RSS FeedUpcoming EventsGrant Farred | Diaspora-in-Place, April 2https://events.berkeley.edu/pct/event/236103-grant-farred-diaspora-in-place

This project stands as the mark of a previous insufficiency. In my recent monograph, The Perversity of Gratitude: An Apartheid Education, one of the concepts on offer is diaspora-in-place. The concept was, however, not brought into its fullness – it remained as a provocation, a provocation demanding address. Thus, this writing – this still provisional – rendering of the diaspora-in-place. The recognition that the diaspora, much as it turns on departure, leaving, the dream of returning, making a place in an unfamiliar locale, also possesses a different dimension. Contains within it a mobility-in-stasis. To leave without departing. To be gone while remaining in place. That is the condition that this presentation subjects to thinking.

 

Please Note: For the pre-circulated paper, please write to Patty Dunlap at pattydunlap@berkeley.edu

 

Speaker Biography

Grant Farred is a Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University and the author of Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football and T he Burden of Over-representation: Race, Sport, and Philosophy , and the editor of Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures (all Temple University Press), among several other books and pamphlets in theory, postcolonial studies, race, intellectuals, sport, and cultural and literary studies.

Sponsors

In generous collaboration with the Center for African Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of African American Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of English, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Department of Geography, the Department of Political Science, the Department of Rhetoric, the Department of Sociology, the Institute for International Studies, the Irving Stone Chair in Literature, the Marion E. Koshland Chair in the Humanities, the Office of the Dean of the Social Science Division, the Rachel Anderson Stageberg Chair in English, the Social Science Matrix, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

https://events.berkeley.edu/pct/event/236103-grant-farred-diaspora-in-place
Nasser Abourahme | The Time Beneath the Concrete: Camp, Colony, Palestine, April 4https://events.berkeley.edu/pct/event/237535-nasser-abourahme-the-time-beneath-the-concrete

The International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs presents “Thinking from Palestine: Dispossession, Liberation, and Return: Conversations on Three Recent and Forthcoming Books.”

The question that this book aims to answer might seem simple: how can a violent project of dispossession and discrimination be imagined, felt, and profoundly believed in as though it were the exact opposite––an embodiment of sustainability, multicultural tolerance, and democratic idealism? Despite well-documented evidence of racism and human rights abuse, Israel has long been embraced by the most liberal sectors of European and American society as a manifestation of the progressive values of tolerance, plurality, inclusivity, and democracy, and hence a project that can be passionately defended for its lofty ideals.

The question of settler colonialism has, once again, risen to the surface of global politics. But what exactly about settler colonialism makes it so unstable a political formation? Why is it that centuries after their foundational events, even allegedly “postcolonial” settler states seem so often stricken with malaise and enmity that continuously open up “old” wounds and pose existential anxieties anew? The Time Beneath the Concrete argues that settler colonialism is always as much a conquest of time as a conquest of land; it is everywhere a particularly, even peculiarly, fraught struggle over time—perhaps nowhere more so today than in the struggle over Palestine. To read this struggle, the book enacts a shift in method: it tells the story of the Palestinian question by telling the story of the Palestinian refugee camp as a political object. From and through the camps, we can approach the heart of this story—and this is my main argument—as a struggle over historical time that has reached an impasse. From the camps, we see Israel as a settler-colonial project defined by its inability to move past the past, a project stuck at its foundational moment of conquest. And we see the Palestinian insistence on return as a refusal to abide by the closure of the past into settler futurity. Palestinian struggle does not just happen in the open time of dispossession; it happens over this time. It is thus a form of anticolonial refusal that draws its power not from any decisive finality, but precisely from irresolution and keeping time open.

Nasser Abourahme is a writer and academic, and currently assistant professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College. He works between comparative colonial history, political geography, and political theory, and has published broadly across journals and edited collections. His book, The Time Beneath the Concrete: Camp, Colony, Palestine, is forthcoming with Duke University Press.

Sponsors

Presented by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of California, Berkeley. Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Rhetoric and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Speakers

https://events.berkeley.edu/pct/event/237535-nasser-abourahme-the-time-beneath-the-concrete
Isabelle Aubert | Messages in a Bottle: Recent Studies on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, April 16https://events.berkeley.edu/pct/event/240412-isabelle-aubert-messages-in-a-bottle-recent

“Messages in a Bottle: Recent Studies on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory” is a three-part virtual book talk series. The third book talk is presented by Isabelle Aubert, University of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne, on her book The Archives of Critical Theory (Springer 2023).

About the Series

“Messages in a Bottle: Recent Studies on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory” is a three-part lecture series. Each lecture requires advance registration.

- February 27, 2024; 12 -1 pm PST; Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy (Brill/Haymarket) with Dirk Braunstein, Institue for Social Research Frankfurt am Main.

- March 19, 2024; 12 - 1 pm PST; Studies in the Prehistory and Early History of Critical Theory (Matthes & Seitz) with Christian Voller, Leuphana University of Lüneburg.

- April 16, 2024; 12 - 1 pm PST; The Archives of Critical Theory (Springer 2023) with Isabelle Aubert, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Register in advance at this link.

Sponsors

Cosponsored by the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, the Department of History, and the Department of German.

Speakers

https://events.berkeley.edu/pct/event/240412-isabelle-aubert-messages-in-a-bottle-recent
Let’s talk about Palestine | Ahmad Diab & Stefania Pandolfo | Palestinian Literature and the Writing of Trauma, April 16https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/diab-pandolfo

In “Palestinian Literature and the Writing of Trauma,” Dr. Ahmad Diab and Dr. Stefania Pandolfo will each present lectures on Palestinian literature and the relationship between narrative, memory, and trauma. The lectures will be followed by a conversation between the scholars, moderated by Dr. Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed.

 

Dr. Ahmad Diab is Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. Diab specializes in modern Arabic literature and Middle Eastern cinema, with a special focus on the politics of culture and representation in the eastern Mediterranean. His manuscript Intimate Others: Arabs through the Palestinian Gaze (currently under review by Stanford University Press) is the first study of its kind to explore how Palestinians represent non-Palestinian Arabs in literature and visual culture.

 

Dr. Stefania Pandolfo is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Pandolfo studies theories and forms of subjectivity, and their contemporary predicaments in the Middle Eastern and Muslim world. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (1997) and Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (2018). Her current project is a study of emergent forms of subjectivity in Moroccan modernity at the interface of “traditional therapies” and psychiatry/psychoanalysis, exploring theoretical ways to think existence, possibility and creation in a context of referential and institutional instability and in the aftermath of trauma, based on ethnographic research on spirit possession and the “cures of the jinn”, and on the experience of madness in a psychiatric hospital setting.

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