An Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference | 22 June 2022 – 24 June 2022 | University of Oxford
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
‘Saying We to Ourselves: Reciprocity as Resistance in Recent German-Language Literature’
Sarah Colvin (University of Cambridge)
“Mir. Wir.” (Sharon Dodua Otoo, Adas Raum)
“I am because we are.” (John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy)
“all things, all beings [must] expose sharing and circulation as such by saying ‘we’, by saying we to themselves in all possible senses of that expression” (Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural)
Sometimes there is an urgent need for oppositional resistance. Without overlooking that, I’d like to argue in this paper that oppositional resistance is an emergency measure rather than a solution, because it necessarily risks reproducing the structures it resists. Reciprocity provides (I shall suggest) a non-heroic, non-binary, and deeply subversive alternative to oppositional resistance. Reciprocity, as plural mutuality, subverts hierarchical and often binary structures. I will illustrate that with reference to recent fiction by contemporary German avantgarde writers such as Sharon Dodua Otoo and Olivia Wenzel, and will argue that that these literary texts not only indicate in their content that things need to be different, but rethink resistance aesthetically, via their form and structure.
Reading and Discussion with Rachel Seiffert
Rachel Seiffert has published four novels, A Boy in Winter, The Dark Room, Afterwards, and The Walk Home, and one collection of short stories, Field Study. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Dublin/IMPAC Award, and longlisted three times for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. In 2003, she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British novelists; in 2011, she received the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and in 2018, the Association of Jewish Libraries’ Honor Book Award. Rachel has been visiting lecturer at the Humboldt University Berlin, University of Manchester, and Spalding College in the USA, amongst others, and currently teaches at Birkbeck, University of London.
‘Turning Ruins of War into Walls of Revolution’ – Murad Subay in Discussion with Wes Williams
Nicknamed ‘the Yemini Bansky’ by the international media, Murad Subay (born in 1987 in Yemen) is a contemporary artist and political activist. Since the Yemeni revolution of 2011, Murad has launched several campaigns of turning the bullet-scarred walls and war-ravaged streets into symbols of hope and peace through his art. Vibrant hues of revolution and civil disobedience against the crumbling canvasses of war mark his signature artistic expression. In this session, Murad Subay will introduce his unique style of resistance in conversation with Wes Williams (Director, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities).
CONFERENCE PAPERS
The Holocaust in History and Memory
‘The Tiyul: Smuggling Jews across the Hungarian-Romanian border during the Holocaust’
Barnabas Balint (University of Oxford)
This paper explores how young Jews contributed to rescue efforts across the Hungarian-Romanian border through a case study of a rescue operation known as the ‘Tiyul’. In so doing, it develops a more comprehensive understanding of the transnational organisational structure of the underground Zionist youth movements and reveals connectivity between resistance groups across Europe. Transcending both physical and social boundaries, Zionist youth smuggled approximately 7,000 Jews across the border to Romania in between March and August 1944 in an operation known as the ‘Tiyul’ (the Hebrew word for ‘excursion’). They were responsible for organising groups of Jews, arranging forged papers, and reassuring those they were smuggling. At constant risk of arrest, smugglers often wore disguise. The Tiyul ended on 23rd August 1944 when the Hungarian-Romanian border was sealed following the overthrow of Antonescu. Although only lasting five months, this operation reveals much about the nature of resistance – especially Jewish resistance – in axis-supporting countries, where general complicity with the Holocaust led many to conclude that rescue was the most effective form of resistance. The Tiyul adds an extra element to this: as an operation led by Zionist groups, not only did participants fear being discovered by the authorities, they also acted within a Jewish community unsympathetic to the Zionist cause. By exploring the activities of young people within this environment, it becomes possible to gain a better understanding of the resistance: their networks, their relations across spatial and social boundaries, and their place within the Jewish community.
Barnabas Balint is a Doctoral candidate in History at Magdalen College, with a specific interest in the history of the Holocaust and its impact on society. Before starting his DPhil, he completed his undergraduate degree in History at the University of Exeter in 2019 and his master’s at Oxford in 2020. His multi-lingual research (English, French and Hungarian) combines the history of childhood, gender and identity to explore Jewish youth responses to persecution during the Second World War. He is currently focusing on the experiences of Jewish youth during the Holocaust in Hungary under the supervision of Dr Zoe Waxman.
‘Republicans and Revisionists, or what the Jewish Underground learnt from Ireland’
James A. S. Sunderland (University of Oxford)
Between 1944 and 1948 three armed Jewish groups engaged in varying forms of violent and non-violent resistance to British rule in Mandate Palestine. Of these, two (the Irgun and Lehi) explicitly looked to the example of Sinn Fein and the IRA between 1916 and 1922 as a model of anti-colonial resistance. Despite this shared model, a diverse range of figures within these organizations took very different lessons about what ‘resistance’ meant. From strategies for gathering funds, to the importance of violence and martyrdom, various leaders of the Jewish Underground and their followers adopted the supposed lessons of Irish resistance in whatever manner best suited their ideological and strategic outlook. At the same time, numerous Irish figures sought to aid Jewish resistance by providing support and advice on how best to organise an anti-British resistance movement. Robert Briscoe, former gunrunner for the IRA and Mayor of Dublin, helped to facilitate high level meetings between the Irgun leadership and Eamon de Valera (Irish Taoiseach), whilst his colleagues’ secured connections between the Irgun and the Irish American diaspora. Conversely, British politicians and military leaders looked to their failures in Ireland to better understand the solution to their woes in Palestine. Many had experience of Ireland and increasingly worried about the parallels they saw between the nature of resistance in the two countries. This paper will explore the genealogies of Jewish resistance to British rule, and the manner in which groups directly and indirectly learnt from, utilized, and adapted the methods of past resistance groups to further their own goals. In doing so it offers pertinent points not just about the specific context of 20th c. Ireland and Israel/Palestine, but of how resistance groups often display patterns of eclectic borrowing and remixing, coalescing radically different ideas and influences around their own ideologies and aims.
James A. S. Sunderland is a second year, history DPhil student at Merton College, Oxford. His research seeks to blend history and the social sciences (in particular Critical Terror Studies and social psychology) to better understand how the violence of the Jewish Revolt (1944-1948) unleashed against the British in Palestine affected the British decision to abrogate their commitments and abandon their mandate.
‘Resisting Traditional Holocaust Memory Online: participation-based Holocaust Social Media’
Rosalind Hulse (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Dalziel suggests “social media has had a monumental impact on the ways in which the Holocaust is learned about and commemorated in the public domain.” Social media content commonly highlights genuine attempts by users to engage with the Holocaust, both on an emotional and an intellectual level. There has been a dichotomy between user content and user intentions in recent years. Users both aiming to engage and, in some cases, subvert Holocaust memory have frequently turned to participation-based media that resists pre-established Holocaust memory norms. The most complex trend involving the Holocaust on social media is the 2020 #holocaustchallenge on TikTok: “Users have shared clips of themselves with fake bruises, wearing clothes that Jews were ordered to wear by the Nazis.” Jones notes how this trend sparked “questions about what the right way to respectfully remember traumatic events in the past, and how first-person accounts can be used to achieve that.” The trend generated a significant backlash, with the role-playing of Holocaust victims being dubbed by many as “trauma porn”. However, since the challenge, discourse reflects a growing awareness of the complexities of engagement in the digital era. Jones argues that “we need to ensure that alongside teaching the historical facts of the Holocaust (which remains crucial), we need to educate young people about the ethics of commemoration.” This paper aims to explore younger generations varying motivations and attempts to resist conventional forms of Holocaust engagement online by exploring two case studies or “genres” of opposing motivations of resistance. The TikTok challenge represents both opposing motivations to the growing trend of offensive Holocaust memes and yet has emerged from the same generations desire to engage and critique past traumas through unconventional means. This paper is centred on the hypothesis that resistance of traditional Holocaust memory is seen across social media.
Rosalind Hulse’s research explores Holocaust memory amongst American High School Students. A focal point of her research is “Holocaust controversy” centred around American High Schools since 1967. Her research and research interests include Holocaust memory in the digital age, historical memory on film, Holocaust-themed content and antisemitism on social media, the impact of developments in media and media technology on Holocaust memory (1990 onwards). Before my PhD she worked in television advertising and studied with the David Cesarani, Kobler Scholarship on the MA Holocaust Studies program at Royal Holloway.
Writing Resistance
‘Bisexuality in Russian Gay and Lesbian Samizdat of the 1990s and Early 2000s’
Charlotte Dowling (University of Oxford)
It has been noted that, in the Anglo-American context, bisexuality resists easy definition and is “erased” due to stigma and a lack of visual codes to externalise plurisexual desire. Anglo-American bisexuality has in fact most often been made legible only through tropes of promiscuity, triangulated relationships, or alternation between “heterosexual” and “homosexual” modes. Meanwhile, bisexuality in Russia has never been fully theorised, and is still commonly omitted or glossed over in studies of queer people and culture. This paper contributes to the beginnings of a theory of bisexuality in Russia by investigating its place in samizdat lesbian and gay journals of the 1990s and early 2000s.
This ephemeral activist press is incredibly understudied despite its significance to the self-shaping of Russia’s LG(BT) community after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, in the approximate decade between the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in 1994 and the first regional bans on “propaganda of non-traditional sexuality” in 2006, Russia experienced a period of both optimistic sexual revolution and conservative backlash to the perceived importation of an “LGBT trend” from Western Europe and the United States.
I show that this activist press offers a window into how a queer culture developed in Russia both alongside and in opposition to the mainstream. Through analysis of articles, personal advertisements, literature, illustrations, and erotic imagery in several key journals, I demonstrate that bisexuality featured prominently in readership and content. These publications document how terms used to (self-)describe sexuality were in flux during this volatile period, with local labels gradually replaced by more strictly-defined, internationally recognisable alternatives. I also show that sexual fluidity and non-normative gender identities were frequently conflated, revealing bisexuality to be a framework through which accepted ideas of masculinity and femininity and corresponding “active” and “passive” sexual behaviours were understood and challenged.
Charlotte Dowling is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford researching the place of bisexuality in the Russian cultural imagination. Her research interests primarily include gender, sexuality, and the representation of lived experiences in literature and culture. Her most recent article, upcoming in 2022, investigates the stylistic intersections between transgender life writing and activism in contemporary Russia. Her work is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Clarendon Fund, and Wadham College.
‘Representation of the German Resistance to the Nazi Régime: The Perspective Presented to Immigrants in Textbooks’
Julia Wolbergs (Leipzig University)
The proposed paper presents the results of an analysis of how the German resistance to the Nazi régime between 1933 and 1945 is represented in current textbooks for immigrants to Germany. The results presented here are based on a discourse analysis of textbooks used in integration courses in Germany. While the analysis on which this paper is based looks at the entire course unit on National Socialism, this contribution focuses on the presentation of the German resistance. The principal argument put forward here is that the textbooks invite learners to identify to a high degree with the resistance fighters by representing the latter in close-up photographs as well as providing overall more extensive coverage of the resistance and its activities vis-à-vis the Holocaust and other crimes (against humanity) committed by the Germans during World War II. Whereas the victims as well as the perpetrators of Nazism remain largely nameless, the resistance is individualised, thus becoming the focal point. The paper also discusses the various resistance groups portrayed, from the widely known White Rose and Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg to Georg Elser, who has long been ignored in German community of memory. Furthermore, the paper draws attention to certain omissions in these textbooks, such as the lack of coverage of the Jewish resistance to Nazi oppression. For instance, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is only discussed in the context of Willy Brandt’s historic `Warsaw Genuflection’ in 1970, but not as evidence of Jewish resistance per se. Here it becomes clear how the representation in these textbooks is interwoven with the hegemonic community of memory in Germany.
The paper is theoretically embedded in research on cultural teaching and learning in the context of German as a Foreign and Second Language (GFSL), here focusing on National Socialism and the Holocaust as topics in GFSL (e.g. Fornoff et al., 2020). The paper reflects on studies on integration courses and the resulting demands on immigrants and their place in said community of memory (e.g. Frenzel, 2021). Methodologically, the work is situated in (critical) discourse analysis, taking into account specific adaptations for the subject GFSL (e.g. Altmayer et al., 2021). Since textbooks are the largest document group in the corpus, the paper considers the research on textbooks and the multimodal nature of textbooks.
Julia Wolbergs is a PhD candidate and research associate at the Herder-Institute of Leipzig University. Her thesis is on textbooks used in integration courses in Germany. She holds a B.A. in Political Science and Linguistics from Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg and an M.A. in German as a Foreign Language from Leipzig University. She previously worked for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Cairo/Egypt and taught at Ain Shams University.
‘Resistance villages: the case of Vergt, a ‘petite capitale de maquis’’
Robert Pike (Cardiff University)
The spread of resistance from an almost exclusively urban setting into the countryside was a major turning point in the story of the France’s ‘dark years’. Villages and small towns took on crucial economic importance. As requisitions of produce and manpower bit, however, local and personal interests split communities. Most people neither resisted nor collaborated, and instead simply made do.
A small number of villages developed a contemporary reputation as centres of resistance activity, a status subsequently celebrated. One such place was Vergt, in Dordogne, which became known as a ‘petite capitale de maquis’. In such places not only were denunciations virtually unknown, but local people had to be complicit. Meetings could take place in cafés, maquisards could circulate, and potential recruits were often vetted andhidden until needed. Even agents arriving from London were briefed about villages such as Vergt. Such ‘hot-spots’ and their reputations have been, to date, largely ignored by academics.
This paper will argue that a spirit of resistance, based on Rod Kedward’s interpretation of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus could, in the case of villages such as Vergt, become normative for inhabitants. It will also show how, in such places, resistance activity in supporting maquis groups aligned with James C. Scott’s concept of ‘weapons of the weak’. It will draw on a contemporary magazine article about Vergt, along with personal testimonies and archival material to consider what really constituted ‘resistance’ in the case of such villages. In doing so questions are raised regarding resistance as a concept, the motivation of ordinary people, andwhether resistance activity need always be intentional. The case is made that, for ‘resistance villages’ such as Vergt, uniform complicity across the social spectrum allowed for illegal activity to thrive undisturbed despite the grip of Vichy.
Robert Pike is a PhD student at Cardiff University. He is researching society and the Resistance in rural regions of occupied France. He graduated from the University of Exeter in 1998 with a BA Combined Hons. in History and French. Recently he completed an MSc in Social Science Research Methods at Cardiff University. To date he has written two books on occupied France: Defying Vichy: Blood, Fear and French Resistance(2018, The History Press) and Silent Village: Life and Death in Vichy France (2021, The History Press). He holds a PGCE in modern languages at secondary level and co-authored Oxford University’s A-level French course.
Making Sense of Resistance
‘What Is Complete Civil Disobedience?’
Eraldo Souza dos Santos (Panthéon-Sorbonne University)
An unexpected yet readily identifiable common theme binds Egyptian activists together in their call for Mohammed Morsi and his government to step down in 2013, Sudanese protesters in the aftermath of the 2019 Khartoum massacre and the 2021 coup d’état, members of the ‘yellow vest’ movement in France, and supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Despite evincing utter disparate political stances, all four movements appear to rally under an ostensibly new watchword: “complete civil disobedience.”
Yet, complete civil disobedience has an extensive history. It is an idea that Mohandas Gandhi developed early on to conceptualize nonviolent resistance. In a letter to Srinivasa Sastri in 1919, discussing the resistance against the Rowlatt Act, Gandhi suggested that civil disobedience could be comprehensive to the point that “all the laws of the land” must bedisobeyed. In 1921, he went on to conceptualize this first-enounced possibility as “complete civil disobedience” in a short article appearing in the Young India, a weekly publication he had initiated. In Gandhi’s words, “Complete civil disobedience is a state of peaceful rebellion— a refusal to obey every single State-made law. It is certainly more dangerous than an armedrebellion.”
A central philosophical puzzle concerning complete civil disobedience arises over Gandhi’s call to disobey “every State-made law.” To what extent is it compatible with his doctrine of nonviolence? Should disobedients break laws prohibiting murder, as an extremal scenario? Moreover, full-scale disobedience of every state-made law seems unrealistic or highly implausible. Is it not empirically the case that an individual in most circumstances observes by default at least some of the state-promulgated laws? Complete civil disobedience, construed as full-scale disobedience across the entire legal framework, appears at first sight to be fraught with contradiction.
In this paper, I argue that Gandhi’s theory of complete civil disobedience enriches the ethics of resistance in highly original ways. Contemporary philosophers usually presuppose that all laws, even unjust ones, deserve our prima facie allegiance. Gandhi, however, approaches political obligation from a different perspective. He argues that state-made laws, even just ones, do not deserve our allegiance; some of them, however, must be obeyed—not owing to their legal bindingness, but their intrinsic moral value or contextual importance. It follows from Gandhi’s principles that assessing which laws must be explicitly obeyed or disobeyed in contexts of acute moral and political crisis is the central ethical challenge for complete civil disobedience. Those who engage in it must be perpetually poised to examine (and potentially reject) not only blind obedience to the law, but also unconsidered disobedience. On this radical new departure, complete civil disobedience seems to be an open-ended, extensible, and dynamic political engagement.
Eraldo Souza dos Santos is a philosopher and historian of political thought. Their research interests include the history of political concepts, the politics of social movements, and Black internationalism (South and Southeast Asia). They are a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
‘Unearthing Hidden Resistance in Gayl Jones’s ‘Palmares’’
Emily Moore (University College London)
Generally, critics have not discussed the work of African-American author Gayl Jones as articulating a message of resistance against the racism that suffuses the United States’ history, inspires brutality and violence, and lies at the foundation of pernicious stereotypes. Rather, when she first began publishing in the mid-1970s, they bemoaned the ways in which her work failed to conform to the program of Black cultural nationalism. They found fault with her portrayal of violent black men, claiming that she sustained racial stereotypes the Black Arts Movement had attempted to dismantle. Had her most recent novel, Palmares, only published in 2021, been released into this critical climate, it certainly would have garnered similar condemnation for its ambivalent portrayal of communities of escaped slaves in Brazil in the seventeenth century. Jones presents the largest of these communities, Palmares, as ruthless, violent, and problematic, not a humane and democratic utopia.
I argue, however, that Palmares is a text full of misdirection and that its articulation of resistance is strong, but hidden, not where it claims to be, always deferred and beneath the surface. The novel’s resistance is not the defensive violence of the Palmaristas, under siege from the Portuguese colonists. It is the (predominantly female) folk knowledge of the healers, the challenge this alternative epistemology mounts against western hegemony, the physical and psychic healing it inaugurates, which is revolutionary and violent. It is the relationships that cross racial boundaries, the homosocial/sexual ones that usurp the heterosocial/sexual ones. It is the novel’s radical ecology. And, finally, it is Jones’s dismantling of the conventions of genre as she abandons linearity and narrative coherence. By exploring these concealed iterations of resistance, I hope not only to disrupt the critical consensus around Jones’s work, but also to understand the important, alternative, nonhegemonic modes of resistance it articulates.
I am a PhD student at UCL working on jazz and blues in the work of Gayl Jones under the supervision of Professor Paul Gilroy. I undertook my undergraduate degree in English and Modern History at The University of Saint Andrews and my Master’s in Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London. My research interests include writers’ explicit attempts to translate or transcribe music in literature and the political currency of music as a literary technique.
‘Claiming Sophie Scholl’s actions and The White Rose resistance as part of an antifascist movement in Nazi Germany (1942-1943)’
Maria Visconti (Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) / Brazilian Center for Nazism and Holocaust Studies (NEPAT))
This paper intends to claim the White Rose resistance group’s role in the hall of antifascist movements in the 20th century, focusing on Sophie’s Scholl agency as a young woman in the resistance.
The White Rose was a student group active in Germany, mainly in Munich, between 1942 and 1943. Their participants were Sophie and Hans Scholl, Alexander Schmorell, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, and Professor Kurt Huber for a brief period. In the first phase in 1942, their resistance was based on the distribution of leaflets calling the German population to peacefully resist the Nazi regime. However, in their second phase, in 1943, the group was leaning towards a more active and engaged antifascist resistance, integrated with left-wing movements. The students had meetings with Falk Harnack, brother of Arvid Harnack, known for his role in the Red Orchestra, who was arranging for their meeting with his cousin, no one less than Dietrich Bonhoeffer, soon to be famous for the attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life.
These encounters, among other things, indicate the White Rose’s intention to participate in more active forms of resistance, even encompassing violent actions. In this sense, this paper aims to include their activities in antifascist historiography. Based on works that amplify the revisionist aspect of the antifascist movements, such as Hugo Garcia’s and Isabelle Richet’s, this paper will argue that the antifascist operations were mainly plural, non-structured, more based on action than theory. Furthermore, Leonardo Rapone proposes a new terminology to understand, especially women’s efforts towards opposition to a fascist regime. The “existential antifascism” would be based on the cultural aspects of resistance and opposition to create autonomous spaces that praise freedom in a broader sense. Therefore, this paper will analyze the White Rose’s activities and Sophie Scholl’s role in their resistance and propose the group’s insertion in the broader debate of antifascist movements.
Maria Visconti is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Brazil’s Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). She has a Master’s and a graduate degree in History at the same institution, with an academic extension at Friedrich-Alexander University, in Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. She is one of the Brazilian Center for Nazism and Holocaust Studies (NEPAT) coordinators and a member of The Perpetrator Studies Network. She worked with the White Rose resistance group in her Master’s, providing the first and only historiographical material about the group in Portuguese. Her Ph.D. is about the Nazis’ discourses in the Nuremberg Trial.
Poetics of Resistance
‘Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Käthe Kollwitz’: Vietnam war resistance and feminist poetics’
Sarah Gilbert (Oxford Brookes University)
The German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) was best known for her self-portraiture and her depictions of women and families by lithograph and wood-cuts, which communicated civilian life during war. However, Muriel Rukeyser’s 1968 poem ‘Käthe Kollwitz’, which takes the artist’s life and art as its biographical material, is often considered hallmark of the 1960s and 1970s US second wave feminist poetry movement. For a long time, the poem served as new readers’ only entrance into Rukeyser’s diverse body of experimental resistance writing. This was due to the poem’s prominence within the early 1970s explosion of feminist poetry in North America, comparable to the lack of availability of Rukeyser’s work by other media. Through this crucial poem, this paper will establish the ways in which Rukeyser’s work speaks to second wave feminist poetics, as well as how broader interpretations of her poetics have been affected by this relationship.
‘Käthe Kollwitz’ undergirds two key feminist poetry anthologies of the early 1970s, both of which take their titles from Rukeyser’s work: No More Masks! (1973) and The World Split Open (1974). This paper will present a brief case study of No More Masks!, as a prominent and representative example of how Rukeyser has been perceived within and represented by feminist resistance poetics. Secondly, this paper will establish a working definition of the phrase ‘Vietnam war era poetics’, in order to re-locate ‘Käthe Kollwitz’ as a Vietnam war resistance poem. I will establish the trans-historical nature of Rukeyser’s broader war resistance poetics, whilst also locating ‘Käthe Kollwitz’ as specifically Vietnam war era, in relation to the poem’s feminism. As well as offering a renewed entrance into the resistance poetics of this fascinating and often misunderstood poet, this paper will directly address the prevailing misconceptions surrounding Vietnam era resistance poetics in literary scholarship.
Sarah Gilbert is a second year PhD student at Oxford Brookes University. Her thesis is entitled Women’s anti-Vietnam war poetry and canon(s): critical and feminist representation of the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser and Denise Levertov, and is supported by an Oxford Brookes faculty studentship. Her work also examines the broader phenomenon of North American women’s war poetry in the 20 century, considering how anti-war writing and representations of anti-war writing were shaped by the broader political context(s) of second wave feminism, the civil rights movement, and the cold war.
‘Portuguese Epic’s Unruly Daughter: Ana Luísa Amaral and her resistance to dominant visions of Portuguese nationhood in the queerly spectral, eco-utopian poetry of Escuro (2014)’
Andrzej Stuart-Thompson (University of Oxford)
Twentieth and twenty-first century Portuguese women poets transform the Portuguese canon, resisting its archive of dominant conceptions, memories and teleologies of the nation. Their re-visionary enterprise involves dialoguing with canonical male-authored epic texts, in particular Camões’s Os Lusíadas (1572), and Pessoa’s Mensagem (1933) – landmark formulations of Portuguese identity, co-opted by Salazarism to bolster the rhetorical arsenal of the dictatorship (1933-74) in its pursuit of bellicose imperialism, masculine heroism and the oppression of the vulnerable.
Ana Luísa Amaral’s 2014 collection Escuro opens up alternative voices and reimaginings of Portugal’s contingent place within history. Through her probing of spurious unities and forms of transcendence, Amaral reminds us that the moral architecture upon which the nation’s future is to be built will always remain uncreated and flexible. In her exploration of mythologized historical figures such as Inês de Castro, Amaral reveals resistant stories muted by patriarchy. Her characters, taken from epic stock, are revealed to be fallibly human. A far cry from the bellicose monarchs of Os Lusíadas and the romantic martyrs of Mensagem, Amaral’s vulnerable subjects – or ‘queer spectres’ (Freccero, 2006) – are figures of resistance and indeterminacy who meditate on, and suffer on account of, the destinies foisted upon them by the faulty logic and masculine ideals of statecraft and imperialist nation-building.
Moving beyond the confines of Portugal, this collection contemplates Europe’s dystopian present, yet resists pessimism by envisioning global utopian alternatives. The poem ‘Amar em futuro’ (‘To love in future’) mobilises an ecological mode of resistance to anthropocentrism and the supposed inevitability of biodiversity loss by gesturing towards a world that is borderless and unpeopled, except for thriving aquatic life-forms, delphinine languages, ‘magic’ and ‘micro-sounds’, which augur new grammars for knowing the world. This eerily beautiful apocalypse decenters the human, instilling an awareness of utopias that may lie beyond the Anthropocene.
Andrzej Stuart-Thompson is a third-year DPhil student in Modern and Medieval Languages (Portuguese) at Jesus College, University of Oxford. His research interests include twentieth and twenty-first century Portuguese women’s poetry; vulnerability as a positive form of resistance to patriarchy; and the possibilities for dis-anthropocentric thought emerging from posthumanism, ecofeminism, critical animal studies and plant philosophy. His thesis examines the ambiguous (anti-)epic poetry of Natália Correia, Luiza Neto Jorge and Ana Luísa Amaral in relation to the Portuguese canon. He is a co-creator of the Jesus College Digital Hub Reading Club, a community exploring robotics, AI and digital technologies in contemporary fiction.
‘(Post)migrant Poets Write Back: Love Poems of Resistance’
Deborah Fallis (Leibniz University Hannover)
When bell hooks describes a feminist and Black ‘talking back’, when postcolonial studies talk about ‘writing back’, rarely does German poetry come to mind. Yet lesser-known authors from the 1980s and 1990s like May Ayim and Semra Ertan are archetypal in their reception: Both were at times successful, at other times forgotten, and lately rediscovered. Both are not (yet) part of the German literary canon and serve as good examples for a critical canon revision. The medium of their choice – poetry – and their biographical backgrounds – Ayim being a Black German and Ertan an immigrant from Turkey – have led to an overarching tendency to read their poetry simply as a form of self-expression. Their individual aesthetic choices, writing styles and narratives of resistances are often overlooked in favour of typical questions about identity and migration.
Love poetry on the other hand, as one of the oldest and most popular forms of literature, is seldom considered a medium of resistance or analysed as a contribution to a broader discourse on social justice. Writing against popular love narratives, bell hooks developed a love ethic in All about Love (2001) that concentrates on “love as an action rather than a feeling” (bell hooks: All about Love. New Visions. New York: HarperCollins 2001, p. 13.) and discusses its relation to family, work, friendship and community. This approach enables a look at love poetry beyond romance and feelings.
My presentation is aiming to explore how May Ayim’s and Semra Ertan’s love poems can be considered acts of resistance: resistance against a white and patriarchal idea of love and against German grammar, literary norms and expectations. For this purpose, I will examine ein nicht ganz liebes geh dicht (1991) and liebe (1980) by May Ayim and Ratschlag (1981) and Gedicht ohne Titel (1980) by Semra Ertan.
Deborah Fallis studied Comparative Literature, Jewish Studies and German Literature in Berlin and Hannover. Since 2019 she has been working as a student assistant, then research assistant at Leibniz University Hannover. She is currently preparing her doctoral thesis and will be giving a class on the relationship between the Bible and literature this summer. Her research interests are postcolonial and postmigrant literature, the intersections between gender and race, intertextual and interreligious approaches to literature. In spring 2021 she received her master’s degree with a thesis on Poetry of resistance: Desintegration in the poems of contemporary postmigrant and jewish writers.
Sites of Resistance
‘Living Artwork as Critical Counter Practice: Tracing the Layers of Resistance in Mike MacDonald’s Butterfly Gardens’
Emily Collins (York University, Toronto)
Located within a theoretical framework of care, decolonial theory, and resistance, and using a broad range of investigative methodologies—ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis—my paper provides a comprehensive study of Mike MacDonald’s Butterfly Gardens which have been planted across Turtle Island from 1995-2003, including many urban spaces, often nearby art centres and public galleries. MacDonald was a Mi’kmaq artist born in Sydney, Nova Scotia whose self-taught practice focused on the environment and the natural world through video installation and multimedia art. Calling attention to environmental and social issues, he planted traditional Indigenous medicinal plants in the gardens to attract butterflies. Originally planting over twenty, today only one of these living artworks remain, outside the Walter Philips Gallery at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada.
While the COVID-19 global lockdowns have created more space for contemplation, causing many to (re)turn attention to gardens and outdoor areas, MacDonald had already been thinking about the ways in which gardens call people to slow down, especially within bustling urban settings, and consider our interconnection and interdependence to all things. In relation to the conference’s central investigative theme, my paper overviews the resistant characteristics at the centre of MacDonald’s gardens. I argue that the artworks function as spaces of resistance across multiple levels – against monocultures and intensive agriculture farming, as institutional critique intervening in the conventions of care in galleries which focus solely on the vault and their collection, to confront the hegemonic reverence of the fine art object, and, more broadly, to challenge dominant ways of knowing and being in the world. In situating these gardens as both a response to resource extraction and spaces to assert an Indigenous and decolonial approach to the environment, urban spaces, and artistic practice, my research explores how these artworks function as knowledge systems and a living demonstration of how we might counter dominant narratives and paradigms.
Emily Collins is an interdisciplinary cultural researcher, writer, and PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. She holds a Master of Arts in Cinema and Media Studies from York University and a Master of Arts in Arts and Culture from Maastricht University. Working across sound studies, intersectional feminist theory, critical disability studies and decolonial theory, Emily’s doctoral work explores how sonic ecologies of difference, resistance and care within media artworks and creative practices might offer new ways to address and engage with our contemporary moment of intersecting crises, evoking embodied, multisensory forms of knowledge.
‘Resisting Populism and Nationalism in Protest Music: How to Redefine the ‘Will of the People’?’
Joanna Zienkiewicz (University of Groningen)
Throughout history, protest music expressed resistance and led to social change. Today, ‘the rise of populism’, which pits ‘good people’ against ‘corrupt elites’, pervades the political climate. With Poland and Hungary exemplifying its rapid escalation, the populism of many European parties is now fused with nationalism and authoritarianism. Popular music is at times used by those populists to normalize their ideas, but also plays a central role in movements that resist hegemonic populisms. In my presentation, I will analyze the different multimodal strategies of resisting populism and nationalism as expressed in protest music based on examples from Poland.
In 2015, a populist-nationalist party, Law and Justice (PiS) won the elections in Poland. Since then, widespread opposition to the party’s increasingly authoritarian and nationalist policies continues to manifest within movements that bring anti-populism to the streets; often with song and dance. By now, over 80 songs have been written to challenge PiS’ continued rule, diverse anti-PiS playlists have been shared on Spotify, and music became the central practice of protests with the emergence of so-called ‘techno-blocades’ and with lyric-inspired protest banners.
As I will show, the dichotomies that populism relies on per definition are challenged within much of such protest music which presents new ways of defining ‘the will of the people’. Through lyrics, sound, and visuals, the protesters subvert populist-nationalist narratives, combine transgressive fun with serious political commentary, while also often reaching the cultural mainstream. By showing how social divides can be complicated, protest music has the potential to deconstruct right-wing populists’ self-proclaimed monopoly on the ‘will of the people’ and undermine their myth that society can be cleanly divided into fundamentally opposed groups of ‘the [conservative] people’ and the liberal ‘(pseudo)elites’.
Joanna Zienkiewicz is a recent Research Master graduate in Arts, Media, and Literary Studies and a lecturer at the University of Groningen. Interested in researching the diverse themes of popular music, politics, protest music, and identity, she has been a speaker of academic conferences & workshops in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Serbia. To date, she has published two peer-reviewed journal articles on protest song (Sonic Scope) and online culture wars (Journal of Media and Culture M/C), and she is additionally affiliated with the Polish Facta Ficta Research Centre for Cultural Studies.
‘“Pan-African Solidarity, International Mutuality, and Interwar Germany: Joseph Bilé and the Liga zur Verteidigung in Weimar Berlin”’
Will Weihe (The Pennsylvania State University)
In late 1929, Joseph Bilé and fellow members of the Liga zur Verteidigung der Negerrasse (LzVN) addressed an audience of German and non-German socialists in Berlin to share brutal accounts of a Germany that had colonized, abused, and abandoned African nationals, now left stateless after the fall of the Kaiserreich. Part of sustained, Comintern attacks on European colonial empires, Bilé described a modern Germany that, counter to Weimar nostalgia for a return to empire, detailed brutal treatments of indigenous peoples in overseas colonies and still denied work and citizenship to those former colonized subjects stranded in the metropole. Bilé and the LzVN’s image of colonial Germany included a call for African liberation to challenge notions of German identity while also demanding international solidarity of all African nations. The state’s denial of German nationality to LzVN members not only informed their depictions of Germany but served to illustrate the broader image of the destruction of the imperial nation-state and promote pan-African organization.
This paper explores Bilé’s representation of Germany as a brutal, oppressive regime in contrast to that of the Enlightened world leader Germany and fellow pro-colonialist European states fashioned for themselves. The racist, imperial image of Germany that Bilé and others put forward, speaking as Cameroonians, Togolese, Black Germans, and stateless internationals, coincides with other radical reconsiderations of national and social belonging. This paper explores the attempts at and ultimate shortcomings of international solidarity during the Weimar period that offered pan-African mutuality in the German metropole for a brief period during the period of counter-revolution and eventual fascist takeover. Bilé and the LzVN’s critical assessment of German empire and the call for international solidarity served as rejoinder to colonial nostalgia and offers continued reflection on the legacies and current struggles for African and non-European mutuality in modern Germany.
Will Weihe is currently a fifth-year PhD student in German Literature and Culture at The Pennsylvania State University. I primarily research theories and representations of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence and justice in German literature and film. I focus on works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Germany that I analyze in the broader context of racial capitalism and modern, European imperialism. I commit my research to unveiling forms of oppression against non-Europeans and resistance by those oppressed groups in modern Germany and in relation to broader European and American contexts.
Graphic Resistance and Hybrid Forms
‘Cerrucha’s Trench: A Feminist Artistic Answer to the War Against Women’
Natalia Stengel Peña (King’s College London)
In Mexico, between nine and twelve women are murdered every day (Salguero, 2021). In addition, other forms of violence are rising; in 2020, 66% of women had experienced physical violence and 70% psychological (ONU Mujeres, 2021). Even with a clear and solid legal frame, we can cite Rita Laura Segato: ‘there is a war against women’ (2016). This has been clear on multiple occasions when the authorities and police officers are complicit or the perpetrators. It seems like there is enough evidence to support the hypothesis about a war against women. With this in mind, Mexican artivist Cerrucha called her last installation Trinchera [Trench]. Hence, I claimed that Trichera is a street art installation that embodies some of the main points of the Mexican feminist agenda while encouraging female resistance. First, I analysed its artistic characteristics following its street art nature and the photographic work. Secondly, I contextualised Cerrucha’s creation within the Mexican feminist art and artivist movement. In this sense, it is also essential to consider the situations leading women to protest in Mexico. Third and finally, I identified the feminist agenda behind her artwork: diversity, inclusivity, sorority, representation and an open call for women to protect women.
Natalia Stengel Peña is studying a PhD in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at King’s College London. She has a Master’s in Modern and Contemporary Art and a B.A. in Sociology. She has participated in different research projects about gender violence, feminism and feminist art.
‘Graphic Protest: The Poetics and Politics of Resistance in Orijit Sen’s River of Stories’
Deblina Rout (Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad)
Orijit Sen’s River of Stories (1994), is generally considered to be the first graphic novel from India. Way before Joe Sacco’s graphic journalism made its way into literary consciousness, Sen’s work was built upon that frame, presenting a fictionalized account of the resistance to the Sardar Sarovar dam project on the Narmada River in Gujarat, by the local tribal people whose homes and livelihoods would be displaced by it. The idea of resistance is sown into the fabric of the narrative on several levels: at the outset, it is about the Narmada Bachao Andolan (“Save the Narmada” movement), feeding into the discourse on the Anthropocene, with capitalism and supposed ‘developmental’ projects weighing in on environmental concerns, such as ecological damage, dispossession of tribes, and climate justice in general. In a broader sense then, the narrative is about the power of dissent in a democracy – of public resistance against authority. All of this is ensconced in the frame story of a tribal folklore, which is an indigenous take on the origin story of the universe, a decidedly powerful way to resist against Western ideals of scientific and rational modes of structuring the ways in which we came into being.
My paper analyses the portrayal of resistance in the narrative through the several diegetic registers at play, using the Derridean concept of ‘de-centering’ as a political tool that questions hegemonic power structures and ways of thinking. I also argue how a central point in the de-centering project taken by this graphic novel lies in its ‘graphic’ aspect i.e, the use of visual verbal metaphors to emphasise protest through a radical medium. The poetics and politics of resistance in the narrative thus takes an approach towards the idea of hybrid cognition to decipher the world, both in terms form and content.
Deblina Rout is a PhD student in English at IIT Hyderabad, India. She received a Bachelor’s degree in English from Presidency University, Kolkata, and a Master’s from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Her thesis is on gender-based violence in Indian graphic narratives, and her fields of interest include comics studies, gender studies, feminist theory, graphic medicine and South Asian literature(s).
‘Babaylan Resistance: Women’s and Queer Filipino American Literatures’
Jill Damatac (University of Cambridge)
Resistance on Stage and Screen
The Philippines, after 400 years of Spanish and American colonisation, has a persistently neocolonial relationship with the United States, its most recent coloniser. For this proposed paper, I am examining the queered, shamanic re-indigenisation of contemporary Filipino-American literatures as a form of resistance to this neocoloniality. This paper will begin by exploring the resistance-led queering of novels and films by Filipino-American women and queer authors and filmmakers such as Jessica Hagedorn, Gina Apostol, Elaine Castillo, and trans filmmaker Isabel Sandoval. I will then map this emergence alongside the shift in demographics of exported labourers from the Philippines, which has feminised between the 1970s to today, moving away from male-dominated agricultural labour and towards the domestic and healthcare spheres. And finally, I will look at how these works (three novels and two films) invoke precolonial, gender-fluid Filipino shamanism, known as Babaylan, as a form of neocolonial resistance. In this first year of my research as a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, I am examining how contemporary women and queer Filipino-American authors and filmmakers narrate through the queer body to interrogate the neocoloniality of the Philippine-American political and economic relationship, and how their resistance is formed around the invocation of a precolonial holistic, feminine, and queer spiritual tradition generally termed as Babaylan. This ancient tradition was nearly overwritten by 333 years of Spanish colonisation and Catholicism, as well as another century of American colonisation and imperialism. Marginalised into the Philippines’ hinterlands, Babaylan has now emerged in the Philippine metropole and diaspora as a holistically political, social, artistic, environmental, and wellness movement oriented away from neocoloniality and towards practices of healing, decolonisation, and solidarity.
Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that the queering of Filipino-American literatures “allows [authors] to address two related historical situations––the relationship of the Philippines to the United States and the relationship of the dominated to the dominating in the Philippines” (Nguyễn, V. T. Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 125). Beyond this American-centric gaze, I will also consider how these queered, feminised literatures, by interrogating Filipino-American neocoloniality, are connecting to contemporary Babaylan indigenous activism in the Philippines. In searching for this connection to practical, real world movements, my aim is to examine the role of capitalist frameworks in shaping the emerging Filipino-American literary canon while returning these literatures to the grassroots that inspired them, seeking to move beyond what Vivek Chibber describes as “more than symbolic contact” (Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capita.l. London, Verso, 2014, p. 3) and into what Nivedita Majumdar calls “radical universalism”, a framework that is “rooted in local realities but able to unearth in them the needs, conflicts, and desires that stretch across cultures and time” (Majumdar, Nivedita. The World in a Grain of Sand: Postcolonial Literature and Radical Universalism.. London, Verso, 2021, p. 11).
Jill Damatac is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, researching contemporary Filipino-American literatures. A writer and a filmmaker, her creative and academic work focuses on Filipino and Filipino-American migration, identity, and indigeneity. Most recently, she has given talks at CRASSH Cambridge and the College of William & Mary on Filipino-American novels and films. Her first book, Dirty Kitchen, is forthcoming in 2023 with Astra House Books.
Resistance on Stage and Screen
‘‘Who Will Change the World?’: Willi Münzenberg, Kuhle Wampe and the Call for a United Front’
Freya Tyrrell (Independent/University College London (UCL) (alumni))
Kuhle Wampe, Or Who Owns the World (1932) was one of the last motion pictures (partly) produced by Prometheus, the film company co-founded by the communist publisher and activist Willi Münzenberg. Whilst the film is often cited for its use of Brechtian montage techniques, its relation to Münzenberg’s media organisation, from which it emerged, is less well discussed. At a time when the possibility of a united front forming between Germany’s workers’ parties was increasingly waning, despite the urgent need for an antifascist alliance, Münzenberg came to play something of a visionary mediating role within and among left-wing circles. (Re)inserting Münzenberg into the collaborative project which made Kuhle Wampe, this paper explores how he utilised the potential of film, alongside his other activities, to open creative, anti-sectarian approaches to the organisation of the working class in response to the advance of the fascist threat. Tracing Münzenberg’s ambitions to promote a wider and more inclusive worker culture, the focus here falls on the tactful ways he highlighted the need to move beyond the isolating ‘camp mentality’ that Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge have analysed in relation to the German Communist Party (KPD). Staying with Negt and Kluge, the aim is to situate the production of Kuhle Wampe within a ‘counterpublic sphere’ formed from a semi-autonomous media network that operated within, but presented a challenge to, the narrow and abstract public sphere constructed by the Stalinised KPD. The film is, therefore, interpreted as perhaps one of the final attempts to articulate a united-front policy before the victory of German fascism in 1933. This paper will conclude with a reflection on how Münzenberg’s example of resistance remains useful for scholars and activists who are returning to the question of strategy in relation to the rise of the far right today.
Freya Tyrrell holds a BA in History of Art and Heritage Management from the University of Buckingham and attained her MA in History of Art at UCL in 2021 with a dissertation entitled ‘Messages in Suitcases: Interwar Photography and the Inheritance of Antifascism’. This research, which she intends to develop for her PhD, considers to what extent the discourses on, and practices of, photography during the interwar years remain necessary to the rereading and transmission of the tradition of antifascism in the present.
‘Beyond resisting dominant narratives: The role of popular anti-caste cinema in India in forming public ‘cultural memory reserves’ for marginalised communities’
Aditi Premkumar and Sumit Turuk (University of Oxford)
Popular cinema in India has an undeniable function in reflecting and shaping public memory through its visuals, song and dance, depictions of kinship and romance, and festivities. The relevance of this memory is in contributing to the notion of an ‘imagined community’ based on shared caste, gender, regionality, and language. This extends to creating a ‘dominant’ narrative, which often excludes, stigmatizes, and invisibilizes marginalized groups and their cultures. With the arrival of filmmakers such as Pa.Ranjith, Mari Selvaraj, Nagraj Manjule, Vennila Kartikaran, Somnath Waghmore, Neeraj Ghaywan, Leena Manimekalai, and Jyoti Nisha, this representation has witnessed a significant shift in the portrayal of stories, themes, histories, and characters from Dalit, Adivasi, queer and trans communities (Edichara, 2020). While their cinema is considered ‘political’ in nature by many, we argue that beyond its role in resisting and reclaiming dominant imaginations of ‘popular culture, contemporary anti-caste cinema also facilities the construction of a public ‘cultural memory reserve’ for marginalized communities – one in which they are felt, seen and heard on screen. Employing qualitative methods of research, we first pursue a content analysis of secondary literature on the relationship between caste in Indian cinema. We also conduct telephonic interviews with some of the above-mentioned directors and attempt to capture the experiences of viewers after watching their films. We are interested in observing the patterns of memory preservation that communities have employed to retain their experiences watching these films, and the means by which they further engage with these topics through art, music, dance, and literature. In conclusion, we reflect on the idea of these public ‘cultural memory reserves’ in helping us understand popular cinema as a vehicle to enrich resistance against caste and patriarchy.
Sumit Turuk Samos is an MSc student in Modern South Asian Studies at Oxford.
He is an anti-caste rapper and student activist. His research interests include Dalit Christians, Anti-caste student activism, and caste among cosmopolitan elites in South Asia.
Aditi Premkumar is a graduate student of Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford. They are working on a study that focuses on the changing nature of family and gender structures in India by highlighting the experiences of relationships between inter-caste and inter-religious couples. They are also interested in exploring visual ethnographic works, oral narratives, performance, and non-text mediums to understand how culture is preserved and transcends temporality in South Asia.
‘Brecht and the Myths of Political Theory: Staging Resistance in The Days of the Commune’
Liam Johnston (University of Oxford)
Bertolt Brecht’s late historical play Die Tage der Kommune / The Days of the Commune (1947) offers a chastening dramatic portrayal of resistance during the short-lived Paris Commune. Established by workers after the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, the revolutionary commune was swiftly and bloodily suppressed by the French government. This defeat, however, did not prevent the commune from becoming a founding myth of the nascent international workers’ movement. This mythologising was largely a product of Karl Marx’s interpretation of the event in a notorious essay, ‘The Civil War in France’ (1871), which argued that violent insurrection was the only effective means of resistance against state oppression. The Days of the Commune is often considered to passively echo Marx’s insistence on violence and to treat the Paris Commune as an event from which a straightforward historical lesson can be drawn. In this paper, I will argue against such an uncomplicated reading of the play and suggest that Brecht gives voice to Marx’s theory of violent resistance in order to undermine and critique it. I will demonstrate how Brecht leans on metatheatrical techniques to not only destabilise the validity of Marx’s interpretation of the Paris Commune but also to question the very relevance of historically informed political theory to future acts of resistance. The Days of the Commune ultimately invites the spectator to adopt a critical approach when confronted with historical ‘lessons’, especially those that have attained the status of myth, and demands the radical reformulation of inherited models for resistance to respond to new and changing circumstances.
Liam Johnston is currently reading for a DPhil at Oxford University. His thesis considers the influence of the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht on the French critic and theorist Roland Barthes. Prior to starting his doctoral studies, he completed a BA in French and German and an MSt in German literature at Oxford.
Resistance: Theory and Practice
‘Retheorizing Negative Emotions and Resistance’
Jasper Friedrich (University of Oxford)
What is the relation between negative emotions and resistance against oppressive social conditions? It is commonly assumed that an emotion like anger, for example, can both cognitively disclose injustices and motivate people to take action against them. Yet, anger also can play a regressive role when targeted at the already disadvantaged, as in xenophobic or sexist rage, and other emotional states, like hopelessness or depression, tend to prevent subjects from acting against injustices. In this paper, I argue that we need a more nuanced understanding of the relation between emotions and resistance than the one provided by standard ‘cognitive’ accounts of emotions which political theorists generally employ. To overcome the shortcomings of rationalized, cognitive theories, we have to take a step back and look emotions from a phenomenological point of view as a way of experiencing the world and as irreducibly embodied. I will draw especially on Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions to conceptualise negative emotions as a way of perceiving the world as problematic. Such experiences, I will claim arise from the feeling of having one’s action in the world disrupted in some way. Following Bourdieu, I then theorize this as a mismatch between the embodied habitus and objective social structures which disrupts the experience of seamlessly going about one’s life. This results in a more nuanced and complex understanding of emotions and resistance. Negative emotional experiences do not disclose injustice in any direct or simple way, but they do reveal chinks in the smooth functioning of the social order—as such negative emotions are, in the first place, a source of resistance in the sense of impeding smooth flow. To convert this resistance into political resistance always requires further work of interpreting the causes of negative emotions as political injustice.
Jasper Friedrich is a doctoral student in political theory in the Department of Politics and IR at the University of Oxford. His work is concerned with the politics of emotions, mental health, and post-conflict reconciliation, approaching these questions primarily from the perspective of critical theory, but also drawing on a wider range of sources, including sociological and psychological theory, cognitive science, and analytic philosophy of language. His doctoral thesis will explore how emotional reactions to injustice are increasingly depoliticised through ‘therapeutic’ politics and make an argument for why and how we should understand anger and depression as political emotions.
‘Language as a Resistance: Dialect in Literature and Translation’
Kotryna Garanasvili (University of East Anglia)
Language is a powerful way of establishing resistance. While literature is able to challenge conventions, norms and traditions, literary works written in dialect can be particularly impactful.
The majority of cultures are dominated by monolingualism, a dynamic where one reigning language dominates over the others. As a result, other linguistic varieties are regarded as inferior or incorrect in comparison to the language of power. This is a particularly sensitive subject with regard to postcolonial hierarchies. Mainly, dialectal varieties of language are marginalized and under-represented, while standard varieties are favoured as an authoritative register.
Writing in dialect can be a highly effective form of resistance against the dominance of colonial power, as well as the literary, social and political conventions it imposes. This is particularly evident in literary works that are written entirely in dialect – such as Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, which is not only a compelling novel, but also a way to give voice to marginalized characters and communities. Whereas literature is dominated by the use of standard language, using non-standard varieties is a cogent act of protest in itself.
My paper looks into the functions that dialectal writing performs, and the influence it exerts on culture, society and politics. I also demonstrate how these issues are reflected in translation, where dialect is one of the most challenging tasks, considering the inherent differences between languages and cultures. Focusing especially on Scottish English, Swiss German and Šiauliai Lithuanian dialects, as well as Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, Pedro Lenz’s Der Goalie Bin Ig and Rimantas Kmita’s Pietinia Kronikas, full-length novels written in these particular varieties, I will explore the possibilities of linguistic and socio-cultural equivalence between dialects, arguing that translating them is an essential matter because of the roles they play, the impact they have in cultural and political backgrounds, and their capacity to act as a force of resistance.
Kotryna Garanasvili is a writer, translator and interpreter working with English, Lithuanian, French, German, Georgian and Russian. She is currently a PhD Candidate and Associate Tutor at the University of East Anglia. Her research is supported by CHASE Arts and Humanities Research Council. She has completed the Emerging Translator Mentorship at the National Centre for Writing and has been awarded translation traineeships at the EU Council and the European Parliament. More at https://kotrynagaranasvili.wordpress.com.
‘Building Educational Institution for Marginalised Students in Rural India: Challenges and Opportunities towards Higher Education’
Raju Kendre (SOAS University of London)
Formal education in the West has been generally understood as an instrument to achieve socio-economic mobility. However, in a region like South Asia, which is replete with socio-cultural diversities and various social inequalities, social structures influence how marginalised communities like Dalit, Adivasis and Nomadic Tribes experience formal education. In particular, higher education is where state funding and infrastructure play a crucial role in ensuring accessibility for all, but post-1990 (LPG) education has become private. The privatisation of education post-1990 has mostly benefitted only specific social groups coming from higher castes, which has reproduced inequalities in higher education with access to only a tiny section of marginalised groups. I lead a project named ‘Eklavya India Movement’ project in remote parts of Central India. We recognise lack of mentoring as one of the primary reasons behind the deprivation of underprivileged students from quality higher education and career opportunities. At Eklavya, we invest in first-generation mentoring college-goers from marginalised communities. We do workshops, capacity building programs, mentoring and handholding to make them informed choices of higher educational opportunities and careers.. Eklavya is a platform for resistance to the traditional approach in higher education, private education. Eklavya plays a vital role in the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion of Higher education in India. I will to present the Ekalavya India movement as a platform of resistance against the exclusive private education available only for a small section of students from society.
Raju Kendre is a first-generation learner who hails from the Nomadic Tribe community of Central India. First-generation learners in India face the problem of accessing higher education opportunities. His lived experience with this problem motivated him to start “Eklavya India”, an organisation working towards promoting higher education and enabling grassroots leadership of first-generation learners in Central India. As a development practitioner, Raju has been engaged with tribal and rural community development for the last nine years. He is currently studying MSc Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, on the Chevening Scholarship offered by the FCDO, UK. He has a dream to build an interdisciplinary university in Central India that will cater to the tribal population of India, with a vision to build effective leadership across all sectors. Recently, Raju has been included in Forbes India’s 30 Under 30 list for 2022.
Writing Resistance Lives
‘Resistance and Survival in the Domestic Sphere: Women’s Accounts of the Nazi Occupation of the Channel Islands, 1940-1945’
Florence Smith (University of Oxford)
The paper explores acts of domestic resistance that were carried out by women in, or in relation to, the domestic sphere on the Channel Islands during the Nazi Occupation. The paper argues that, due to gendered associations of resistance with ‘male’, non-domestic, militaristic settings, the significance of such acts of resistance has not been fully acknowledge – despite the intense historiographical debate over the extent of Channel Islander resistance during occupation. Using women’s unpublished and published occupation diaries as its main primary source, the paper argues that, during the occupation, women participated in acts of resistance to Nazi rule that ensured the physical and psychological survival of themselves and their families. The paper explores how, in the context of occupation, acts such as food acquisition and preparation, listening to and hiding wireless radios, and indeed diary writing itself, involved women in illegal acts of subversion and resistance. Furthermore, the paper suggests that, in understanding the way women perceived their own daily existence through occupation, it is possible to consider the extent to which daily survival itself can be considered as an act of resistance. In the context of occupation, the domestic setting, and indeed women’s bodies themselves, became sites of resistance, and the boundary between the militaristic and the domestic became blurred. The paper also suggests that it was gendered assumptions of the unthreatening nature of women and the domestic setting that enabled such acts of resistance to be effective. Thus, in recognising the significance of domestic acts of resistance in the specific context of the occupation of the Channel Islands, the paper suggests the importance of having a more nuanced understanding of resistance that is free from gendered assumptions of the insignificance of the domestic sphere.
Florence Smith is a third-year history DPhil student at the University of Oxford. My DPhil research focuses on women’s experiences living and studying in the first coeducational Oxford colleges. This project reflects my general interest in understanding the significance of the dynamics between women’s daily experiences and wider social and political change in twentieth century Britain and Ireland. The paper I will present at the conference is based on one I wrote as a master’s student for a course that utilised women’s life-writing to explore British and Irish social and political history from the late 18th century to the modern-day.
‘Impersonality as Resistance in Alice James’s Diary’
Maëlle Nagot (Ecole Normale Supérieure – Sorbonne Université)
As the self emerged as a subject worthy of study in the nineteenth century, women’s diaries increasingly focused on personal experience. Feminist readings often interpret this form of self- representation as a means of opposing the silencing forces of patriarchal censorship. Drawing on both literary criticism and linguistic research, this paper argues that a close reading of Alice James’s conspicuously impersonal language uncovers a little-discussed strategy of social resistance within an allegedly private piece of writing. The sister of Henry and William James and a lifelong invalid, Alice James indeed proclaims the primacy of the “I” from the outset of her diary: her enterprise is to be “a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself”. And yet her writing is overwhelmingly dominated by impersonality. “How sick one gets of being ‘good’”, she laments, as the unspecific pronoun ‘one’ comes to replace the ‘I’ as the preferred articulation of the self.
In Sharon Cameron’s view, impersonality “is not the negation of the person, but rather a penetration through or a falling outside of the boundary of the human particular.” Alice James carries this disruption of individual boundaries to a tipping point where the impersonal reflects, bolsters, and aggrandizes the self. In challenging conventional expressions of empirical knowledge and personal judgement, she not only subverts the generic codes of diary-writing, but she conquers a traditionally masculine territory of distance and objectivity. James refuses to be pigeonholed as a pitiable spinster and invalid: in this context, impersonality suspends, modulates, and reinvents the self to gain authorial control over the text and reclaim intellectual autonomy.
Maëlle Nagot is a master’s student in English Literature and Linguistics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, and teaches French language at St Anne’s College and Lady Margaret Hall. Her research, at the junction between linguistic studies and literary analysis, focuses on nineteenth-century American literature. More specifically, she is investigating the figures of generality, impersonality, and abstraction in Alice James’s diary and letters, in relation to generic conventions and gender norms in the nineteenth-century United States.
‘Resistance, practices, and discourses through the story of a Ukrainian family during the Russian invasion’
Emanuela Nadia Borghi (University of St Andrews)
Taking an anthropological perspective on a Ukrainian family’s story, I conceptualise resistance as a daily practice ‘forged through practical engagement in lives lived’. I show how resistance is negotiated, embodied, and sustained over an indefinite length of time.
My ethnographic focus on Nadia’s voice sheds light on how the ‘pawns’ of larger structural forces emerge as autonomous human beings who shape their own future. Resistance is a dynamic process of everyday strategies and practices through which a Ukrainian migrant woman based in Italy finds herself embodying discourses of war, destruction, and death. I show how the embodiment of these discourses of grief and suffering reshapes strategies and interactions between her and her family members in Ukraine. While she feels excluded by political mobilizations and organised resistance, Nadia practices forms of everyday resilience and resistance. The concept of resistance, as a set of beliefs, practices, and actions that qualify vulnerable subjects who are able to oppose oppression, is shaped by pressing material needs, changing social conditions, and cultural and emotional factors. This family’s narratives of resistance are interwoven with the drama of a nation cruelly invaded by the Russian army.
I show the dynamics of resistance of this Ukrainian family whose members have been displaced by war and migration to demonstrate how resistance strategies mutually influence their subjectivity and the broader discourses and movements of national identity and resistance. Imagining a better future is a key element in resisting the threats of a return to the past, as Nadia said: ‘Gorbachev showed the Ukrainians that life was not just the misery the Soviet Union offered us, but there was more, and we don’t want to go back.’ My participants are required to resist, survive, and cope with a war and humanitarian crisis which overwhelms their fractured present and uncertain future.
Emanuela Nadia Borghi is a PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews, Department of Social Anthropology. I started my fieldwork among forcibly displaced people and migrant women in 2018, during my Master’s in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Milan-Bicocca. My research focuses on the practices and discourses of resistance to discrimination, gender-based violence, and political repression from a subjective and bodily perspective. I am currently involved as a volunteer at an NGO network based in Milan to combine my research interest in Political Anthropology with active support to migrant women who have experienced gender-based violence and displacement.