Lecture Series 2023 "How Do We Think (In) The 'We'?"

Program: 

• 27.04.2023:
  The Global and the Planetary: Thinking CoFutures,
  Dr. Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay
   
• 01.06.2023:
  Weak Resistance and Solidarity in Contemporary Borderlands,
  Dr. Ewa Majewska 
   
• 15.06.2023: (Online at 10 am CET):
  An Oceanic 'We': Poetry, Solidarity, and Multispecies Justice in the Pacific,
  Dr. Craig Santos Perez 
   
• 29.06.2023:  (Room 211, Institut für Europäische Ethnologie at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) 
  Beyond Vulnerability: Rethinking Humanitarian Governance and Interventions, a  joint lecture and conversation with
  Dr. Lewis Turner and Dr. Fadi Saleh 
   
• 09.07.2023:
  Rethinking Humanity (at Gropius Bau, Berlin)
  hn. Lyonga

In this talk, Dr. Chattopadhyay will present the contemporary moment in SF and genre theory, especially the discussion that there is somehow a new "global" genre of SF, where writers and their works from around the world can now find a place. This global of the genre is maintained in academic dialogue and discussion, as well as popular media. Especially with theorisations in new futurisms such as Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, Latin American futurism, Latinx Futurism, Indigenous Futurisms etc, this “global turn” in SF studies, inspired by contemporary literary studies, is one where deep literary histories are elided through labels or subsumed under a hierarchy of futures, futurities, and ethnofuturities. CoFutures clashes with the global turn, arguing that this turn either purposefully or unwittingly reproduces assumptions about futures and futurities, and what forms of storytelling are recognized for future making.

Following Lauren Berlant we could say that today's optimism often becomes "cruel", as many institutions, in which we entrust our creative agency, labor and hopes, represent the most uncritical feudalism, foreclosing medieval rules of authoritarianism under the thin veil of knowledge and openness. More importantly however, this optimism enacts cruelty in the multiple abuses of representation politics, allowing and legitimizing such notions, as the supposed equality of the excluded, built on homogenizing notions of collective subjectivity, which introduce false unity of de facto heterogeneous and conflicted lived experiences of individuals and groups. Such fake unity fuels the pastoral powers of institutional and corporate "care for the population", allowing enhanced surveillance and control, while at the same time undermining any forms of solidarity and resistance.

The brutalized diversity of Borderlands experience, so meticulously depicted by Chicana feminists, including Gloria Anzaldua, has been made visible by the events taking place on the East border of Poland, which since 2004 has also been the East border of the European Union, with all the troublesome and sometimes tragic repercussions of it. While the dramatic events resulting of Russia's invasion in Ukraine made the Polish-Ukrainian border a welcoming zone for at least those of the war refugees, who happen to fulfil the racist criteria of whiteness, the Polish-Belarussian border has since 2021 became a brutally different version of the state of exception, with the 37 officially recognized deaths of the mainly non-European refugees trying to cross the border, in vain, being illegally pushed-back to Belarus, tortured by the border guards of both countries and left to die in the frozen primaeval forests of Białowieża.

While Poland and many other countries in Europe opened their homes and institutions to millions of war refugees fleeing the brutal war terror currently enacted in Ukraine, thousands of non-European refugees have died trying to enter the Fortress Europe via the Mediterranean Sea... and the Polish-Belarussian (and Lithuanian) border. The notions of "weak resistance" and solidarity allow depicting the painful diversity of all these Borderland experiences, while also allowing the problematic visibility their contradictions and alliances. In the critical negotiations of the institutional abuses and supposed disempowerment, represented by the brutality and lack of agency of the border guards on Polish-Belarussian border, we need to maintain the experience of vulnerability and exposure, while at the same time producing critically invested claims. To this task Dr. Majewska will try to build a methodological introduction.

In this hybrid talk and poetry reading, I will discuss and share some of my poetry related to articulating an “oceanic we.” I will define an “oceanic we” as a network of people, places, animals, objects, and elements gathered into an interconnected, intergenerational, multicultural, and multispecies kinship ecology. This assemblage is rooted in Pacific Islander cultural wisdom, practices, and stories. Using examples from my own poetry, I will show how literature can express the complex entanglements of an “oceanic we.” Furthermore, I will share examples from other poets, specifically drawing work from a new anthology that I co-edited, Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures (2022).

In contemporary humanitarian regimes, refugees’ so-called “vulnerability” heavily shapes their access to protection, aid, shelter, or resettlement. “Vulnerability” markers such as bodily abilities, socio-economic circumstances, mental health, family situation, sexual orientation and gender identities therefore play a central role in humanitarian-refugee relations. Engaging in a conversation with Dr Lewis Turner and Dr Fadi Saleh, this lecture invites us to think beyond predominant humanitarian frameworks and seeks to formulate a radical critique of contemporary humanitarian politics.

Based on his ethnographic research on the Syria refugee response in Jordan, Lewis Turner will explore how humanitarian workers and organizations understand and operationalize the idea of ‘vulnerability.’ What does it mean – according to humanitarians – for refugees to be ‘vulnerable’? How do gender, race, and orientalism shape humanitarians’ views of who ‘deserves’ their assistance? In a context of huge need and limited resources, how do humanitarian organizations attempt to measure who is ‘vulnerable?’ And to what extent do humanitarians examine whether their understandings of ‘vulnerability’ are shared by the people they work with?

Drawing on his ethnographic research with Syrian LGBTIQ refugees in Istanbul, Turkey, Fadi Saleh further problematizes these questions by exploring the ways queerness and humanitarianism intersect and shape each other. He argues that Western humanitarian actors and discourses do not only impose very specific, Eurocentric notions of gender and sexuality for Syrian LGBTIQ refugees to be eligible for humanitarian support, but it also forces them to change, erase, or completely suppress any histories or lived experiences of being LGBTIQ Syrian that do not match their expectations. This dynamic is not only problematic when it comes to writing queer histories in the Global South, but also has far-reaching implications for the LGBTIQ refugees’ livelihoods and their chances of resettlement. In conclusion, Saleh will offer some insights into how we could intervene into such dynamics and transform the queer humanitarian work landscape to become more radically inclusive of and helpful for the very people it claims to protect.

What is a community, and who is in it? How is the community different from the neighbourhood? Where does the neighbourhood begin and end? How do bodies become subjects and objects in the neighbourhood space? What drives an exhibition hall’s desire to become a neighbour? What is the relevance of institutions for people living on the margins of society in Berlin? Because the needs of the neighbourhood are recurring, life-long and continuous, my work as a Neighbour in Residence will be to find ways to address these questions.

The question of residence determines under what terms I can begin to imagine a life. It impacts how I show up in the world. A residence is never simply a question of how long a person is allowed in a place; it is rather a very fundamental question of existence in space just as we are. Residence to me is about rooting oneself in a place or a community. It is living with certainty. It is belonging to a place that wants you to live within its vicinities. A place you are not at risk of losing.

As a migrant from Cameroon who has undergone asylum processes, the question of residence governs every aspect of life. The idea of a residence, a stable place to keep my body in always lingered and hovered over me as I moved across multiple German cities. I see this role as an opportunity to enter into a meaningful relationship with community members. To listen, to learn, to think together and to work towards mutually beneficial interests.