Colonialism was committed to the education of a certain class. It was interested in the seemingly permanent operation of an altered normality. Paradoxically, human rights and ‘‘development’’ work today cannot claim this self-empowerment that high colonialism could. Yet, some of the best products of high colonialism, descendants of the colonial middle class, become human rights advocates in the countries of the South. I will explain through an analogy.

Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (University Professor and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University, USA) and Professor Fred Moten (Professor of English, Duke University, USA) will be speaking in dialogue with Karl Marx on issues of race, critique and the possibilities for a radical politics to come.

4th June 2010, 1pm-4pm
Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre
Goldsmiths, New Cross, London
SE14 6NW
All Welcome

Goldsmiths Centre for Cultural Studies in association with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Goldsmiths Graduate School, Centre for Postcolonial Studies, Department of Anthropology and Department of Media and Communications

Philippe Rekacewicz (Le Monde Diplomatique, Paris)
Discussant: Eyal Weizman (Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths)

Maps are not the same thing as territory. At best they are only a representation of reality on the ground. Maps merely reveal what map-makers or their superiors want to show. They inevitably present a truncated, partial, even deliberately misleading picture of reality. Readers may be taken in by the final form of a map, with its mass of

The Politics of Knowledge: Latin American Studies and Postcolonial Theory

International Conference sponsored by the Centre for Postcolonial Studies and the British Academy’s UK-Latin American and the Caribbean Link Programme

6 and 7 of May 2010
Goldsmiths, University of London
Small Cinema
Richard Hoggart Building. (MB)

Paul Hirst Memorial Lecture 2010

Date: 16 June 2010
From: 6.00pm to 7.00pm followed by a reception.
Location: Clore Management Centre, Room B01
Free entry; booking required.
Please reserve a place by emailing Jason Edwards: j.edwards@bbk.ac.uk

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/polsoc/news/current-news/paul-hirst-lecture-2010

guest speaker: Peter Hallward

Wednesday, 24 March, 17pm @ Goldsmith’s Research Architecture Studio, RHB 312 (main building, second floor).

As his advisors ponder the ever more troubling consequences of regime change in Iraq, Bush is entitled to take some comfort from the far more successful operation just completed in Haiti. [1] No brusque pre-emptive strikes, domestic carping or splintering coalitions have marred the scene; objections from CARICOM and the African Union have carried no threats of reprisal. In overthrowing the constitutionally elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide, Washington could hardly have provided a more exemplary show of multilateral courtesy. Allies were consulted, the UN Security Council’s blessing sought and immediately received.

By ‘will of the people’ I mean a deliberate, emancipatory and inclusive process of collective selfdetermination. Like any kind of will, its exercise is voluntary and autonomous, a matter of practical freedom; like any form of collective action, it involves assembly and organization. Recent examples of the sort of popular will that I have in mind include the determination, assembled by South Africa’s United Democratic Front, to overthrow an apartheid based on culture and race, or the mobilization of Haiti’s Lavalas to confront an apartheid based on privilege and class. Conditioned by the specific strategic constraints that structure a particular situation, such mobilizations test the truth expressed in the old cliché, ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’.

“By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and the nexus of Republican politicians, think tanks and land developers started talking about “clean sheets” and exciting opportunities, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering (...) “I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, “disaster capitalism”.

“The accident reveals the substance” (Aristotele) – “If so, then the invention of the ‘substance’ is equally the invention of the ‘accident’. The shipwreck is consequently the ‘futurist’ invention of the ship, and the air crash the invention of the supersonic airliner, just as Chernobyl meltdown is the invention of the nuclear power station (...) They say invention is merely a way of seeing, of reading accidents as signs and as opportunities. If so, then it is merely high time we opened the museum (...) to that ‘indirect production’ of science and the technosciences constituted by disasters, by industrial or other catastrophes. The repetition of disasters has become a clearly recognizable historical phenomenon - The tool is tending to vanish from consciousness.