Blog
Summer School, July 1-6, 2024
Organized by
The Center for Global Culture and Communication (CGCC), Central European University (CEU) and the Center for Transcultural Studies (CTS)
DEMOCRACY
AND
INEQUALITY
The Challenge of a Society of Equals
The application deadline is April 1, 2024. Once admitted, all costs related to participation will be covered by the organizers. For US-based students (including Northwestern students), airfare and ground transportation will be covered up to
$500 (USD).
Given the CGCC’s role in the Summer School, a minimum of three Northwestern graduate students will be admitted.
Interested students should review the application requirements on the Summer School’s page on the CEU website and then email their application materials to Dilip Gaonkar (d-gaonkar@northwestern.edu). Please note that the application deadline set by CEU has expired, but late applicants from Northwestern will still be considered for admission.
Neither Settler Nor Native
The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities
(Harvard University Press, 2020)
Mahmood Mamdani
(Political Science, Columbia University)
In case after case around the globe―from Israel to Sudan―the colonial state and the nation-state have been constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The model emerged in America, where genocide and internment on reservations created a permanent native minority. In Europe, this template would be used both by the Nazis and the Allies. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this process. Mahmood Mamdani points to inherent limitations in the legal solution attempted at Nuremberg. Political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice but a rethinking of the political community to include victims and perpetrators, bystanders and beneficiaries. Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, he calls on us to delink the nation from the state so as to ensure equal political rights for all who live within its boundaries.
Respondents
Craig Calhoun
(Sociology, Arizona State University)
Linford Fisher
(History, Brown University)
Nandita Sharma
(Sociology, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa)
ON ZOOM
Friday, September 29, 2023
10 am to 12 pm CST
Insurgent Universality
An alternative legacy of modernity
(Oxford University Press, 2019)
Massimiliano Tomba
(History of Consciousness, University of California Santa Cruz)
Scholars commonly take the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, written during the French Revolution, as the starting point for the modern conception of human rights. According to the Declaration, the rights of man are held to be universal, at all times and all places. But as recent crises around migrants and refugees have made obvious, this idea, sacred as it might be among human rights advocates, is exhausted. It’s long past time to reconsider the principles on which Western economic and political norms rest. This book advocates for a tradition of political universality as an alternative to the juridical universalism of the Declaration. Insurgent universality isn’t based on the idea that we all share some common humanity but, rather, on the democratic excess by which people disrupt and reject an existing political and economic order. Going beyond the constitutional armor of the representative state, it brings into play a plurality of powers to which citizens have access, not through the funnel of national citizenship but in daily political practice. We can look to recent history to see various experiments in cooperative and insurgent democracy: the Indignados in Spain, the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and, going further back, the Paris Commune, the 1917 peasant revolts during the Russian Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. This book argues that these movements belong to the common legacy of insurgent universality, which is characterized by alternative trajectories of modernity that have been repressed, hindered, and forgotten.
Respondents
John Brenkman
(Comparative Literature and English, CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College, Emeritus)
Anne Norton
(Political Science, University of Pennsylvania)
Uday Mehta
(Political Science, CUNY Graduate Center)
ON ZOOM
Friday, December 8, 2023
10 am to 12 pm CST
Center of Global Culture and Communication
(An interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication)
Department of English &
Center for Transcultural Studies
jointly present
A Lambert Conference
Berlant’s America
(A Symposium on the Legacies of Lauren Berlant)
October 26 & 27, 2023
9:30 am– 5:00 pm
Harris 108
Northwestern University, 1881 Sheridan Rd, Evanston, IL 60208
Participants include: Kris Cohen (Art History and Humanities, Reed College), Lee Edelman (English, Tufts University), Jonathan Flatley (English, Wayne State University), Michael Hardt (Literature, Duke University), Lauren Jackson (English, Northwestern University), E. Patrick Johnson (Black Studies & Performance Studies, Northwestern University), Benjamin Lee (Anthropology and Philosophy, New School), Heather Love (English, University of Pennsylvania), Sianne Ngai (English, University of Chicago), Jonathan Schroeder (American Studies, Brandeis University), Kathleen Stewart (Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin), Michael Warner (English, Yale University), & Ken Wissoker (Editor, Duke University Press)
Convenors: Dilip Gaonkar (Rhetoric, Media & Publics, Northwestern University) &
Laurie Shannon (English, Northwestern University)
RSVP: BipinSebastian2024@u.northwestern.edu
While the range of Lauren Berlant’s work is capacious, the engagement with “America” — its history, politics, and culture (art and literature, popular and performative, and much else) — stands out as a gravitational center and the preferred archive for her/their critical meditations, theoretical innovations, and reading practices. “Berlant’s America” is a distinctive “America,” as distinctive as Tocqueville’s, or Emerson’s, or Whitman’s. This conference will test the shapes of that America and of what Berlant indelibly named its “cruel optimism,” prompting us to think — and think again.
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Around the world, democracies are breaking down. Many are being dismantled from within while others face attacks from without. In both cases, the issues underlying democracy’s erosion are not superficial but deeply entrenched and complex. As a result, democracies will not be renewed without considerable effort. Technical fixes imposed from above may slow democratic degeneration, but they cannot reverse it. Rebuilding democracy—fortifying its institutions and advancing its project—takes a movement from below.
Yet, when it comes to social mobilization, democratic societies tend to be apprehensive. A handful of exceptionally civil, organized, and focused social movements may serve as evidence of a dynamic public sphere and a healthy democratic culture. But far more often, democratic governments respond to social mobilization with less enthusiasm, treating it as anything from a nuisance to a threat. After all, what democratic purpose could social mobilization fulfill in a society with fair elections, democratic representation, and independent courts? Given the growing frequency, intensity, scale, and volatility of twenty-first century social mobilizations in democratic societies, it is difficult to see them simply as a confirmation of democratic flourishing or evidence of its undoing. Instead, from Indian farmers to Canadian truckers and Colombian taxpayers, from the Black Lives Matter movement to the Yellow Vests, these mobilizations index social, political, cultural, and economic crises that democratic governments have failed to address. In this context, what is the relationship between social mobilization and democracy? Do loosely networked local protests in disparate contexts share a global anatomy? When are social mobilizations a threat to democracy and when are they the foundation of its renewal?
The aim of It Takes a Movement is to re-examine the relationship between social mobilization and democracy by attending to the stunning complexity and diversity of twenty-first century protests and social movements. The course will employ a global perspective, comparing social mobilizations across different democratic contexts, tracing transnational connections and fissures, and establishing common features. To this end, the course will foster a robust dialogue among students, activists, and scholars assembled from all over the world. Students will leave the course with a deeper understanding of the fraught relationship between democracy and social mobilization as well as new questions and ideas about how it might be productively addressed.
The course will fund a minimum of twenty students and reserves one third of available spaces for applicants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The Center of Global Culture and Communication (An interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication)
& the Center for Transcultural Studies
Jointly present
Questioning the Present: An Online Public Forum on
The Force of Non-Violence
(Verso, 2020)
Judith Butler
(Distinguished Professor,
Department of Comparative Literature & Program of Critical Theory,
UC Berkeley)
Judith Butler’s recent book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilized in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how “racial phantasms” inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.
Respondents
Jay Bernstein (Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, The New School)
Anne Boyer (Poet, Essayist, Writer, Kansas City Art Institute)
José Medina (Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University)
ON ZOOM
Friday, June 2, 10:00 am to 12:00 pm CST
Register
https://northwestern.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMuduyqrjMiHdTjDyeurWBnLPNjXCFlHNMv
An extract from The Force of Violence to review before the forum
https://drive.google.com/file/d/114dyGGXs4keP0D6KvjJ9n3LyQtCoRWgl/view?usp=sharing
The Center for Global Culture and Communication
(An interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication)
Invites you to an in-person conference on
Rhetoric and Politics of Protest and Social Mobilization II
Friday, May 26, 2023
TGS Commons
2122 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60201
10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Participants
Banu Bargu
(History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz)
Humberto Beck
(Center for International Studies, El Colegio de México)
Liam Olson-Mayes
(Communication, Tulane University)
Wendy Pearlman
(Political Science, Northeastern University)
+ Roundtable with graduate students!
Convened by Professors Dilip Gaonkar & José Maria Medina
Lunch and light refreshments will be served.