An Inventory of Traces:
Palestinian Existence in Edward Said’s Early Works

Fadi A. Bardawil (Princeton University)

24 April 2024
16:00 – 17:30 BST
Online

REGISTER HERE for the zoom link

Contact: s.bromberg[@] gold.ac.uk

This seminar is part of the 23/24 CPCT research seminar series on ‘What is Global Critical Theory? Pt.3’ [link]. 

About the talk 

In the last pages of Orientalism, under the subheading “The Personal Dimension,” Edward Said borrows Antonio Gramsci’s words about the imperative to compile an inventory of the historical processes that have deposited in someone an infinity of traces as a starting point for a critical elaboration. Orientalism, Said then notes, is an attempt to “inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.” This talk takes as its starting point Said’s observation to investigate how his own Metropolitan Palestinian exilic experience informed his early conceptualization of the relation between knowledge and power, which will be further developed in his trilogy Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981). 

About the speaker 

Fadi A. Bardawil, is visiting research scholar in the department of Near Eastern Studies and visiting Associate Professor in the department of Anthropology at Princeton. 
His work investigates the traditions of intellectual inquiry and modalities of political engagement of contemporary Arab thinkers at home and in the diaspora, and their friction with the different genealogies of critical theory (Frankfurt school, anti-colonial and post-colonial). In doing so, his research explores how the different relationships to cultural production (creating and thinking), political practice (acting) and generational dwelling (living) in different sites (Global North/South), can help us reckon with questions of power, emancipation and solidarity in an increasingly interconnected, yet fragmented world. 
His recent Arabic and English writings have appeared in American Ethnologist,  boundary 2; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; The Journal for Palestine Studies (Arabic edition); al-Jumhuriya; The Immanent Frame; Megaphone;  Political and Legal Anthropology Review Online; South Atlantic Quarterly; and World Records Journal. 
He is the author of Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Duke UP, 2020). 

Frantz Fanon and the Critical History of Philosophy

Lucie K. Mercier (University of Fribourg)

27 March 2024
16:00 – 17:30 GMT
Online

REGISTER HERE for the zoom link

Contact: s.bromberg [@] gold.ac.uk

This seminar is part of the 23/24 CPCT research seminar series on ‘What is Global Critical Theory? Pt.3’ [link]. 

About the talk 

Within a critical history of philosophy, Frantz Fanon is a paradoxical figure. Though he has become a symbol of a fundamental epistemological turn and a paramount figure in new narratives of the history of philosophy, Fanon didn’t subject his own use of the Modern European canon to much questioning. How are we to interpret the disjunction between these two facets of his writing? How is Fanon’s thought connected to the contemporary project of a critical history of philosophy? 

To answer this question, I will discuss Fanon’s philosophical practice and the specific ways in which he took up the task of « critique ». I will also draw on a number of contemporary readings of Fanon in order to contrast the philosophical meaning each of them gives to Fanon’s epistemological rupture. This interpretation, I will claim, depends on how we think of the relationship between the critical philosophy of race on the one hand, and the critical history of philosophy on the other – i.e. it depends on the divergent, and somewhat contradictory, meanings imparted to critique at this historical juncture. 

About the speaker 

Lucie K. Mercier is Senior Researcher at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She was previously Research Fellow and Lecturer at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, London, as well as Visiting Fellow at the University of Paris 8 and at the Program in Critical Theory of UC Berkeley. She recently published ‘The Translatability of Experience: On Fanon’s Language Puzzle’ (Critical Times 6(1), 2023) and ‘Warding Off the Ghosts in the Historiography of Philosophy’, (Critical Philosophy of Race 10(1), 2022).She is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective and is currently working on a book-length project on Fanon’s philosophy.