2026 - 2027 Sladja Blazan's seminar: Epistemic Disobedience

The seminar is conceived and offered by: Sladja Blazan

The seminar from Confluence to Confluence

Seminar participants second year: Shiva Yourdkhani, Lío Spinnewijn, Yindi Chen, Noa Storrs Gokul

Seminar participants first year: 

Epistemic Disobedience

INTRODUCTION:

This seminar continues last year's inquiry into reconceptualizing the human, building on Sylvia Wynter's call to "unsettle the overrepresentation of Western man as human," alongside thinkers like Anzaldúa, Ahmed, and Alaimo. This year, the focus shifts in two directions: toward emancipation narratives as acts of epistemic disobedience, and, more urgently, toward the obstacles we encounter in trying to imagine humanity otherwise — including our own often unintended complicity in systems of injustice.

The central provocation is this: what if the subject is not a critical observer? Despite decades of theoretical turns — spatial, linguistic, new materialist, critical — many of us, including activists, feel less agency than ever. Rather than simply asking how society is structured and for whom, the seminar asks how we structure society, and for whom.

Drawing on Alenka Zupančič's concept of disavowal (distinct from denial), the course examines how naming injustice — attending conferences, using the right vocabulary, building careers on critique — can substitute for actual transformation, leaving harm to continue in the background. This dynamic is traced across climate politics, racism, and other struggles, questioning the comfort of "righteousness" in a moment when being on the right side of history can become its own trap.

The term "epistemic disobedience" stems from Walter Mignolo's conceptualization of the act of refusing to operate solely within Eurocentric frameworks of knowledge, and instead asserting other ways of knowing (vernacular, embodied, subaltern) as legitimate on their own terms rather than as objects to be studied by dominant epistemology. However, we will shift our attention to disobedience. What form should this refusal be taking? In literature as in visual art, for example, formal and narrative choices are often employed as acts of resistance. We will draw our main example from Toni Morrison’s, Beloved. The novel is structured around "rememory," a fragmented, recursive relationship to trauma and history that resists the coherent, chronological format of conventional historiography. To be able to theorize this we will turn to Édouard Glissant’s concept of "opacity" (articulated across his poetics, e.g. Poetics of Relation) that argues for the right of any entity to be understood on its own terms rather than fully translated/transparent to a dominant gaze; a direct literary theorization of epistemic disobedience.

This is to name only a few examples. Our sessions will include poetry writing workshops, collaborative exercises, focused free writing, film screenings etc.  

Readings:

Ahmed, Sara. The Feminist Killjoy: Handbook. New York: Penguin Books, 2023.  

al-Gharbi, Musa. We Have Never Been Woke : The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024. 

Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. "Open Letter to Sylvia Wynter: Unlearning the Disappearance of Jews From Africa." The Funambulist, no. 30, 2020. 

Barad, Karen. “On Touching—the Inhuman That Therefore I Am.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, 2012, pp. 206–23, https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-1892943. 

Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. London: Penguin Books, 2025.

King, Tiffany Lethabo. "Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight." Critical Ethnic Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2017, pp. 162–85.

MORE WORLDS COLLECTIVE, et al. Fear of a Dead White Planet. Duke University Press, 2025. 

Sultana, Farhana. "The Unbearable Heaviness of Climate Coloniality." Political Geography 99, 2022, pp. 102638.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 

Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

Mignolo, W. D. Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom. Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 26, no. 7-8, 2009, pp. 159-181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276409349275. 

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 

TallBear, Kim. "Standing With and Speaking as Faith," Journal of Research Practice, 2014). 

TallBear, Kim. "Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming." Kalfou 6, no. 1, 2019, pp. 24–41. 

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. 

Mannoni, Octave. "Je sais bien, mais quand même..." In Clefs pour l'Imaginaire ou l'Autre Scène. Paris: Seuil, 1969.

Marx, Karl. 1844. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Translated by Martin Milligan. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959 

Odeh, Tayseer Abu & Sherah Bloor (trsl.), Jorie Graham (ed.). You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine. Copper Canyon Press, 2025. 

Wynter, Sylvia. "1492: A New World View." In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.

Wynter, Sylvia. "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument." CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. 

Zupančič, Alenka. Disavowal. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024.