In the age of the superimposition of contemporary forms of capital on the globe, can the bodies of the Earth figure counter-hegemonic forms of the social body?

In this seminar, we depart from the social body as a figure for politically re-imagining the world that rests on a set of conflicting images, positing the struggle between hegemonic and oppressed forms of lived experience. Following Marxist, feminist, postcolonial and decolonial forms of materialist politics we figure the social as an antagonistic field of dynamic transformations peopled by a multitude of embodied historicities. We will explore their modes of visibility.  In particular, we will critically deconstruct the universal claim of the modern body politic, laying bare how dominated bodies were made “other” through the construction of gendered, religious, sexual, racial, ableist, socio-economic, and biological differences. It is from these “alter-subjectivities” that we will explore counter-hegemonic figurations of the social body towards political transformation. In encountering flesh as a spectral materiality at the formation of the modern-colonial matrix, we will interrogate the social body as a fait accompli – turning it into a heuristic model where the ligature between the somatic and the normative becomes the site for different forms of historical political struggle. Among the questions we will explore are: How can “flesh” figure both the social death of enslaved captive bodies as well as counter-hegemonic instantiations of the social body through decolonial lived experiences and practices? How can the desire of bodies to form a collective political organization beyond coloniality help populate a social fabric without producing otherness through the violence of binary oppositions? How can we posit and imagine a new “social subject” and a new “grammar” by passing through and transforming the hieroglyphs of the flesh marked by centuries of genocide, linguicide, ecocide and epistemic erasure?

We will explore the idea of enfleshment as a decolonial project for figuring lived material and spiritual experience as an embodied attempt to communicate a tradition of the oppressed. Through engagements with multiple media forms including the artistic practice of several contemporary woman of colour of Lusophone Africa, we will address the above questions through confronting the erasure of "indigenous knowledge" during different Liberation Movements and exploring how indigenous knowledge is re-articulated by bodies within racial, sexual and patriarchal relations of power.

• October 22, Thursday, 1 – 4 pm, BG1 0.16
• November 25, Wednesday, 1-4 pm, BG1 0.16
• March and April dates to be decided
• June: workshop and/or screening

To register, please email Sudeep Dasgupta at s.m.dasgupta@uva.nl