This seminar is inspired by two important new books: Jeffrey Sacks’ Poeticality: In Refusal of Settler Life and Mark Minch-de Leon’s Indigenous Inhumanities: California Indian Studies after the Apocalypse. Sacks’ book presents an innovative conceptualization of Western modernity from the era of the first Crusade as resting on “settler life”— the ontological formation of the European subject as possessive individual. The grounding of settler life in regimes of carcerality, property, legality, and whiteness names and informs “a manner of reading, a sense of language, and a pose in philosophical explication.” Against these practices, Sacks draws on critiques of racial capitalism by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, and Cedric Robinson; indigenous resistance to settler life drawn from the work of Layli Long Soldier, Audra Simpson, and Glen Couthard; and the “anontological form” developed in Arabic thought through the work of Mahmoud Darwish, Etel Adnan, and Khalid al-Ma’ali (including al-Ma’ali’s translations of Paul Celan) to demonstrate the work of “poeticality” as the disposition of a non-possessive, relational subject that refuses settler life. Minch-de Leon’s Indigenous Inhumanities explores the anticolonial dimensions of California Indian intellectual and cultural resurgence in the aftermath of apocalypse through Indigenous art, literature, and theory, envisioning an expanded poetics of resistance through a reconfigured relationship to death and the dead. He centers Indigenous knowledge and social systems while challenging legal and political definitions of violence, power, and the human, asking what the language of comparison can mean for peoples to whom “humanity” has been denied. Refusing reconciliation and embracing Indigenous frameworks of radical relationality and the “inhuman,” drawing on the evocative art of Frank Day, the poetry of Tommy Pico, and the writings of Deborah Miranda, Minch-de Leon proposes a critical Indigenous antihumanist survival and resurgence that is a vital counterpoint to Sacks’ “refusal of settler life” in the context of Indigenous thought. 

Given this range of references, we invite relevant contributions across languages, regional formations, and time periods, including work addressing the writers and artists invoked above, particularly papers that propose comparative approaches to settler colonialism (and settler life writ large), racial capitalism, Indigeneity, poetics, visual aesthetics, ontology, translation, philology, and especially approaches grounded in or speaking to Palestine studies and the role of scholars and teachers in the midst of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli genocide, continuing practices of racist state violence, and apocalyptic climate catastrophe. In addition to papers that directly address one or both books, we also welcome contributions inspired by them, as well as work that moves alongside them and reverberates with the call to refuse of settler life and its apocalyptic inhumanity.