Events Related to the NETRePerform Program

Narrating from the Margins:

Liberatory Practices of Engaging the Past and Reimagining the Future

Fanny Söderbäck

Professor of Philosophy, Södertörn University
Co-founder and Co-director of the Kristeva Circle

Speech Title

“Minor Stories, Archival Erasures:

Narrating Black, Jewish, and Palestinian Lives Subjunctively”

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James R. Walker

Independent Scholar

Speech Title

“What Is That She Got? The Blues Epistemology and Counter-Hegemonic Systems of Knowledge”

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Venue

Department of English Studies Conference Room
9 Klimentos Str. (2nd floor, Eliades Building), 1061 Nicosia Department of English Studies

Date
  • Wednesday, 5 November 2025 @ 11:30
Upcoming Event

Body, Time, and Digital Technologies: 

Philosophical and Literary Perspectives

Abstract

This international conference explores how digital technologies are reshaping human experience, embodiment, and creativity. Bringing together philosophers and literary scholars, it examines how technology alters lived experience, challenges subjectivity, and opens new horizons for thought.

Programme Highlights

  • Keynotes and talks from leading scholars in philosophy, literature, and digital culture
  • Hybrid participation (on-site and online)
  • Wine & Cheese Reception (2 Oct.) and Conference Dinner (3 Oct.)
Conference Programme
Venue

Room LRC014, University of Cyprus Library & Online

Online
Conference Zoom Meeting
Date
  • Thursday 2 – Friday 3 October 2025
Past Event

Imagining Otherwise.

Ricoeur and Butler on Ideology, Utopia and Imagination

by

Annemie Halsema

Socrates Professor of Philosophical Anthropology and the Foundations of Humanism, Institute for Philosophy, Leiden University

&

Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, VU-University Amsterdam.

Abstract

What is the role of imagination in envisioning a future without discrimination? What is its role in reorienting ideas that categorize and classify groups of people and pit them against each other?

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Venue

Department of English Studies Conference Room
9 Klimentos Str. (2nd floor, Eliades Building), 1061 Nicosia
Department of English Studies

Date
  • Wednesday, 4 December 2024 @ 14:00
Past Event
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This presentation examines three attempts to narrate the “minor stories” of women who have left the most minimal of traces in the archives of history, yet whose stories are taken up in our present in an attempt to grapple with the violence they were subjected to in their own time, and the archival erasures that haunt them. Starting with Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), the lynching of a young woman aboard a slave ship and the brief trial transcript documenting that crime, set the stage for an impossible narration aimed at reparation. Hartman tells her story in the subjunctive mood of the might – offering it not as a marker of what did indeed happen but rather as a reminder of what remained impossible within the confines of the past. Her methodology of critical fabulation gives us a toolbox to imagine an otherwise in relation to that past – the possibility that results from the very act of amplifying impossibility, through narration.

I go on to trace that same subjunctive might as it appears in Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997), wherein a brief ad for a missing young Jewish girl from a 1941 Paris Newspaper sets off the author’s attempt to uncover the last traces of her existence before her deportation to Auschwitz, and marks the beginning of a meditation on his own irrecoverable losses. Finally, I turn to Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (2017), where yet another brief newspaper clip forms the backdrop of the story. This time it concerns an incident that took place in the Negev desert in 1949, when Israeli soldiers captured, raped, and killed a young Bedouin woman, burying her in the sand. The clip sets a present-day woman from Ramallah on a path to investigate the incident, and again we witness the horrowing difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and dispossession. I read each of these three texts – which chronicle loss and erasure in the wake of trauma (the Middle Passage, the Holocaust, and the Nakba) – as seeking to narrate the singularity of three young women robbed of that singularity, while amplifying the impossibility of that very narration.

In her presidential address to the American Studies Association, radical abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore engages with what is to be done, “in the face of all this direness” – and reflects upon the question of “what kinds of practices––of teaching, research, and analysis––might we develop across disciplines toward the goal of identifying and promoting multiple routes out of crisis?” Her answer connects the notions of radical abolitionism with that of a “regrounding of the terrain of the racial modalities of class struggle” through “oppositional theorizing and thinking”––a process she ascribes to the utilization of Clyde Woods’s “blues epistemology.”

In this talk, I will work to situate these remarks and connections into a broader understanding of the power of counter-hegemonic epistemologies and how such frameworks demand a fundamental re-orientation of our approach to the scholarly and philosophical task of “making sense” of the world. In addition to Gilmore and Woods, this talk will engage a variety of thinkers from within the Black Radical philosophical tradition, including Frederick Douglas, W. E. B. Du Bois, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Vincent Harding, Angela Davis, Sylvia Wynter, bell hooks, and the blues musician Muddy Waters.

Talk Abstract

What is the role of imagination in envisioning a future without discrimination? What is its role in reorienting ideas that categorize and classify groups of people and pit them against each other? In this lecture, I first of all address the different aspects of imagination in the contemporary debate about gender. My starting point will be Judith Butler’s recently published Who is Afraid of Gender? (2024). I will analyze the notion of ideology Butler uses with the distinctions Paul Ricoeur makes in his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986) and in the recently published Lectures on Imagination (2024).

Imagining otherwise not only refers to another future for mankind but can also be taken as referring to personal identity. A second problem I address concerns the extent to which alternative identities than the ones assigned to us can be understood in terms of imagination. Using the notion “imagination” in order to consider alternative gender identities might seem to contradict the intimacy of feeling to belong to a certain gender. Speaking of “imagination” in this respect might even seem a repetition of the antigender discourse of right wing radicals, the Vatican, and some feminists, who consider gender identity a phantasy, that misrecognizes sex, nature, reality. This use of the notion is pejorative and superficial, I will argue. My aim instead is to relate alternative gender identities to the productive side of imagination that for Ricoeur is crucial and opens new ontological possibilities.