SIROCCO TERM 2022 | FEBRUARY 5, 6, 12, 13, 19, 20, 26, 27
“Read!,” says a famous first encounter with pure recitation that promises – but does not immediately deliver – meaning, perhaps because of the “in the name of…” that follows the injunction. This exhortation lives in many registers, senses, and worlds. Today, when writing has become “content creation,” and when claims to inaccessibility of texts and stolen attention both appeal to and indirectly affirm the imperial academic bureaucracy of expertise and intellectual elitism, the responsibility for the egalitarian self-fashioning of the demos, in intellect, theory, imagination, and will is effectively ceded. At such a time, it is worth asking what has become of reading (not as a leisurely habit or sport or new year resolution) and its promise.
The inaugural course of GCAS-Jəhān, taught by Wesley Brown, Sumana Roy, and Asma Abbas, seeks to examine reading and relation. How and with whom are practices of reading learnt and unlearnt? How do readers assemble their methods of reading, and become aware of them as ethical, critical, aesthetic, and political practice? How can the acts both of making meaning and liberating texts from meaning both feel liberatory and comforting, and when does this happen? What kind of counter-aesthetics are suggested in attempts at paranoid, reparative, close, distant, relational, deconstructive, reading, and the hermeneutics, of suspicion, recovery, and longing, especially when they become part of the toolkit of the “qualified” expert entirely consistent with extraction, consumption, or citation wrought in the mines of the imperial and neoliberal university? What is the role of a democracy of reading and inquiry when the leader and expert are accepted as salvation by both the left and the right? And, then, what of the demand to domesticate our existential, poetic, and political surrealities into certain prosaic ideas of the real, the realistic, and the truthful, en route to a promised position in the hierarchies of knowledge, experience, and political utility? How do capital, colony, and geopolitics authorize our acts of reading and recitation, and how must we claim a community of readers and reciters in their contemporary aftermath?
We will ask these questions, and others, in the company of Octavia Butler’s cautionary novel, Parable of the Sower, set in Los Angeles, 2024, where America is in the throes of a global pandemic, brought on, in part, by a willful disregard of the consequences of climate change. We will read and experience the book in which Lauren Olamina, a Black Woman, attempts to create a community, both in opposition to, and implicated in, a society poised to destroy itself. We will reach into Butler’s Parable of the Talents and translations of Manoranjan Byapari’s recent works and Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke that write and read caste and poems by Indian poets, alongside Glissant’s poetics of relation and worldmaking, the classical Indian aesthetic theory of rasa, and the genres of recitation of the Quran, among others.
Wesley Brown is novelist, playwright, and professor. He is author of Tragic Magic and Darktown Strutters, and Dance of the Infidels among numerous other stories, novels, and plays. He has taught widely in literature, black aesthetics, and African-American Studies at Rutgers University and at Bard College at Simon’s Rock.
Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree, a work of nonfiction, Missing: A Novel, Out of Syllabus: Poems, and My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, a collection of short stories. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University.
Asma Abbas is a transdisciplinary political theorist. She is the author of Liberalism and Human Suffering and Another Love: A Politics of the Unrequited, and has contributed to several edited volumes and journals. She is a professor of politics and philosophy and director of transdisciplinary and experimental studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and the director GCAS-Jəhān.
