Summer School Programme
July 2022, Parrhesia, Berlin
Three 10-hour courses taught in person and online July 2022
All courses are 10 hours in length and will be taught in person and on Zoom. Significant discounts apply for those enroling in multiple courses. For any questions please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
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When: 18 July – 29 July 2022 Where:
How: All courses will be taught in a hybrid format (in person and on Zoom). Video recordings are made available for those unable to attend. Course readings can be accessed online before the school begins. Links to the Zoom classroom are sent out prior to the course starting. All payment must be made via credit card or Paypal account during enrolment. Also it's worth noting that Berlin (CMT+1) is 10 hours behind Melbourne time and 6 hours ahead of New York. |
Enrolment Fees
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Each Course runs 2 hours per day for 5 days
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Mon-Fri 1–3 pm 18-22 July |
Intellectual Emancipation: Rancière, Badiou, Illich Lecturer: Steven Corcoran |
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Mon-Fri 3–5 pm 25-29 July |
The Politics of Not-Speaking: A Non-Conversation with Heidegger, Schmitt, Fanon, Spivak and Derrida Lecturer: Elad Lapidot |
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Mon-Fri 6-8 pm 25-29 July |
Black Feminism: A Radical Introduction Lecturers: Eva von Redecker & Bibi Stewart |
Course Descriptions
Course 1
Intellectual Emancipation: Rancière, Badiou, Illich
Monday 18 July - Friday 22 July 1-3 pm
Lecturer: Steven Corcoran
Description
TBA
Course 2
The Politics of Not-Speaking: A Non-Conversation with Heidegger, Schmitt, Fanon, Spivak and Derrida
Monday 25 July - Friday 29 July 3-5 pm
Lecturer: Elad Lapidot
Description
Politics is all about speaking, that is about the social communication and discourses that generate and maintain social organization, the coordinated action of collectives. Aristotle famously established ‘logos’ (speech, discourse, rational communication) as the basis of the polis, the city, state or polity. Yet, even if speech opens up the dimension of politics, the actual political reality has been just as much connected or even predicated on not speaking. The biblical myth of the Tower of Babel narrates the beginning of human politics as arising from a rupture in communication.
This course will explore the notion of not speaking as a political, epistemological and social practice in twentieth-century theory, especially in view of decolonial discourse. We will look at texts that analyze conceptually but also actively perform the end of dialogue and the crisis of conversation in a paradoxical age of globally asserted epistemo-cultural fragmentation. From Martin Heidegger’s exchange with ‘the Japanese’ through Carl Schmitt’s anti-parliamentarism, including Frantz Fanon’s defense of anti-colonial violence, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s nonspeaking subaltern and Jacques Derrida’s one-language-that-is-not-his-own. Through these texts we will reflect together on logoclastic features in patterns, structures, and practices of dialogue and non-dialogue deployed in contemporary politics, from nonviolent boycotts to the violence of war.
Texts: TBA
Day 1 Martin Heidegger
Day 2 Carl Schmitt
Day 3 Frantz Fanon
Day 4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Day 5 Jacques Derrida
Course 3
Black Feminism: A Radical Introduction
Monday 25 July - Friday 29 July 6-8pm
Lecturers: Eva von Redecker & Abibi Stewart
Description
Black Feminism: A Radical Introduction
Black feminism is sometimes reductively understood as tending to the specific problems of multiply marginalized groups, sorted by identity. There, the term ‘identity politics’ suggests an individualizing view of the social world – an impression confirmed by current discourses on identity politics and by neoliberal, reform-oriented appropriations of the term ‘intersectionality’. In contrast, this seminar will study Black feminism as a tradition of materialist social analysis and critique within which ‘identity' is not considered in isolation, but as a starting point and result of social struggles. As an ongoing articulation of the relationship between marginalized identities and resistance, Black feminisms hav always been embedded in broad emancipatory movements: abolitionism, workers movements, citizenship and migration. They might well provide a key perspective to connect them all.
We will read foundational texts of (mainly US) Black feminism in the context of social movements in which they were/are embedded. Sessions are thematically organized by sites of resistance, reaching from early abolitionism through reproductive justice to current border struggles. The goal of each session is to draw out and discuss analyses of the interplay of mechanisms of domination as well as the rich perspectives for transformation offered by the texts.
Day1 Early abolitionism
In the first session we will read the landmark speech ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’, held by abolitionist and civil rights activist Sojourner Truth in front of an audience of white women suffragists. Truth articulates her experience as an enslaved Black women and criticizes the notions of docile femininity and protected motherhood within white feminist activism. In ‘Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves’, Angela Davis writes about the specific role of Black women in resistance struggles against slavery.
- Truth, Sojourner, 1991 (1851): ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ In: The Crisis. 106 (1), 31.
- Davis, Angela, 1972: ‘Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves’, in The Massachusetts Review, 13 (1/2), 81-100.
Day 2 Worker's movement
In the second session we will read the essay "An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women" by Claudia Jones, a Black feminist, anti-imperialist and anti-fascist leader in the CPUSA (Communist Party USA). In 1949, she addressed the American left in a class-based analysis of the triple oppression and super-exploitation of Black women, whom she saw as the “most oppressed stratum of the whole population” due to their specific positioning as mothers and breadwinners in impoverished communities (Jones 2011, 75). Frances Beal updates this analysis in her 1969 essay by showing how the racialized differences within genders help to uphoald and conceal capitalist domination.
- Jones, Claudia, 2011: ‘An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women’, in Carole Boyce Davies (ed.) Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Essays, and Poems. Banbury.
- Beal, Frances, 2008 (1969): ‘Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female’, Meridians, 8 (2), 166-176.
Day 3 Identity, difference and reproductive justice:
In the third session we will speak about the meaning of "identity politics" and the role of difference in Black feminist and intersectional theory and organizing - and for emancipatory movements in general. The Combahee River Collective were the first to explicitly use the term "identity politics" to describe a main feature of Black feminist organizing. Audre Lorde's speech "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House" continues this line of thinking with a strong argument against complacent versions of inclusion and diversity politics. Within feminist organizing, the insight in intersectional difference has led to a crucial revision of the struggle for reproductive rights. Instead of a narrow focus on abortion rights, the Black feminist agenda aims at overall reproductive justice.
- Combahee River Collective, 1979: ‘A Black Feminist Statement’, in Zillah Eisenstein (ed.), Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, New York/London, 362-72.
- Lorde, Audre, 2007 (1984): ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, 110- 114.
- Ross, Loretta J. (2017): ‘Reproductive Justice as Intersectional Feminist Activism’, in Souls. Vol. 19, No. 3 July-September 2017, 286-314.
- Gumbs, Alexis Pauline (2016): ‘m/other ourselves: a Black queer feminist genealogy for radical mothering’, in Gumbs, Alexis Pauline/Martens, China/Williams, Mai'a (eds), Revolutionary Mothering, Oakland, CA, 19-31.
Day 4 Abolitionism and critiques of police violence
The fourth session will focus on more recent forms of abolitionist organizing and analysis. The INCITE!-Critical Resistance Statement marks a crucial moment of Black feminist intervention in the understanding of punitive institutions as well as the horizon of their overcoming. One crucial site of racist state violence is the police practice of racial profiling. Fatima El-Tayeb and Vanessa Thompson situate it in European colonial traditions and discuss the various contexts of activist resistance that have formed in the present conjuncture. The functioning of punitive institutions is closely linked with ableism. We trace these intersections by reading Vanessa Eileen Thompson’s analysis of policing the Black and differently abled body. Again, this account emphasizes the centrality of a Black feminist, inclusive and care-focused abolitionism.
- Critical Resistance and Incite!, 2003: ‘Critical Resistance-Incite! Statement on Gender Violence And the Prison-Industrial Complex’, Social Justice, 30 (3), 141-150.
- El-Tayeb, Fatima; Thompson, Vanessa Eileen, 2019: ‘Alltagsrassismus, staatliche Gewalt und koloniale Tradition. Ein Gespräch über Racial Profiling und intersektionale Widerstände in Europa’, in Baile, Mohamed Wa et. al: Racial Profiling. Struktureller Rassismus und antirassistischer Widerstand. Bielefeld, 311-328.
- Thompson, Vanessa Eileen (2021): ‘Policing in Europe: disability justice and abolitionist intersectional care’, Race & Class 62(3), 61-76.
Day 5 Migration and border regimes
One key site of the racist segregation of life chances across the globe is the European border. As the world’s deadliest border, the Mediterranean naturalizes the fortification of a more and more militarized dispossession of mobility. Céline Barry traces how the pan-African legacy of transnational Black feminism inscribes anti-colonial praxis within Black feminism in Germany. The border feminism practiced by Black refugee women, lesbians, non-binary, inter and trans people promotes the unfolding of the Black Mediterranean as a space of resistant solidarity.