2025-2026 FROM CONFLUENCE TO CONFLUENCE ~ Sladja Blazan's seminar: Shapeshifting
SEMINAR: April 17, 18 & 19, 2026
SEMINAR: March 13, 14 & 15, 2026
Critical Fabulation
In this confluence, we will turn towards strategies of resistance and survival under oppression and discuss what relational identity might mean. We will pay particular attention to the politics of imagination. Our guide will be Anansi, the divine trickster, a devious spider who knew how to spin the story. Anansi’s shapeshifting will be our entrance into a 1984 essay by the Jamaican novelist, dramatist and philosopher Sylvia Wynter with the title "The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism," a powerful philosophical intervention that challenges Western humanism and its ways of defining what it means to be human. In this text, „ceremony” is invoked as an event that exposes capitalist modernity’s fundamental contradictions, managing to transform them with a combination of physical presence and stories, just like Anansi does. Wynter argues for an understanding of humans as “hybrid” creatures that are formed of both biology (bios) and mythology (logos). This foundational essay develops Wynter's theory of genre and cultural ceremony as collective meaning-making practices. It provides the theoretical scaffolding for understanding how trickster narratives function as autopoietic (self-creating) systems. The title for Wynter’s essay comes from a John Peale Bishop poem about finding a ceremony to wed Desdemona to Othello, symbolizing the need for new rituals that can reconcile seemingly irreconcilable differences. Taking our inspiration in Wynter’s work and poetry by Layli Long Soldier and Mohammed El-Kurd, we will write our own poetry and spin our own ceremonies.
Day 1: Tricksters and Civil Disobedience
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. “Anansi, Eshu, and Legba. Slave Resistance and the West African Trickster.”
Morrison, Harun. “When and Where to Become a Spider.”
Eva Hayward. “Spider City Sex.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, volume 20, number 3, 2010, pp. 225–51. doi:10.1080/0740770X.2010.529244.
Day 2: The Ceremony
Descartes. “Meditations II.”
https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil201/Meditations.pdf
Sylvia Wynter. "The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism." boundary 2, Spring 1984, pp. 19-71.
The Demon. Directed by Brunello Rondo. Italy, 1963.
Day 3: Ceremony Found?
Continue discussing Sylvia Wynter, write and read poetry, individual student meetings, plan the next confluence
The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Directed by Piere Paolo Pasolini. France / Italy 1964.
SEMINAR: January 17, 18 & 19, 2026
Becoming Molecular
The readings for this confluence bring together speculative fiction with feminist science studies and new materialist theory. The selection creates a conversation around embodiment, knowledge production, and the politics of categorization. Butler's Parable of the Sower grounds the discussion in questions of survival, community-building, and adaptive change, while the theoretical texts provide a framework for understanding how bodies, matter, and meaning interact. The pairing of Le Guin's brief short story "She Unnames Them" with the theoretical pieces dramatizes what Haraway and Barad theorize about language, power, and relationality.
Keywords: “situated knowledges,” „animacy hierarchy,” “transmaterialities,” “molecular becoming”
Day 1
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege
of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, volume 14, number 3, 1988, pp. 575–99.
Reassemblage (40 min.), dir. Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1982.
Day 2
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, Four Walls, 1993.
Mel Y. Chen, “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, volume 17, issue 2-3, 2011, pp. 265-286.
The Last Angel of History, dir. John Akomfrah, 1996.
Love is the Message, The Message is Death (7.5 min), dir, Arthur Jafa, 2016.
Day 3
Karen Barad. "Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, volume 21, issue 2-3, 2015, pp. 387-422.
Ursual K. Le Guin, “She Unnames Them,” The New Yorker, 21. January 1985.
Dahomey, dir. Mati Diop, 2024.
Planktonium (15. min), dir. Jan van Ijken, 2021.
SEMINAR: November 22 & 23, 2025
Transcorporeality
Saturday 22
One of the most discussed new concepts in environmental humanities currently is the concept of transcorporeality as introduced by Stacy Alaimo in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and The Material Self. Transcorporeality is a radically relational vision of the human that highlights the material entanglements with one’s environments. Alaimo’s theory builds on materialist feminist theory that preceded her publication. After discussing the posthumanist mode of new materialism and material feminism as well as transcorporeal ethics and politics during the first day, we will move on to a fitting historical example of relational ontology.
Sunday 23
During the second day, we will discuss Nagualismo, a Nahuatl concept associated with Pre-classic Olmec-inspired depictions of shapeshifting humans or of animal guardians or companions or spirit guides. We will particularly pay attention to how this concept has been used to resist colonial powers and how the writer and artist Gloria Anzaldùa used la naguala, the shapeshifter associated with knowledge and creative power, to construct a theory of a “new consciousness” based on relational identities that are understood to be the basic building blocks for a just society.
Bibliography
Stacy Alaimo. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana UP, 2010.
Gloria Anzaldùa. “La conciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness,” In: Borderlands / La Frontera.
---, “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.
Nancy Tuana. "Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina." Material Feminisms, 2008, p. 188.
Edward Said. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Foreword by Akeel Bilgrami. Columbia University Press, 2005.