WEDNESDAY 25 MARCH:

8:45 – 09:30    REGISTRATION & COFFEE

09:30 – 10:00 OPENING ADDRESS

 Introduction by Mireille Rosello, Mikki Stelder, and Thijs Witty

10:00 - 11:30 FILM SCREENING –  RENEE GREEN

Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009)

11:30 – 12:00  COFFEE BREAK

12:00 – 14:00 PANEL 1

The sessions are all held in the building of the University Theater

14:00 – 15:00 LUNCH

15:00– 17:00   PANEL 2

The sessions are all held in the building of the University Theater

17:00 – 17:15  COFFEE BREAK  

17:15 – 19:15  KEYNOTE LECTURE – GLORIA WEKKER

“The Politics of Innocence: Decolonizing Toxic Knowledge Attachments in Contemporary Dutch Society”

Introduction by Mikki Stelder

THURSDAY 26 MARCH:

09:00 – 09:30 COFFEE

09:30 – 11:30 PANEL 3

The sessions are all held in the building of the University Theater

11:30 – 12:00  COFFEE BREAK

12:00 – 14:00 KEYNOTE LECTURE – ALANNA LOCKWARD

“Spiritual Revolutions: On Afropean Decoloniality and the ‘Secularity’ of the Arts”

          Introduction by Mikki Stelder

14:00 – 15:00 LUNCH

15:00 – 17:00 PANEL 4

The sessions are all held in the building of the University Theater

17:00 – 17:30  COFFEE BREAK  

17:45 – 19:15  FILM SCREENING – DEAN SPADE

Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back! (2015)

FRIDAY 27 MARCH:

09:00 – 09:30 COFFEE

09:30 – 11:30 PANEL 5

The sessions are all held in the building of the University Theater

11:30 – 12:00  COFFEE BREAK

12:00 – 14:00 KEYNOTE LECTURE – GRADA KILOMBA

            “Tongues Without Shame”

                        Introduction by Thijs Witty

14:00 – 15:00 LUNCH

15:00 – 16:00 PANEL 6

The sessions are all held in the building of the University Theater

16:00 – 16:15  COFFEE BREAK  

16:15 – 17:45  CLOSING DISCUSSION AND GOODBYES

            Moderated by Murat Aydemir

                        Official closing of workshop by Esther Peeren

21:00 – LATE  CLOSING PARTY – VONDELBUNKER

Keynote lectures by:

Gloria Wekker: 

The Politics of Innocence: Decolonizing toxic Knowledge Attachments in contemporary Dutch Society.

In my presentation, I will be centrally engaging with a dominant knowledge attachment, when issues of race, ethnicity and religion are concerned in contemporary Dutch society: the politics of innocence. Central to this technology of world- and self making is a conglomerate of ideas, practices and affects, a set of notions in which we, the Dutch, are assigned an extraordinary, exceptional position in the world, when it comes to dealing with the Other. Partly inspired historically by religious ideas, partly by secular notions of various kinds, four hundred years of colonial rule can be effaced and neutralized by this technology of attachment, as if it would not have left any traces. I will be exploring the nature of this politics of innocence and how it is operative in various domains of society.

Gloria Wekker is emeritus Professor in Gender Studies, Faculty of the Humanities, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. A social and cultural anthropologist (MA, University of Amsterdam 1981, PhD, UCLA 1992), she specializes in Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, African- American Studies and Caribbean Studies.

She wrote The Politics of Passion; Women´s sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (Columbia University Press, 2006), for which she won the Ruth Benedict Prize of  American Anthropological Association in 2007. Her next book is entitled White Innocence; Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race  The Dutch cultural Archive and Race, which will be published in 2015 by Duke University Press.

Alanna Lockward:

Spiritual Revolutions: On Afropean Decoloniality and the 'Secularity' of the Arts

A Vodoun ceremony heralded the beginning of the end of Europe's savage capitalist entreprise in the Caribbean and elsewhere. According to Laurent Dubois we are all descendants of the Haitian Revolution and therefore accountable to its ancestry. In my presentation I will discuss how the liberation Pan-Africanist legacies of the maroon leaders that created the first Black Republic is present in some Afropean Decolonial Aesthetics practitioners, such as Teresa María Díaz Nerio, Jeannette Ehlers, Quinsy Gario and Patricia Kaersenhout, as well as in other US-based Caribbean Diaspora artists. Apart from the paradigmatic work of Renée Cox honouring the legacy of Queen Nanny of the Maroons, there is as well the radical legacy of Ana Mendieta who combined in her work the basic premises of maroon life, namely a permanent dialogue with nature and its spirits. Also Nicolás Dumit Estévez and Charo Oquet, for example, bring together the legacies of marronage consistently contributing to dismantle one of the most succesful fallacies of modernity: the so-called 'secularity' of the arts.

Alanna Lockward is a Berlin based Dominican author and independent curator. She is the founding director of Art Labour Archives, an exceptional platform centered on theory, political activism and art. Her interests are Caribbean marronage discursive and mystical legacies in time-based practices, critical race theory, decolonial aesthetics/aesthesis, Black feminism and womanist ethics. Lockward is the author of Apremio: apuntes sobre el pensamiento y la creación contemporánea desde el Caribe (Cendeac, 2006), a collection of essays, the short novel Marassá y la Nada (Santuario 2013) and Un Haití Dominicano. Tatuajes fantasmas y narrativas bilaterales (1994-2014), a compilation of her investigative work on the history and current challenges between both island-nations (Santuario 2014).

https://decolonialsummerschool.wordpress.com/

http://www.utrechtsummerschool.nl/courses/culture/stolen-memories-museums-slavery-and-de-coloniality

https://www.facebook.com/events/1424793697813680/https://www.facebook.com/events/1424793697813680/

Grada Kilomba:

Tongues Without Shame

Marginalized subjects, their experiences, discourses and theorizations have been systematically placed outside the academic body. Such a fact reveals not only the inadequacy of dominant scholarship in relating to post-colonial realities, but also that science is not an apolitical study of truth, but rather the result of unequal power relations - which defines what counts as true and in whom to believe. 

In this experimental lecture we will explore alternative knowledge production, and forms of decolonizing knowledge, bringing to voice the tongues that ‘have been kept quiet as secrets’. 

Grada Kilomba is a writer, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist. Her work draws on gender, race, trauma, memory, and post-colonialism combining the academic and artistic languages in a variety of formats, from print publications to staged readings and performance. She is the author of ‘Plantation Memories’, a compilation of episodes of everyday racism written in the form of short psychoanalytical stories; and co-editor of ‘Mythen, Masken und Subjekte’, an anthology on Critical Whiteness. She has published, directed, and lectured internationally and last was a Guest Professor for Gender Studies and Post-colonial studies, at the Humboldt University - Berlin. Currently, she is developing a series of projects on ‘Decolonizing Knowledge’.

FILM PROGRAM

Endless Dreams and Water Between by Renée Green

(Wed. 25 March 10:00-11:30)

Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009) is a feature film with four fictitious characters sustaining an epistolary exchange. In their letters, "planetary thoughts" are sutured to the physical locations the writers inhabit, which are both visual and aural characters in themselves: the island of Manhattan, the island of Majorca, in Spain, and the islands and peninsula that form the San Francisco Bay Area.

The characters’ reflections and dreams enact what could be described as "an archipelagic mind," linking worlds, time, and space. While the film was originally screened as a video installation, commissioned by the US National Maritime Musem, Green’s feature-length version includes filmic, literary, historic, and sonic references that in turn weave together various reflections on the humbling power of nature. The film also questions the vocation of artists, these “emblematic seekers and articulators of yearning” that live and dream on intimate islands, with so much water between.

Bio

Professor Renée Green is the Director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology. Green is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Via films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series and events her work engages with investigations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories as well as what has been imagined and invented. She also focuses on the effects of a changing transcultural sphere on what can now be made and thought.

Her exhibitions, videos and films have been seen throughout the world in museums, biennales and festivals.

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Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back! – Queers Against Israeli Apartheid Seattle

(Thursday 26 March 17:45 – 19:15)

This hour-long documentary tells the story of a group of queer activists in Seattle who responded to an Israeli Consulate-funded propaganda tour that visited their region in 2012.  Local queer Palestine solidarity activists exposed the "Rainbow Generations" tour as pro-Israel propaganda and got some of the events, including the tour's centerpiece event hosted by the City of Seattle's LGBT Commission, cancelled.  A significant backlash ensued involving the Seattle City Council and Seattle's leading LGBT and HIV organizations. Through the inspiring story of these activists' victory,

Pinkwashing Exposed explores how pinkwashing works and what local activists are doing to fight back. At the same time it is an attempt to archive and record this history in Seattle and it is a tool for us to keep trying to respond to the aftermath of these events in Seattle and pinkwashing backlash worldwide

Politics of Attachment

The 2015 workshop will consider all three strands as forms of attachment. Attachments align us with the many social, psychological, economic, and political organizations that give us a sense of self and belonging. They also align us to intellectual projects: think of the citations you use, the masters you keep at the back of your mind when you outline arguments, or the selections you make in the cultural archive. Attachments pertain to individual lives as much as they are invested in systemic and structural exercises of power (e.g. nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, doctrines of the good life, capitalism, racism, classism, sexism). Attachments also entail blind spots, since they follow from the turns not taken in the formation of perspectives. Yet, attachments can be called into question once other knowledges and feelings disorient our prior entanglements. Although detachments can lead to anxiety, immobility, and apathy —they can even traumatize us,— detachments can also be thought of as modes of resistance to familiar and dominant territories of world-making. How can detachments possibly inspire resistant alliances and forms of organization? In other words: what are the politics of our attachments?

Decolonizing Knowledge

“Decolonial thinking is an opening towards another thing, on the march, searching for itself in the difference.” (Walter Mignolo, 2011)

More than five hundred years of colonization have imposed a mystified image of past and present productions of knowledge and being. The decolonial turn scrutinizes the process of knowledge-making as a fundamental aspect of modernity/coloniality. Besides looking at the way in which Eurocentric domination and exploitation work, this stream will examine what forms of knowing, being, and belonging exist and take shape in resistance to these structural and systemic forms of inequality. How can decoloniality be understood as a project of attachment/detachment that resists hegemonic power formations that profit from the death of entire populations? What praxes, analyses, and attachments/detachments emerge that do not start from within hegemonic principles of political, economic, social, cultural and gendered forms of organization rooted in narratives of Western modernity? What other political imaginaries, lived realities and productions of knowledges are possible and thriving without resorting to empty pluralization? What happens when we foreground other theoretical, geographical, physical, and affective starting points and attachments/detachments that generate a decolonization of knowledge and being? And, how can we interrogate the decolonial turn in terms of its own repetition of hegemonic attachments, especially by looking at decolonization through an intersectional frame?

Topics we are interested in include, but are not restricted to: border thinking and border epistemologies; transnational and grassroots critical race, feminist, queer perspectives on migration, diaspora, home, community, belonging, resistance and decolonization; transformative justice and coalitional politics; shifting the geo- and body politics of critical knowledge; other cosmologies; intersectional forms of decolonization; de-universalizing modernity; nonoppositional thought; cultural production in decoloniality.

Ecologies of Practice

"An ecology of practices does not have any ambition to describe practices ‘as they are’ (...). It aims at the construction of new ‘practical identities’ for practices, that is, new possibilities for them to be present, or in other words to connect." (Isabelle Stengers, 2005)

Practices can be thought of in terms of multiple attachments: the attachment of practitioners to their repeatedly performed tasks, interdependence between otherwise differentiated agents, and all the interactions that embed them in their worlds. As previous occupational and social attachments become undone by the uprooting of current modes of capital, terms and conditions of cultural practices are likewise put into question, What creative, scholarly and engaged practices emerge, and how are boundaries and overlaps between them renegotiated?

This strand prioritizes ecological frameworks. Ecologies of practice can be thought of in terms of parasitism, symbiosis, interdependence, mutualism, mimicry, predation, extinction, co-evolution, resilience, metabolism, autopoiesis and other ecological concepts. How can practices be thought ecologically? How is ecological thinking practiced? How are world-making, sense-making and change-making related, entangled, interlinked? This strand looks for contributions in the fields of ecological humanities, cultural ecology and other intersections of ecology across disciplines and struggles (ecosophy, ecocriticism, ecolinguistics, ecological aesthetics, ecofeminism, ecological justice struggles, climate and degrowth movements).

Emergent Genre

The narratives people use to mediate their feelings, desires and thoughts are in turn mediated by available genres. One may consider genre as a literary or aesthetic category in its pure state, or as a form that has the remarkable ability to include many content variations into its formal whole. Indeed, genres often give audiences the pleasure of encountering what they already expect to encounter, with slight shifts and alterations maintaining or even strengthening their attachments to them.

Another way to approach genres is to apprehend them as forms of aesthetic expectation and as mediating institutions for people to process complex social and cultural attachments in specific historical moments. Instead of neutral descriptions that would confine the unruliness of meaning making, this stream is interested in the analysis of genres as attachments to the social. How do genres pertain to certain transitions in social life? What inventories could one make of the emergent genres of and across contemporary cultures? And what transitions can we discern in historical developments of genres? Social theorist Lauren Berlant has suggested the importance of the ‘situation tragedy’ for instance, with its emphasis on the stretched-out temporalities of everyday crisis, in order to understand predominating attachments in precarious societies and cultures.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: affect and genre, the renewal and/or afterlives of established genres, genres of crisis and adjustment, genre and mode, genres across media. We are also interested in reflections on the genres you employ in your own artistic and/or academic labour (the article, the essay, the lecture, the novel et cetera).

Practical Information

The format of the workshop is designed to maximize discussion time. Therefore, during the sessions participants are asked to read the papers of the participants in their stream in advance and to respond to other panelists’ papers for a maximum of 15 minutes.

The keynote lectures are open to all interested scholars. 

If you want to participate in one of the streams, please send an e-mail to Eloe Kingma at asca-fgw@uva.nl.