UHURU Theory & Event Workshop – 2016

The Theory & Event workshop, which will be held in the Humanities Seminar room every Tuesday from 3:00 – 4:30, is open to all.  It offers graduate students, staff and visitors an opportunity to participate in a structured discussion on emancipatory thought and action in the modern world. The set of topics is not comprehensive, and thinkers and events that have already been widely discussed in post-graduate courses, the UHURU reading group etc – like Frantz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, Mahmood Mamdani, Achille Mbembe, Gayatri Spivak etc – are not repeated here. Also some major emancipatory events are not dealt with e.g. the Spartacus uprising in Rome, the 16^thc Peasant War in Germany, the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and many others.  Readings (divided into core and supplementary readings) will be circulated a week before each meeting. All participants will be expected to have read at least the core readings.

Term One (5 weeks)

1.    Introduction: Slavery in Africa & The Mande Charter of 1221

2.    The French Revolution of 1789: Robespierre, Saint-Just, Olympe de Gouges

3.    The Haitian Revolution of 1791- 1804: Toussaint Louverture

4.    The European working-class movements of 1848:  Karl Marx

5.    The Paris Commune of 1871: Karl Marx

Term Two (8 weeks)

6.    The United States after slavery: W.E.B Du Bois (1903)

7.    The Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917: V.I. Lenin

8.    The Spartacist Uprising of 1919: Rosa Luxemburg

9.    The Turin Strikes of 1918 & 1919: Antonio Gramsci

10. Struggles within the anti-colonial movement in India B. R. Ambedkar, Mohandas Gandhi

11. Post-war feminism in France: Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

12. People’s war and the Chinese revolution 1920s-1949: Mao Zedong

13.Thinking anti-colonialism in France: Jean-Paul Sartre

Term Three (6 weeks)

14. Rethinking pedagogy in Latin America: Paulo Freire (1968)

15. Thinking national liberation struggle 1963-1974: Amilcar Cabral

16. The 1960s in the United States and rethinking racism: Malcom X

17. The 1970s in the United States: Angela Davis

18.Rethinking feminism in the United States: Bell Hooks

19. The 1967 Naxalbari uprising in India: Ranajit Guha

Term Four (7 weeks)

20.Rethinking feminism & the commons after structural adjustment in the 1980s: Silvia Federici

21.Thinking new urban struggles in Latin America in the 21^st c: Raul Zibechi

22.May 1968 and ‘post-classism’: Sylvain Lazarus

23.After 1968, rethinking democracy: Jacques Rancière  and Kristin Ross

24. 1968, the ‘immanent exception’ and the subject of truth: Alain Badiou

25. Rethinking the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1970s & 1980s 
26. Conclusion: Rethinking emancipation in contemporary Africa: Michael Neocosmos