#5: Frames of War 23/01/2019

Wednesday 23 January | 5 - 6.30pm | LHRI | All welcome 


A Happy New(ish) Year from Quilting Points! We have a few changes to announce. Firstly, our sessions will now take place on Wednesday evenings (23 January, 13 February, 6 March and 27 March). Secondly, and more excitingly, this semester’s programme includes the following two special events:
  1. Film Screening, 27 February: Paris Is Burning (a collaboration with Leeds Cineforum)
  2. Guest Seminar, 27 March: Griselda Pollock on Anne Emmanuelle Berger’s The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theatre of Gender
The first session of the semester will take place on Wednesday 23 January. We will be reading from Butler’s ‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag’ from Frames of War (2009). Written as a critical response to Sontag’s On Regarding the Pain of Others, the essay uses the Abu Ghraib torture photographs to ask whether Sontag is correct to argue that photography has lost its power to incite an ethical response and to develop her investigation of the ways in which the modern American state uses war to frame hierarchies of grieveability. Taking issue with Sontag’s separation of affect and cognition in analysing the photographic form’s effects on the viewer, Butler argues that the photographs and their widespread circulation act to expose and disrupt the normative frames that legitimise modern warfare. 

In the session, the discussion will focus principally on pp.74 - 101 of the chapter, but you are welcome to read the whole chapter, and to glance at Sontag’s On Regarding the Pain of Others, if you wish.  

We look forward to hearing your thoughts! 


Wednesday 23 January | 5 - 6.30pm | LHRI | All welcome 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Robinson session 3: Robinson and the Decolonial

Thursday 29th February November | 5:30 – 7:00pm | The Alumni Room (School of English) We are happy to announce interdisciplinary reading group Quilting Points will return after a short break. Following our readings of  Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition  last term, we will begin this year by reading two short essays in which Robinson develops the ideas of that book in relation to thinking about the legacy of decolonial struggles on the African continent. In ' The appropriation of Fanon ', Robinson takes issue with what he sees as postcolonial theory's depoliticized conception of Fanon, and opens this up into a critique of the "native bourgeoisie", which he then develops in ' In Search of a Pan-African Commonwealth ', into thinking through the association between Pan-Africanism and the form of the Nation-State.  Everyone (at whatever level of study & whether enrolled at the University or not)  is welcome, and no prior familiarity w
Read more

CFP | Quilting Points 2024: Racial Capitalism and Cultural Resistance

  Quilting Points Call for Papers     CFP | Quilting Points 202 4 :    Racial Capitalism and Cultural Resistance     01 st Ma y 2024    Call for Papers – PGR-led symposium   Deadline: 15th December     Abstracts: 250 -words    The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures that emerged from capitalism (2)   Cedric Robinson – Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (2021)   Originally published in 1983, Cedric Robinson’s work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition has proved critical in thinking through the relationship between race and capitalism in a global context . It has experienced a renewed wave of interest over the last decade because of the purchase that some of his concepts such as ‘racial capitalism’ and the ‘Black Radical Tradition
Read more

Sylvia Wynter and The Tempest: 'Beyond Miranda's Meanings'

Image
Thursday 18 May | 5:30 - 7:00pm | Meeting Room G01 Written as an afterword to Out of the Kumbla (1994), the first edited collection of critical essays on Caribbean women’s literature, ' Beyond Miranda's Meaning: Un/silencing the "Demonic Ground" of Caliban's "Woman" ' analyses the ways in which race complicates gender, taking a discussion of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a point of departure. According to Sylvia Wynter, this play not only posits Caliban as ‘the irrational native subject’ but in doing so also relegates 'Caliban’s "woman"' to a space of non-being. As such, the play reenacts the founding structure of the onto-epistemic order of Western Man. Analysing the function of the “ontological absence” of the Black female subject position, it is in this essay that Wynter coins the term “demonic ground”, which has since been taken up by various scholars in different ways, most notably by Katherine McKittrick. As always this sessio
Read more