London Critical Theory Summer School 2017 Reading list

Drucilla Cornell - African Socialism and the Philosophies Underlying It

This module is taught over four sessions:

1. Session One

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Optional additional reading

Cornell, Drucilla. Law and Revolution in South Africa: uBuntu, Dignity, and the Struggle for Constitutional Transformation. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Chapter 8: “Is there a Difference that makes a Difference between Dignity and uBuntu?”

Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2011. Chapters: ‘Exile’ and ‘Rhythms’ (pp. 17-96)

2. Session Two

Senghor, Leopold Sedar. On African Socialism. Westport: Praeger, 1964.

3. Session Three

Nyerere, Julius K. Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.

4. Session Four

Cornell, Drucilla and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera. This Will Make You Hopeful: Justice in a Hopeless World. Publication forthcoming. Chapter 1: ‘On the Shaman's Couch: Why Only Amerindians Can Save the Modern Soul’ by Guardiola-Rivera. Chapter 2: ‘Creolizing Heidegger through Amerindian Cosmo-Politics’ by Cornell. Chapter 5: ‘Attainable Utopias’ by Guardiola-Rivera. Chapter 6: ‘Relaunching Socialism as an Attainable Utopia’ by Cornell.

Costas Douzinas – The Retreat of the Enlightenment

This module is taught over three sessions:

1. What is a person?

2. The subject of dignity

3. Finis Europae? Euroscepticism and the rise of the extreme right

Recommended Reading:

Steven Pinker, ‘The Stupidity of Dignity’, The New Republic, 28 May 2008.

Etienne Balibar, ‘Ideas of Europe: Civilization and Constitution’ (Iris, 2009), IRIS European Journal of Philosophy and Public Debate, I, 1 April 2009, 3-17.

Costas Douzinas, ‘The Poverty of (Rights) Jurisprudence’, in Cambridge Companion to Human Rights Law, eds C. Douzinas and C. Gearty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 56–78.

Costas Douzinas, ‘Epilogue: The Europe to Come’, in Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis, ed. C. Douzinas (Polity, 2013), 198-208.

Stephen Frosh - Silence, Representation, Responsibility

This module is taught over three sessions:

1. Haunted By Uncertain Refrains

Said, E. (2003) Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso.

Yerushalmi, Y. (1992) The Moses of Freud and the Moses of Schoenberg—On Words, Idolatry, and Psychoanalysis. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 47, 1-20.

2. Different Trains

Reich, S. Different Trains.

Trezise, T. (2013) Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony. New York: Fordham. (pp.77-95)

Wlodarski, A. (2015) ‘The composer as witness: Steve Reich’s Different Trains’. In Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Chapter 5, pp. 126-163)

3. Acknowledgement, Apology and Forgiveness amongst those who ‘Come After’

Benjamin, J. (2016) ‘Non-Violence as Respect For All Suffering’. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 21: 5–20.

Schwab, G. (2010) Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. NY: Columbia University Press. (Chapter 3)

Paul Gilroy - Black Political Culture in Britain 1968 to the Present

This module is taught over four sessions:

1. State racism: Policing a chronic crisis

Stuart Hall, Drifting Into A Law and Order Society Cobden Trust Lecture *

Winston Trew, Black For A Cause . . . Not Just Because: The Case of the Oval 4 and the Story it Tells of Black Power in 1970s Britain

Colin Jones, The Black House 1973-1976.

2. Bass culture and dub aesthetics

Linton Kwesi Johnson poems Mi Revalueshanary Fren

Paul Huxtable, Al Fingers & Mandeep Samra, Sound System Culture, Celebrating Huddersfiled’s Sound Systems (One Love Books, 2014) [please visit the website for more information about Sound System Culture – images and video provided]

Jon Stratton & Nabeel Zuberi (eds), Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945 (London; New York: Routledge, 2014).

3. A black arts movement?

Sonia Boyce & Ian Baucom (eds.), Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain.* (Introduction and Chapter 1 in dropbox)

Isaac Julien, Riot *(Forward, and chapters by Gilroy and Hall will be uploaded to Dropbox).

Stuart Hall & David Bailey Ten:8 Vol.2 No.3 ‘The Critical Decade: Black British Photography in the 1980s’ (Birmingham, 1992). [Please visit the provided link for more information about this resource]

4. Corporate multiculture and black neoliberalism

Dan Hancox, Kettled Youth (available as an ebook from Amazon for £2 and also extracts here: http://dan-hancox.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/kettled-youth-battle-against-neoliberal.html) and ‘Pow!: Anthem for Kettled Youth’ )

Race Equality and Diversity Division, Communities and Local Government, Have you got what it takes to inspire the next generation of young Black men? The Government’s first national programme of Black male role models for boys and young men

Tim Campbell: Website

Joy White, Urban Music and Entrepreneurship: Beats, rhymes and young people’s enterprise (New York: Routledge, 2017)

General Background Reading

Kenneth Little, Negroes in Britain (in the Birkbeck Library)

Paul Foot, Race and Immigration In British Politics (London: Penguin, 1965)

Stuart Hall et al., Policing The Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: The Macmillan Press, 1982)*

Heidi Safia Mirza (ed.), Black British Feminism (in the Birkbeck Library)

Mark Olden, Murder In Notting Hill (Widely available at low cost)

Val Wilmer on Johnny Edge

Kwesi Owusu, Black British Culture & Society: a Text Reader (in the Birkbeck Library)

Film: Roy Ward Baker Flame in the Streets (available to rent here)

Tunes: Honest Johns anthology London Is The Place for Me vols. 1&2

Esther Leslie – Nature reloaded

This module is taught over two sessions:

1. Plant Life

Michael B. Guenther, ‘Northern Designs: British Science, Imperialism, and Improvement at the Dawn of the Anthropocene’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Volume 46, 2017, pp. 123–145.*

Leo Lionni, Parallel Botany, trans. P. Creagh (New York: Knopf, 1977).

Karl Marx., ‘Chapter Seven: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value’, Capital, Vol. I, Part III: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value.

2. Plant Death

Ryan Bishop, ‘Smart Dust and Remote Sensing: The Political Subject in Autonomous Systems’, Cultural Politics, Volume 11, Issue 1, March 2015, pp. 100-110.

Heather Davis, ‘Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures’, PhiloSOPHIA 5.2 Summer (2015): 231-50.

Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, ‘Art & Death: Lives Between the Fifth Assessment & the Sixth Extinction’, in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, Open Humanities Press, 2015, pp. 3-22.

KairUs - Linda Kronman and Andreas Zingerle, ‘Behind the Smart World Artlab – Artistic Strategies for Dealing with Resurfacing Data’, Kairus.org – Linda Kronman, Andreas Zingerle (eds.), Behind the Smart World – saving, deleting and resurfacing of data (AMRO Research Lab, Servus, 2015), pp. 121-9.

Alain Renais: La chant de la styrene, 1958 (film).

Kirsty Roberston, ‘Plastiglomerate’, E-Flux 78 (2016): 1-14.

Catherine Malabou – What is a Symbol?

This module is taught over four sessions:

1. General Introduction: From Symbol to the Symbolic

2. The ‘Symbolic Function’

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brook Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic, 1963), chapt. X ‘The Effectiveness of Symbols’, pp. 186-205.

Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987)

3. The ‘Symbolic Order’

o Jacques Lacan

‘The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real’*

Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’, in Ecrits

4. Transcendence/Immanence: The Image

Roland Barthes, ‘The Third Meaning’, in Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 44-68.

Jacqueline Rose - History and Psyche: The Political Legacy of the Past

This module is taught over two sessions:

1. South Africa at the Barricades

Lovelyn C. Nwadeyi, ‘Lovelyn Nwadeyi’s Empowering Message: The onus is on us to disrupt the status quo’, Mail & Guardian, 29 June 2016

Leigh-Ann Naidoo, ‘Leigh-Ann Naidoo: The anti-apartheid generation has become afraid of the future’, Mail & Guardian, 17 August 2016

Mogobe B. Ramose, An African Perspective on Justice and Race (Themes, 2001)

Noel Chabani Manganyi, Mashangu’s Reverie, and other essays (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1977).

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela `Introduction - Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition,’ in Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory, ed. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (Opladen, Berlin, Toronto: Barbara Budrich, 2016), 1-11.

2. Writing/Remembering

D W Winnicott, ‘Fear of Breakdown’, International Review of Psychoanalysis 1 (1974): 103-7.

Jacques Lacan, ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, 1953, Ecrits, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977), 23-86. (for the concept of future perfect, p. 64)

Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between (London: Random House, 2016).

Han Kang, Human Acts, translated from the Korean and introduced by Deborah Smith (London: Portobello, 2016).

Gillian Slovo, Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison - Artangel, 4 September 2016.

Slavoj Žižek - Totality or Assemblage?

This module is taught over four sessions:

1. Assemblage, structure, totality, organism

2. Assemblage or overdetermined totality?

3. No spirit without mechanism

4. In defence of class essentialism

Recommended Reading:

Slavoj Žižek, Disparities (London: Bloomsbury 2016), Chapters 1, 2, 8 and 9.

Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 2016).

Graham Harman, Immaterialism (Cambridge: Polity 2016).