Our fourth talk this term! Stewart Motha questions the "archaic belief in sovereign solitude"!

SOVEREIGNTY ENISLED

with Stewart Motha

Room 4, Mill Lane Lecture Theatre, Cambridge
Tuesday, 1 December, 2015 @ 5-6:45PM

Sovereignty has defied the many obituaries that have heralded its demise or imminent end. Its resurgence might be observed among the erection of borders to limit the movement of migrants, the new nationalisms in Europe, declarations of war and emergency following terrorist attacks, and struggles for economic independence amidst externally imposed austerity measures. In each instance the underlying assumption is that sovereignty represents the possibility of being secure, independent, and autonomous. These measures repeat an archaic belief in the possibility of sovereign solitude – the sense that a sovereign subject or people are capable of being and thriving if they are enisled. The discussion will explore the conditions and implications of such sovereign assertions. We will consider the UK’s expulsion of Chagos Islanders in order to shore-up the security interests of the United States in the Indian Ocean, and Australia’s excision of islands from its territory and internment of refugees offshore. In each instance a sovereign exceptionalism proclaims a self-sufficiency that is undermined by the need for political and legal alibis. Should the political response on the left be based on the essential plurality of being, or another (sovereign) solitude – the sense that the other must remain, as Derrida suggested, ‘wholly other’?

Stewart Motha is Reader in Law at Birkbeck Law School, University of London. He is a critical legal theorist working on sovereignty, violence, and aesthetics. His current research is focused on the Indian Ocean region – including Australia, the Chagos Islands, Sri Lanka, migration and refugees, and South African post-apartheid jurisprudence. He is currently working on a book, Archiving Sovereignty (forthcoming with Michigan University Press).
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Welcome to the fourth of this term's Critical Theory and Practice seminars. The aim of these talks is to integrate radical theory with political practice and activism. Each talk consists of a presentation followed by a Q&A session (and trip to the Anchor pub round the corner). We record each session, so if you can't make it, like our pages so you get updated once the video is uploaded. Organised by Cambridge Defend Education (CDE) and Cambridgeshire Left.

For more about our upcoming events:

https://www.facebook.com/criticaltheorypractice

Did you miss Alex Anievas? Check out his talk, Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism and the 'Rise of the West': Beyond the Eurocentric Cage!

Alexander Anievas is a Leverhulme Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) In Cambridge. His research focuses on the development of non-Eurocentric approaches to international historical sociology and political economy, with a particular emphasis on the study of epochs of macro-historical change and conjunctures of interstate conflict, war and revolution. He is the author of 'Capital, the State, and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in Thirty Years’ Crisis, 1914-1945', and co-author of 'How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism'.

Priyamvada Gopal explores the role of the intellectual in our third lecture this term!

WHAT ARE INTELLECTUALS FOR? REVISITING EDWARD SAID AND THE QUESTION OF REPRESENTATION

with Priyamvada Gopal

Room 4, Mill Lane Lecture Theatre, Cambridge
Tuesday, 3 November, 2015 @ 5-6:45PM
All lectures start 5:15PM

This talk – or rather, a set of provocations for discussion in relation to the question of praxis – revisits the case made by Edward Said in his Reith Lectures for the intellectual (who can never be 'private') as a "curmudgeonly' voice of opposition whose place it is 'to publicly to raise embarassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma…to be someone who cannot be co-opted by governments or corporations, and who raison d’etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. His insistence that the intellectual had a vocation and that that vocation was to represent the forgotten – both histories and peoples – was intrinsically tied up with his advocacy. often glossed over in readings of his work--of a 'critical humanism.' Priyamvada will ask us what the implications of this model of 'democratic criticism' are for the question of the relationship between critical theory and political practice while also examining some of the limitations of Said's conceptualisation of the 'exilic' and, via Adorno, 'homelessness'.

Priyamvada will speak to the above concerns for around half an hour, but the emphasis will be on open discussion and conversation. It would therefore be helpful if you had a chance to read Said's Reith lectures on 'Representations of the Intellectual'.

These can be found here.

Priyamvada Gopal is Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. She has published two books: Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence and The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration. She is currently working on a third, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonialism in the Making of Britain. She has written for various newspapers and magazines in Britain, USA and India including Guardian, The Hindu, The Nation and al-Jazeera.
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*                                  *                                  *

Welcome to the third of this term's Critical Theory and Practice seminars. The aim of these talks is to integrate radical theory with political practice and activism. Each talk consists of a presentation followed by a Q&A session (and trip to the Anchor pub round the corner). We record each session, so if you can't make it, like our pages so you get updated once the video is uploaded. Organised by Cambridge Defend Education (CDE) and Cambridgeshire Left.

For more about our upcoming events:

https://www.facebook.com/criticaltheorypractice