2026-2027 Hypatia Vourloumis' seminar: how on earth

The seminar from Confluence to Confluence

Seminar participants second year: BiBi, Seta Astreou-Karides

Seminar participants first year: 

how to earth

INTRODUCTION:

This seminar will focus on the doings of language and ungrammaticality. We will analyze hegemony’s dependence on the functions of language, closely reading Antonio Gramsci’s writings on normative grammar and political power. If, as Gramsci posits in his Prison Notebooks and other writings, language is a central battleground, the seminar seeks to recuperate the question of linguistic hegemony as it pertains to common sense and consent. The first study sessions will think through what too often gets ignored – the Gramscian notion of “a philosophy of praxis” as the unity of theory and action is inseparable from a critical analysis of performances of language. Thus, in constructing our study trajectory together, we begin by preparing some foundations – we will read and discuss Gramsci’s writing on language, culture and hegemony, Stuart Hall’s “encoding/decoding,” Marxist philosophy of language. This preparation seeks to set the stage for an analysis of repertoire and structure, logistics and infrastructure, iterability and repetition, communication as techné. Following this, we will read and listen to practices of linguistic resistance and ungrammaticality within and across anticolonial histories, theories and poetics including the Caribbean discourse and paralanguage of Edouard Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, Wilson Harris; Lorca’s and Nathaniel Mackey’s duende; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s “decolonising the mind,” the bursts, eruptions and deconstructions of poets Norman H. Pritchard’s Matrix. JJJJJerome Ellis’s The Clearing, and Sutardji Calzoum Bachri’s O Amuk Kapak. All these vernaculars, textual sounds/sound texts, and breaks will lead to a close study of explosive resistant media, communiques and channels that, in their iteration of, (and too often misdiagnosed and/or ignored), statements, news items, political analyses and reflections, practice and demand a militant breaking of hegemonic language as new anticolonial ideological and cultural paradigm. How is the inability to recognize, listen to and learn from the grounded, battle front articulations of organized interregional popular mobilization forces (their sacrifices and achievements) - despite their media producers’ tireless daily labour to translate and speak to “the free people of the world” in imperial languages - bound up with hegemonic colonial thinking? The ungrammatical how on earth of the seminar’s title marks several things – linguistic and cognitive struggle, compartmentalization, discursive and cultural failure and betrayal, political detachment, stupefaction; propaganda, psyops, censorship/self-censorship, automatonic business as usual; liberalism’s twenty first century live streamed, expanding genocides as common sense; the duty to destroy the ‘world’ and re-think the language that upholds it; the urgency of organizing mass systemic institutional, infrastructural, logistical severance; the question of practice of practice, the philosophy of praxis: how and with whom we do things together on this earth, together with the earth. Glory to the martyrs. Long live the resistance. Free Palestine.

Readings:

Abed, Noor. Stars at Midday. Occasional Papers, 2024.

Abu Sitta, Ghassan et al., “Toward a Revolutionary Charter for Comprehensive Liberation.” March 10, 2026. https://en.al-akhbar.com/news/toward-a-revolutionary-charter-for-comprehensive-liberation1

Agamben, Giorgio, Means without Ends: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

al-Araj, Basel. “Exiting Law and Entering Revolution.” 2024. https://www.thebadside.net/tbs-2-exiting-law

Bachri, Sutardji Calzoum, O Amuk Kapak. Jakarta: Penerbit Sinar Harapan, 1981.

Brathwaite, Kamau, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean. New Beacon Books, 1984.

Chambers, Iain & Marta Cariello, “Mediterranean Blues: Archives, Repertoires, and the Black Holes of Modernity.” California Italian Studies, 10(2), 2020.

Ellis, JJJJJerome, The Clearing. New York, NY: Wendy’s Subway, 2021.

Glissant, Edouard, Caribbean Discourse. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989.

Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Gramsci, Antonio, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, ed. David Forgacs. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2000.

Hall, Stuart, “Encoding/Decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language. London: Routledge, 1980.

Harris, Wilson, Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. A. J. M. Bundy. London: Routledge, 1999.

Jamjoum, Hazem, “Liberation, Wonder, and the ‘Magic of the World’: Basel Al-Araj’s I have Found My Answers.” London: Liberated Texts, 2021. https://liberatedtexts.com/reviews/liberation-wonder-and-the-magic-of-the-world-basel-al-arajs-i-have-found-my-answers/

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, A Marxist Philosophy of Language. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2006.

Mackey, Nathaniel. “Cante Moro.” In Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adalaide Morris. NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Omar, Abdaljawad and Yasir Piracha, “The Hunt: A Conversation with Abdaljawad Omar on Palestine, Empire, and Anti-Imperial Possibility.” The Ex-Puritan Journal, 2026. https://ex-puritan.ca/the-hunt-abdaljawad-omar

Pritchard, Norman H., The Matrix Poems: 1960 – 1970. New York, NY: Primary Information, 2026.

Sterne, Jonathan. “Communication as Techné.” In Communication as. . . : Perspectives on Theory, eds. Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005.

Taha, Mai, “Exiting Law, Entering revolution.” The Sociological Review, Vol. 74, Issue 5, pp. 941-958, Sep, 2026.

Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1986.

Zupančič, Alenka. “What if the Interregnum is the Regnum?” July 1, 2026. https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783513/what-if-the-interregnum-is-the-regnum