Politics Department and Centre for Postcolonial Studies Seminar Series Programme 2010/2011
Professor Sandro Mezzadra (University of Bologna) speaks on "The multiplication of borders and border struggles in the contemporary world"
Friday 10th February 2012; RHB 356, 5-7 pm
All welcome
Drawing from a book I am currently finishing with Brett Neilson ("Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor"), this presentation will start with a description of the proliferation and heterogenization of borders that characterizes the contemporary world. It will then focus on the consequences of these processes for an understanding of migration and political subjectivity, discussing some of the most important positions in contemporary critical debates. The concept of border struggle will be then introduced against this background, and its importance for a radical politics of the common will be discussed.
Sandro Mezzadra is Associate Professor of Political theory in at the University of Bologna. He has been research fellow at the Humboldt Universität, Berlin; in the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney; at the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris; at the University of Ljubljana; and at Duke University. In the last decade his work has centered on the relations between globalization, migration and citizenship as well as on postcolonial theory and criticism. He is an active participant in discussions within the tradition of Italian autonomist Marxism and (post)operaismo, and is one of the founders of the UniNomade network (http://uninomade.org/)
Tuesday 28th February 2012, 5-7pm, RHB 137
Presenter: Prof. Vassilis K. Fouskas is Professor of International Relations at Richmond University and the founding Editor of the refereed periodical Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies (quarterly, Routledge)
Title: "The Tragedy of Globalisation and the Re-Fashioning of Imperial Order"
Abstract: USA's informal imperium established after WWII in Western Europe and Asia's Pacific rim rested on monetary, political and ideational conditions none of which exists today: the supremacy of the dollar in global currency markets, already frail since 1968, is now being challenged by the global financial crisis drawing the Eurozone into it too; America's over-expanded military power has shown its limits and recent disasters include Iraq and Afghanistan (also note the back seat America took vis-à-vis NATO's Libyan campaign); and the "war on terror" can no longer, if at all, provide the ideational glue to rally alliances and friends behind the cause of free market capitalism with the same success as the scheme of the "war on Communism" did during the Cold War. But while the victors of WWII are in economic decline and retreat, the Global East (China, Brazil, India, South Africa, Turkey) are on the rise. This paper is set to examine these developments and the extent to which the relative decline of the US imperium could possibly result in more democratic and equitable forms of global, regional and local governance.
Wednesday 18th January 2012, 5-7.30pm, RHB Cinema
Presenter: Aslak Sira Myhre, Director of Litteraturhuset, (House of Literature), Oslo. For further details on Aslak Sira Myhre see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aslak_Sira_Myhre
Title: We are the 99 percent and so what? —On the political left after the fall of the Soviet Union—
Abstract: This paper is an analysis of the following:
"Since the days of Marx, capitalism's inevitable descent into crisis has been among the major talking points of the left. But when the crisis hits us, the European left is absent. The working class, the poor, the devaluated middle class, the immigrants and their children, all look anywhere but to the traditional left for solutions. The rise of the popular right and the Islamic right in Europe is more than anything a result of the shortcomings of the Left".
Monday 21st November 2011, 5-7pm, RHB 137
Presenter: Professor Florent Villard
Professor Villard is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies, University Jean Moulin Lyon 3, Vice-director of the Institute of Transtextual and Transcultural Studies, and director of publication of Transtexts-Transcultures: Journal of Global Cultural Studies. He is the author of many articles on Chinese modern cultural history involving topics on nationalism, orientalism, translation and postcolonial and transcultural issues. He is currently engaged in a research on the Ph.D. thesis of the students of the Lyon Sino-French Institute (1921-1946).
Abstract: This seminar investigates the discursive peregrinations of the ‘Han’ category in the writings of the Chinese revolutionary, theoretician and activist Qu Qiubai. In the papers he wrote at the beginning of the 1930s dealing with the questions of language and writing, the author made singular use of the concept ‘Han’ to talk about the language/writing of the ‘Han’ (Hanzi, Hanyu) as a racial or ethnic group (Hanzu). Qu elaborated a discourse which articulated and mobilized, sometimes in a contradictory manner, the ‘Han’ category both as a ‘race’ and as a social class. Going beyond the race/class dialectic, I will try to show that these texts question the territorial, cultural and ethnic boundaries of ‘China’ and its homogeneity. Following this argument, this paper demonstrates how Qu's attempt to define ‘Chinese language(s)’ helps us to elucidate the complex articulation between China as a discursive and spatial category, the ‘Han’ category, and the other nationalities in the Chinese space. By questioning the homogeneity of the linguistic identity of China, using the word zhongguohua, Qu Qiubai unveiled an unstable and fragile imaginary relative to China and its so-called majority ethnic group, the Han.
Department of Politics Seminar Series Autumn Term 2011
Wednesday 16th November, 4-6pm, RHB 142
Speaker: Dr Jeremy Larkins, Goldsmiths Politics Department
Abstract: This seminar explores the representation of the idea of Africa in work by three ‘post-colonial’ artists: Isaac Julien, Yinka Sonibare and Ingrid Mwangi. This work, which is political in Rancierre’s sense that it expands the realms of the sensible, both challenges and subverts the colonial imaginary of Africa and re-contextualises the idea of Africa within a post-colonial constellation that emphasises notions of hybridity, creolisation and multiple temporalities. Playing loosely with metaphors of darkness and light, I begin with a consideration of the assignation of Africa to a realm of darkness by European colonial discourse. Modernism’s ambivalent relationship to colonialism is explored by looking at a number of photographs of African subjects that appear in Michel Leiris’ surrealist ethnographic travelogue L’Afrique fantôme, in which Africa is presented as both a site of alterity and a source of desire. Whereas modernism has tended to represent Africa in terms of European standards of civilisation, progress, art etc., Julien, Sonibare and Mwangi point to a re-imagination of the idea of Africa that, while it acknowledges the profound impact that of the colonial imaginary has had on Africa, also seeks to expose the biases and conceits that underpinned the colonial vision of Africa and its subjects. The art of work of Julien, Sonibare and Mwangi is both political and celebratory, seeking to represent Africa on its own terms, to give voice to the multiple, complex and heterogeneous voices that constitute African history and identity.
Department of Politics Seminar Series Autumn Term 2011
21 to 22 June 2011, 9.30am-6pm
Politics of Knowledge – the London-Brasilla Conference (Universidade de Brasilia Goldsmiths College, University of London)
An international conference of the Instituto de Ciencias Sociais
Auditório do Centro Internacional de Física da Matéria Condensada, Edifício Multiuso II – Campus Darcy Ribeiro, Universidade de Brasília
Thursday, 9th June, 10am-6.30pm, NAB Lecture Theatre
Speakers: John Milbank (Nottingham University), Wang Hui (Tsinghua University), Achille Mbembe (WISER Institute/Duke University)
Thursday, 5th May, 5-7pm, RHB 308
Presenter: Tejaswini Niranjana (Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore)
Title: “WHY CULTURE MATTERS: The Changing Language of Feminist Politics in India”
Monday, 11 April, 4pm, RHB 137 (please note location is different from Senior Common Room)
Presenter: Chris Gill (Art journalist & Shanghai resident artist) http://www.shanghaieye.net/english/about
Title: "China's Art Model."
Monday, March 28, 5pm, NAB 3.26 (please note location is different from Senior Common Room)
Presenter: Bernadette Buckley (Goldsmiths, Politics)
Title: "Is justice a sausage? Art, Artists and the Bismark Principle."
Monday, March 7, 5pm, NAB 3.26 (please note location is different from Senior Common Room)
Presenter: Kristin Surak (University of Duisburg-Essen / European University Institute)
Title: “Nation-Work: Towards a Praxeology of Cultural Nationalism”
Monday, February 21, 5pm, RHB 150 (please note location is different from Senior Common Room)
Presenter: Ewa Domanska (Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland / Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, USA)
Title: “Hiroshima “Shadows” and Ontology of the Human Remains”
Tuesday, February 8, 5pm
Presenter: Sam O. Opondo (University of Hawai’i at Manoa)
Title: “The Postcolonial Subject of Violence: Explorations in Ethics and the Politics of Aesthetics”
Tuesday, January 25, 5.30pm
Presenter: David Martin (Goldsmiths, Politics)
Title: “Pious Subjects / Sacred Geometries: Postcolonialism and the politics of Western Modernity”
Tuesday, December 14, 5pm
Presenter: Anca Pusca (Goldsmiths, Politics)
Title: “The 'Roma Problem' in the EU: Nomadism, (In)visible Architectures and Violence”
Tuesday, December 14, 5pm
Presenter: Branwen Gruffydd Jones (Goldsmiths, Politics)
Title: “Assembling Financial Subjects in the Slum”
Thursday, December 9, 6pm
Presenter: Renate Holub (University of California at Berkeley)
Title: “Elements for a Critical Theory of Intellectuals under Conditions of Informational apitalism”