Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & Resistance: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Global Middle East and North Africa is a bi-annual symposium and lecture series thatfocuses on the study of literatures that have been shaped by histories of territorial and linguistic politics, colonialism, military domination and gross human rights violations. The initiative grapples with the constructed nature of history; reimagines American and global history from the position of suppressed voices; and examines how minoritized writers and scholars have historically innovated literary production and theory in the process of responding to systemic violence.
Symptomaticity and Opacity in the Literature of Smog Sensing Jean-Thomas Tremblay
This talk identifies a cross-media aesthetics of “smog sensing” that measures the shifts in sensation, perception, and orientation occasioned by atmospheric urban pollution. Exemplifying this aesthetics is Renee Gladman’s corpus of writing and drawing, in particular a cycle of speculative novels set in the city-state of Ravicka, where a mysterious environmental cataclysm has made the air thick and yellow. In a context where different characters’ respiration indexes a socioecological crisis without revealing what it means to and for them, relations are organized by “symptomatic breathing,” an interpretive attitude that consists in learning the limits of what is graspable about embodiment and experience. In Ravicka, breathing is deceptively transparent; it mediates what, within a critical tradition anchored by Édouard Glissant, we may label a politics of racial and sexual opacity. Gladman’s works enable us to rethink the politics of breathing at a historical moment when oppression and inequality reproduce themselves through the weaponization of the air. Breathing together, our visit to Ravicka reveals, is no great equalizer; it instead constitutes a coalitional tactic or strategy for showing up and staying in relation without presuming shared experience.…
Négar Djavadi was born in Iran in 1969 to a family of intellectuals opposed to the regimes both of the Shah, then of Khomeini. She arrived in France at the age of eleven, having crossed the mountains of Kurdistan on horseback with her mother and sister. She is a screenwriter and lives in Paris. Disoriental…
