant clarity is required here. In Fargo Tbakhi’s piece Notes on Craft he cites Amiri Baraka in a 2004 lecture on art and politics:

“You must raise the level of our understanding of the world… so that we understand the causal connections in the world, why it acts the way it does. So that we don’t believe everybody who smiles at us and gives us a broom is our friend. So that we know who are our friends and who are our enemies, and right now so that we can build that united front. What is the artist’s job? To make war. The artist’s job is unrelenting war on evil.”

Now please read Fargo Tbakhi’s “An American Writes a Poem.” 

In the link you will find an interview Tbakhi gives about the poem you just read. He explains: “This poem is an attempt to map an economy of poetry which forces it back into a materialist analysis and refuses to allow the romantic notion of a poem as some mystical object which exists outside the violent circulation of the world. I wanted to insist that American poetics, and the market of American literature, is not separate from the financial and ideological structures facilitating and necessitating brutality against Palestinians and all other populations marked for death.”

If we are to live to tell the tale, the story, because Refaat Alareer had to die (he said – “if I must die”) then one is inexorably confronted by poethical challenges inseparable from the relentless analysis of concrete historical materiality; what doing, what saying within the imperatives of infrastructural canons and cannons, and the labour of preserving, of invention, circulation and improvisation, connection of a concert of counter counter-revolutionary tales, stories, infrastructures.

In the Midst, an international collective of anti-imperialist scholars, organizes an independent platform called Liberated Texts where they review “works of ongoing relevance that have been forgotten, underappreciated, suppressed or misinterpreted in the cultural mainstream since their release.” During our seminar, students will study several of these book reviews and review texts and present them in class. We will begin our seminar by reading Ursula le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. This year’s seminar continues from last year’s thinking with Amílcar Cabral’s notion of the weapon of theory and his method of bricolage. This bricolage will include theoretical and poetic writings on the canon including Samuel R. Delany’s The ParaDoxa Interview: Inside and Outside the Canon, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE, Jonathan Sterne, Communication as Techné, Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature”, Dear Science & Other Stories by Katharine McKittrick, and writing and testimony as cannon including Wisam Rafeedie’s prison novel The Trinity of Fundamentals, Let Me Speak! by Domitilla Barrios de Chungara, and the memoir The Country under my Skin by poet Gioconda Belli. To be in the midst, as this introduction to the seminar reveals, is to be in the midst of the many voices and works and interventions of a historical and growing movement, near and far, physically present or absent, alive “in the long middle of revolution” (Tbakhi, 2023). We will study together what appears to us as we walk to what and where as yet unknown, what emerges as theory, art, science, and critical practice. Studying as a site of struggle, our sessions will think through tactics and strategies regarding: institutional collapse; the exhaustion of language and the grasping of insurgent materiality; ideological dissolution and political clarity; crafting militancy/militant crafting; non-performance, non-cooperation, attrition, abolition, organization." 

Readings:

Domitila Barrios De Chungara and Moema Viezzer, Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2024.

Gioconda Belli, The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War. Knopf Doubleday Publishing, 2003.

Theresa Hak Yung Cha, DICTEE. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001 [1982]

Samuel R. Delany, “The ParaDoxa Interview: Inside and Outside the Canon.” In Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and The Politics of the Paraliterary. 186–217. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, 1973. Originally published in the New Dimensions 3 anthology, 1973. Later republished in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, 1975.

Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

Wisam Rafeedie, The Trinity of Fundamentals. New York, NY: 1804 Books, 2024.

Jonathan Sterne, “Communication as Techné,” in Communication as… Perspectives on Theory, eds. Gregory Shepherd, Jeffrey St, John, Ted Striphas. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006.

Fargo Tbakhi, “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide.” December 8, 2023.