Spring 2024 Seminar

This seminar attempts to undo binary thinking through ternary positionality. Instead of disrupting or subverting the binary with a new oppositional pair and thus recreating the dialectical gesture, instead of proposing the hybrid or the creole, we will attempt to think from an autonomous and relational third space. The intermediary is an example of ternary relationality: not an in-between or a go-between, a broker or a translator, and not a grey area, a middle ground, or a transitional space, but an agent in its/their own right. Specifically, the seminar will focus on: the hard binary opposition between Western epistemology and decolonial epistemic disobedience through the politics of refusal; relationality as a ternary structure; intersectionality as a ternary positionality; translation as a ternary process. To wit: how does interpreting from the ternary positionality change the stock image of the oppositional and/or ungendered historical figure of the marginalized (“the slave,” “the Indian,” and others); how does it intervene in the debates of resistance vs. refusal, or liberty vs. freedom; how does it interrogate notions of historiography of early colonial encounters (in Africa and in the Americas), or theories of world literature? To the degree that the politics of refusal seeks to disentangle from the settler-colonial policies of imperial and neoliberal nation-states, and that it does not find help in postcolonial experience and literature, the precolonial and its historically instantiated life forms and life worlds can provide comparative examples of imagining what is possible beyond the limits imposed by the neoliberal nation-state. The different historical iterations of the ternary will help us think through the most pressing issues of today and tomorrow, alongside visiting scholars working on historical and contemporary topics in philosophy, anthropology, gender, race, ethnicity, sovereignty.

The seminar will be offered in Spring 2024 under the graduate course COM LIT 250, taught by Professor Zrinka Stahuljak, and scheduled in 1041 Public Affairs Building on Mondays from 12:00-3:00 PM PT. Public lectures will take place in 306 Royce Hall.

May 2nd Event Postponed:

Dean of Humanities’ Lecture in Critical Humanistic Inquiry

Message from María Josefina Saldaña Portillo, Dean of Humanities’ Inaugural Lecturer in Critical Humanistic Inquiry:

With deep regret, I am postponing my Dean’s Inaugural Lecture for Humanistic Inquiry. Last night’s decision to call the police on the UCLA student encampment leaves me no choice. The opportunism of the Chancellor using the violence of counter-protestors against the students as the reason for ordering the violent arrest of the student protestors “for their own safety” is the height of cynical reasoning, and plays right into the hands of donors’ efforts to shape universities to their will. This is indeed what the counter-protestors were hoping to accomplish, the shutting down of free speech, and more specifically, the obscuring of the reason for student protest in the first place: to hold attention on the devastating war Israel is perpetrating on Gaza and Palestine more generally, as well as the role that our universities play in that war through their investments. As an anti-colonialist intellectual with a long history of studying protest, I can only affirm what we all already know: peaceful protest is meant to be disruptive, it is meant to interrupt the “normal” functioning of a university, to disrupt the commonsense, and to draw attention to the obvious: that over forty-thousand innocent lives have been lost in Gaza, with the full support of the U.S. government. The students, faculty and staff in the encampment were fulfilling the university mission; they were educating the general public about something administrations—both university and federal—would rather sweep under the rug. I look forward to addressing you all on the continuing mission to decolonize our universities in the fall, and I thank Dean Stern for allowing me that opportunity.

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Spring 2024 Guests:

April 15: Etienne Anheim (History, EHESS, Paris): “The Role of the Renaissance in the Transformation of the Western Political Imaginary: Petrarch’s Africa and Death for the ‘Fatherland’”

April 22: Shannon Speed (Director of American Indian Studies Center; Anthropology/Gender Studies/American Indian Studies, UCLA): “Rethinking Sovereignty with Care and Relationality”

April 29: Gisèle Sapiro (Sociology, EHESS/CNRS, Paris): “Intermediaries, translators and mediators : the making of world authorship”  

May 2: The ECT schedule will feature an additional guest lecture on May 2 by Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (Department of Social & Cultural Analysis (SCA), Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), New York University): “Visualizing Mestizaje through Zapotec Remappings of the Americas”

May 6:  Kathrin Thiele (Director of the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG); Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University): “Relationality as Ternary Structure: On Challenges and Openings for Relational Critical Thinking”

June 3: Herman Bennett (Director, Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas & the Caribbean (IRADAC); History, CUNY; Global Professorial Fellow, Queen Mary University of London, 2022-2025)

Required Readings:

• Barad, Karen. (2017). “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable”. New Formations (92), 56-86. https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF:92.05.2017
• Bennett, Herman. (2009). Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico. Indiana University Press(Introduction, chapters 1-3)
• Bennett, Herman. (2018). “Prologue” to African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic. University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812295498
• Bourdieu, Pierre. (1999). “The social conditions of the international circulation of ideas.” In R. Shusterman, ed., Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, pp. 220–228. Blackwell.
• Bunz, Mercedes, Birgit Mara Kaiser, and Kathrin Thiele. (2017). “Introduction” + key terms “Semi-agency,” “Entanglement,” “Responsibility,” in Symptoms of the Planetary Condition: A Critical Vocabulary.Meson Press.
• de la Cadena, Marisol. (2015). “Story 3 – Mariano’s Archive Cosmopolitics: Between Lawyers and Ausangate,” in Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Duke University Press, pp. 91-116. 
• Dennison, Jean. (2017). “Entangled Sovereignties: The Osage Nation’s Interconnections with Governmental and Corporate Authorities.” American Ethnologist, 44(4), 684–696. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12566
• Duperron, Brenna, and Elizabeth Edwards. (2021). “Thinking Indigeneity: A Challenge to Medieval Studies.” Exemplaria, 33(1), 94–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2021.1893095
• Dussel, Enrique. (1993). “Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures).” Boundary 2, 20(3), 65–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/303341
• Foucault, Michel. (1966). “Las Meninas,” Introduction to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Routledge.
• Haraway, Donna. (1997). Selections from Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge.
• Haraway, Donna. (1988) “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
• Holmes, C., & Standen, N. (2018). “Introduction: Towards a Global Middle Ages.” Past & Present, 238 (suppl. 13), 1–44. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gty030
• Latour, Bruno. (1993). Chapter 3 “Revolution,” in We Have Never Been Modern (trans. C. Porter). Harvard University Press.
• McGranahan, Carole. (2016). “Theorizing Refusal: An Introduction.” Cultural Anthropology, 31(3), 319–325. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.3.01
• Mignolo, Walter. (2007). “DeLinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality.” (2007). Cultural Studies (London, England), 21(2–3), 449–514. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647
• Prabhu, Anjali. (2007). “Preface” to Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects. State University of New York Press.
• Restall, Matthew. (2005). “Black Slaves, Red Paint” (introduction), in Beyond Black and Red: African-native relations in colonial Latin America. University of New Mexico Press.
• Saldaña Portillo, Josefina. (2016). Introduction and Chapter 1 in Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States.Duke University Press.
• Saldaña Portillo, Josefina. (2016). Cruel Coloniality; or, The Ruse of Sovereignty. PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 131(3), 722–730. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2016.131.3.722
• Sapiro, Gisèle. (2016). “How do literary texts cross borders (or not)”, Journal of World Literature, 1:1, p. 81-96.
• Sapiro, Gisèle. (2022). “Literature festivals: a new authority in the transnational literary field”, Journal of World Literature, 7. 
• Simpson, Audra. (2007). “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice,’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue, 9, 67–80.
• Simpson, Betasamosake Leanne.(2017). Chapter 11 in As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press.
• Stahuljak, Zrinka. (2024). “Fixers: For an Alternative History of Literature and Translation,” introduction to Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature. University of Chicago Press.
• Tănăsescu, Mihnea. (2020). “Rights of Nature, Legal Personality, and Indigenous Philosophies.” Transnational Environmental Law, 9(3), 429–453. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2047102520000217
• Teves, S. N., Smith, A., & Raheja, M. H. (Eds.). (2015). Native Studies Keywords. The University of Arizona Press: “Sovereignty,” p. 1-17, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “The Place Where We All Live and Work Together,” pp. 18-24
• Thiele, Kathrin. (2024). “Intra/Sectional Matters; or How to Think-Practice the World Otherwise” (forthcoming in Intra/Sections: Post-Anthropcentric Concepts of Multiplicity, edited by J. Haase-Knöpfle/K. Thiele (Fink/Brill 2024)).
• Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. (1999). Chapter 1 “Imperialism, History, Writing, Theory,” in Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous Peoples.  Zed Books.
• Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. (2019). “Exchanging Perspectives. The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies.” Common Knowledge (New York, N.Y.), 10(3), 463–484. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-10-3-463
• Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. (2014). Selection from Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology, trans. and ed. by Peter Skafish. Univocal.
• Wynter, Sylvia. (2003). “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, Afer Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument.” CR, 3(3), 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015

Optional Readings:

• Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (selections); “Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/realities and Queer Political imaginings”; “After the End of the World”
• Bourdieu, Pierre. “Social Space and Symbolic Space” (from Practical Reason. On the Theory of Action)
• Botha, Louis, Dominic Griffiths, Maria Prozesky, “Epistemological Decolonization through a Relational Knowledge-Making Model”
• Coccia, Emanuele. A Sensible Life: A Micro-Ontology of the Image (selections)
• Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options
• Shih, Shu-mei. “World Studies and Relational Comparison”
• Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. (2015). “Cosmologies: Perspectivism” in The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds. Hau Books.
• Wynter, Sylvia. (1995). “1492: A New World View.” In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas. A New World View, eds. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. 5–57.