Reading Group : Flowing With the Flood: A Study on Aesthetics and Practices of Liberation

This reading group will be an exercise in close reading amidst and in the aftermath of genocide. The avalanche of death and destruction in Palestine has generated an immense deluge of image, sound, and text—both in the relay of the facts of genocide from people on the ground, and in the global political discourse that has erupted since. The scale and pace of what we receive daily, of words and scenes and horrors, can be so overwhelming that it is rendered shapeless and nameless. We must resist the blurring of faces and truths, we must commit to our memory the sharp contours of the lives being decimated.

This reading group is a collaborative study, in the Moten and Harney sense, with the intent to reflect on what is required of us amidst a paradigm shift of such colossal proportions. We will do this through a collection of readings, films, and exercises that will invite us to sit close to the image and the word, and think of this moment within the long stretch of our steady walk towards liberation.