2025-2026 FROM CONFLUENCE TO CONFLUENCE ~ Grant Watson's seminar: SCRITTI POLITTI
SEMINAR: April 17, 18 & 19, 2026
SEMINAR: March 13, 14, 15 2026
The March Seminar at Matera developed the theme of political writing, pursuing the question: What makes a text political? Does politics reside in the content, the affect, the actions or community convoked? For this session the group read ‘The Materiality of Affect,’ from Rosemary Hennessy’s, ‘Fires on the Border, The Passionate Politics of Labor Organising on the Mexican Frontera,’ a texts which outlines and helps to link affect theory to historical materialism and activism. The group also read Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambrano’s book ‘Tone’ which explores the affective qualities of ‘tone’ through a heterodox research project undertaken by ‘The Committee to Investigate Atmosphere’ specially created to undertake this study. The book addresses the labour politics of academic work and suggests ways to structure research along no-normative trajectories. Finally the group read the introduction to Nasser Abourahme’s, ‘The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine Between Camp and Colony,’ a text that thinks through the Palestinian refugee camp in order to discuss the question of time as a critical battleground between the settler colonial project and indigenous resistance. The seminar also included listening to a podcast interview with Nasser Abourahme about his book, watching the film ‘London’ by Patrick Keiller, and reading and discussion of student text submissions.
Readings:
Nasser Abourahme, The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine Between Camp and Colony, Duke University Press, Durham: 2025
Rosemary Hennessy, Fires on the Border, The Passionate Politics of Labor Organising on the Mexican Frontera, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: 2013
Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno, Tone, Columbia University Press, New York: 2024
SEMINAR: January 17, 18 & 19, 2026
This seminar block continued the inquiry into the political potentiality of art and writing by turning to affect as a register of orientation between bodies, political and social structures. Engaging with Leela Gandhi’s Affective Communities, we considered how aesthetic practices intersect with anti-colonial thought, asking whether poetry can provoke fractures from within the ideological project of the Empire. Through Ghandi’s cross-reading of Kant and Hegel, the session traced her anti-colonial approach to aesthetics troubling fixed binaries of autonomy and historicity. Drawing on Rosemary Hennessy’s Fires on the Border, a second strand turned to practices of bearing witness, examining the role of the researcher within labour struggles and introduced concepts such as meantime and second skin to think through lived temporalities and heterogeneous experiences of labor organising. Through Raymond Williams’ notion of structures of feeling, we engaged with (pre-)emergent forms of cultural experience exceeding formalised cultural categories, posed against the uneven distribution of representation and cultural participation. These questions were tested in reflections on Oscar Wilde’s fairytales, enacted in a Situationists psychogeographic exercise and discussed in relation to two film screenings addressing the musical scene of Turkish migrant workers in Germany and an intimate essay film of a Palestinian filmmakers’ diasporic experience.
17.01.
Morning Session
Introduction, Practicalities & Recap from last Seminar
Reading: Leela Gandhi. Chapter 6: Art, in: Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
Zoom Call with Grant
Afternoon
Communal walk & Listening: Oscar Wilde’s Fairytales
Writing Feedback Session: Emma, Leo
18.01.
Morning Session
Reflections on Palestine Teach Out
Reading: Rosemary Hennessy. Introduction, In: Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Afternoon Session
Writing Feedback Session: Tomaso, Aimee
Affective Mapping: Situationists' Psychogeography Exercise
Screening: Love, Deutsche Mark and Death (2022)
19.01.
Morning Session
Communal Walk & Listening: What’s left of Philosophy: Raymond Williams on Literature and Cultural Materialism
Reading: Raymond Williams. Structures of Feeling, In: Marxism and Literature, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
Afternoon Session
Recap, Collective Notetaking