In the summer of 2021 the research and teaching area Theory of Politics in cooperation with Centre Marc Bloch will host the mini-series 'Breaks in Tradition: Shifting Geographies of Political Thought'
"The thread of tradition is broken," Hannah Arendt repeatedly cites the French poet René Char. What does this brokenness mean if one reads it within spaces of colonial domination and Atlantic slavery? What encounters are possible after the collapse of tradition? What orientation can be gained from political theory when the latter no longer benefits from the authority of inheritance?
With the event series Breaks in Tradition: Shifting Geographies of Political Thought, we hope to investigate those imagined geographies that silently mark modern political thought as the endeavor of an Atlantic world yet picture modernity in isolation from its entanglements with Empire and the slave trade. With a nod to the slogan of the Caribbean Philosophical Association ("shifting the geography of reason"), we hope to highlight Black American and Caribbean traditions of critique that have for long engaged in dialogues with various "Continental" traditions of critical theory, exposing the limitations of the latter while repurposing their diagnostic power. It is our wager that these dialogues – too often made inaudible in dominant accounts – can today serve as generative sites for a theory of politics that speaks to movements for racial justice. At the same time, such dialogues might show the way forward for a political theory with transformative intent: they do not remain stuck in a denunciation of Eurocentrism but take a reconstructive step, opening perspectives – past, present, and future – for new geographies of political thought.
The series will be structured around three events, featuring John E. Drabinski on Édouard Glissant (June 8, 2021), Neil Roberts on Angela Davis (June 22, 2021), and a one-day symposium on the place of the Haitian Revolution in histories of political thought (July 8, 2021).
This event series is organized as part of the 2021 Séminaire Marc Bloch (Traditionsbrüche: Zur Dekolonisierung der politischen Theorie) at Humboldt University's Department of Social Sciences and co-sponsored by the HU Berlin Political Theory research group (Lehrstuhl Prof. Dr. Christian Volk) and the Centre Marc Bloch.
June 8 , 4 pm: John E. Drabinski (University of Maryland) on Édouard Glissant
John Drabinski (University of Maryland) will discuss his latest work on Édouard Glissant, centering the question of memory and Glissant's contributions to political thought. This will also be an occasion to discuss Glissant's Caribbean critical theory with the thinking of a "break in tradition" in the work of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin.
June 22, 4 pm: Neil Roberts (Williams College) on Angela Davis
Neil Roberts (Williams College) will be presenting on "Angela Y. Davis: Abolitionism, Democracy, Freedom." His talk will be based on his recent chapter in Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner, eds., African American Political Thought, University of Chicago Press 2021.
July 8, 4 pm: Roundtable Breaks in Tradition: Haitian Futures in Political Thought
