)18th Annual Nikos Poulantzas Memorial Lecture (event)

18th Annual Nikos Poulantzas Memorial Lecture

December 19 @ 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

18th Annual Nikos Poulantzas Memorial Lecture

Friday, December 19, 7:00 PM. Goethe-Institut Auditorium, 14-16 Omirou St., Athens.

Eduardo Cantava

 

Professor of American Literature & Philip Mayhew Chair, Princeton University.

 

Learning to Read History: Fazal Sheikh’s Erasure Trilogy

The Nikos Poulantzas Institute is organizing the 18th Annual Nikos Poulantzas Memorial Lecture, on Friday, December 19, at 7:00 PM, at the Goethe-Institut Auditorium (14-16 Omirou St., Athens).

The keynote speaker is Eduardo Cadava, Professor of American Literature and Philip Mayhew Chair at Princeton University.

Topic of the lecture

Title: “Learning to Read History: Fazal Sheikh’s Erasure Trilogy”

 

The lecture is based on Fazal Sheikh’s multi-volume photographic work, Erasure Trilogy (2015). The focus is on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Israeli side’s ongoing effort to erase both the violence it perpetrates and the acts of erasure themselves.

By exploring the legacy of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Eduardo Candava highlights the mechanisms of this “double erasure” and the possibilities of resistance to it. Drawing on theoretical and literary texts by Walter Benjamin, Mahmoud Darwish, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Eyal Weizmann, the speaker argues that the Erasure Trilogy functions as a training manual for how to read history in times of danger; a crucial tool for understanding, analyzing, and resisting the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Speaker: Eduardo Candava

Eduardo Candava is Professor of American Literature and Philip Mayhew Chair at Princeton University. He collaborates, among others, with the Department of Comparative Literature, the School of Architecture, the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the University’s Institute for International and Regional Studies.

His work spans American literature and culture, the theory and history of photography, comparative literature, political theory and philosophy, media technologies, and translation theory. He has also written extensively on architecture, music, democracy, war, memory and forgetting, racial discrimination and slavery, human rights, and citizenship.

He is the author, among others, of the following works:

Emerson and the Climates of History

Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History

Paper Graveyards

Politically Red (in collaboration with Sara Nadal-Melsió).

 

He is currently completing two new books: Erasures, dedicated to Fazal Sheikh’s Erasure Trilogy, and “What Interests Me Has Always Had Its Place There”: Derrida on Palestine, in which he examines Jacques Derrida’s thought in relation to Palestine.

The event will be prefaced by Maria Repoussi, historian, director and scientific director of the Nikos Poulantzas Institute.

The speaker is introduced by Mina Karavanta, Associate Professor of Literature and Culture in the Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Philosophy, NKUA.

Mina Karavanta is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literature and Culture in the Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Philosophy, NKUA. Her research and teaching focuses on: postcolonial and decolonial studies, poststructuralist theory and comparative literature, contemporary and world English-language literature.

Practical information

Date: Friday, December 19

Starting time: 19:00

Venue: Goethe-Institut Amphitheatre, Omirou 14–16, Athens

Admission: Free

Interpretation: There will be simultaneous interpretation during the lecture.

The lecture is part of the annual event of the Nikos Poulantzas Institute, dedicated to the memory of the distinguished Marxist theorist. This year’s event highlights the role of photography as a tool for critical reading of history and the present, in a period of uncontrolled violence against the people of Palestine.

 

Contact

Nikos Poulantzas Institute

Phone: 2103217745

Email: info@poulantzas.gr

Website: https://poulantzas.gr/

Image: Logbook entries from the period of the Nakba, 1948, Al-Akbi Family Archive. The pages reproduced in this photograph document correspondence between the Palestinian Governor-General and the Governor of Bir al-Sabaʿ (Beersheba), reporting the collapse of the Al-Akbi defenses after an engagement with Israeli forces. The report notes the use of armored units, the seizure and destruction of defensive positions, and the confiscation of weapons and ammunition, as well as casualties among the Arab forces. © Fazal Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline, Steidl, 2015.

 

Image: Tree-planting activities for the Ambassador Forest at the site of the former Bedouin village of Abu Abdoon, which was evacuated and destroyed in the winter of 1948. The planting was organized by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organization involved in afforestation and settlement development. © Fazal Sheikh, Desert Bloom, 2011.