Thought in Revolt
Description
NOTE: This seminar will pre-circulate its contributions. If you are interested in attending any of its sessions, please email the organizers to receive the relevant materials: [email protected] and [email protected].
What forms of thought arise in acephalic uprisings? What modes of expression, textual genres, and rhetorical gestures appear when thinking stops being the prerogative of leaders and theorists and becomes a common practice in and of revolt? How does the irruptive thought of collective insurrectionary self-activity challenge the basic ontological presuppositions, conceptual frameworks, and normative categories of political modernity?
This seminar gathers scholars working on a temporally and geographically wide range of subjects under the banner of popular insurgency. These might include historical and contemporary global peasant insurgencies, slave revolts and the Haitian revolution, anti-colonial insurrections and movements, as well as contemporary appearances of communization and destituent power. We are especially interested in those sites that articulate heterodox visions of political theology and challenge the ontology of the secular, the power of secularism, and the narratives of secularization. We also invite work that critically engages the violent intimacies of state and capital and expands the canon of anarchist and communist thought, especially from non-European and non-modern fields.
We hope to convene an interdisciplinary conversation, not only to think popular insurrections, but also to explore the pressure they exert on the realm of theory. To this end, contributors might engage the following subjects: revolts that enact the unthinkable and the impossible, as in Trouillot’s theorization of the Haitian Revolution as an impossible event—unthinkable even to the self-emancipating enslaved who carried it out. Challenges to dominant understandings of the theory-practice relationship, via Arendt’s exploration of the revolutionary capacity for radical novelty, or via Agamben’s critique of the paradigm of realization and his rethinking of the modal relations of the possible and actual. The capacity of mass collective action to embody, in Tomba’s formulation, insurgent universality in contrast to juridical universalism. The experience of historical discontinuity (Benjamin) that allows collective insurgency to contest the sovereign periodization of modernity (Kathleen Davis). Guha’s reflections on insurgent peasant consciousness and its challenge to secular historiography, as well as the broader debate on the relation of peasant insurgencies to the political (Chakrabarty, Hobsbawm, Toscano). Social poesis (Hartman) or socio-poetic insurgency (Moten) as ante-political, following Cedric Robinson’s critique of the political as the transcendental principle of order.
Other potential topics might include the general insurrection and the general strike; fanaticism and the boundaries of political thought; millenarian and utopian practice; self-authorization and self-activity; the ontology of order and disorder.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Oliver Silverman is a PhD Candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY and a Future's Initiative Fellow. Their academic writings have appeared in Political Theory, History of the Present, Utopian Studies, and Theory & Event .
Speaker Bio
Alex Dubilet is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern and the editor of Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology and Political Theology Reimagined.
Speaker Bio
Kirill Ospovat is associate professor of Russian at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently preparing a book-length study of the Pugachev rebellion as a popular revolution and its resonances with the discourse of radical Enlightenment, as well as its interpretations in varous strains of (post-/neo-/anti-)Marxist scholarship of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Speaker Bio
Mark Minch-de Leon is associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and a founding member of the California Indian Studies and Scholars Association. He works at the intersections of Indigenous studies, rhetorical theory, and narrative and visual studies. He recently published, Indigenous Inhumanities: California Indian Studies after the Apocalypse, with UMN Press as part of the Indigenous Americas series. He is an enrolled member of the Susanville Indian Rancheria.
Papers
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Parisa Vaziri is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell. She is the author of Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive (2023).
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I am a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the New School for Social Research. I work on democratic theory, social movements, and Anti-colonialism.
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Jess Feldman received their Ph.D. in political theory from Brown University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Bard College's Hannah Arendt Center. Their book project, Democratic Refusals: The Politics of the General Strike, develops an account of how the general strike has shaped the democratic imaginary, exploring how and why political thinkers and movements—like Georges Sorel, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and W.E.B. Du Bois—turned to general-strike politics in the 20th century.
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Laila Riazi is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Speaker Bio
Ali Altaf Mian is assistant professor of religion and the Izzat Hasan Sheikh Fellow in Islamic studies at the University of Florida. His forthcoming book is Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty: Genres of Tradition in Muslim South Asia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2026).
Speaker Bio
Noor Asif is a PhD Candidate in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also an associate editor for Parapraxis Magazine.
Papers
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Salik Basharat Geelani is a Russell G. Hamilton scholar and doctoral candidate in the Department of English Literature at Vanderbilt University. His thesis project studies statelessness and socio-poetic congregation in the context of Kashmir’s long-standing struggle for self-determination.
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Chloe Tsolakoglou is a poet, translator, and scholar based in NYC. She is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
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Joseph Albernaz is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community (2024).