16.03.2021
Inward Outward Postponed until October 2021
After giving it a lot of thought we have decided to postpone Inward Outward until October of this year (exact dates to be confirmed soon). We’ve been pushing for our original dates but realise that in the current context, it is best to postpone.
With that said, we’re more than elated to bring you the second edition of Inward Outward in October with the theme Emotion in the Archive, and with a keynote address from Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. A scholar, curator and filmmaker, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is also Professor of Modern Culture and Media at the Department of Comparative Literature, Brown University. In her most recent book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019), Azoulay posits that the institutions that are constitutive of our culture and civilization, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty, are all embedded in imperialist logics. Moving from this, her work invites us to unlearn the archive, unlearn our complicity with regimes of violence, domination and exploitation.
In the meantime, we would like to direct your attention to the following events that are connected to the wider symposium:
- The RCMC/NMvW hosts scholar Kaiama L. Glover on April 1 at 18:00-19:30 CET (i.e. Amsterdam) as part of their Thinking With series. Glover will be in conversation with Elsa Dorlin, Carine Zaayman, and Wayne Modest around her latest book, A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke UP 2021). Anchored in rigorous literary analysis, Glover’s study asks us to pay attention to the gendered expectations that often determine our critical approaches to works of literature and their feminine protagonists. Her analyses propose “representations of adamantly self-articulating, sexually self-defining female characters,” as configured by writers who “present self-love—physical and emotional—as both provocation and critique” (14). Glover’s study asks us to think expansively about what it means to value the self above all else, and about how a woman’s self-regard might “be recognized as an achievement—a justifiable response to the prejudices and other perils of the existing communal order”? (10).
For more information and to register for the online event with Glover, please visit the RCMC/NMvW website.
On May 18, Carine Zaayman, an artist, curator and scholar committed to critical engagement with colonial archives and collections, will lead a pre-symposium workshop on ‘Unlearning the Archive’. Riffing off Azoulay’s call to imagine museum workers going on strike, Carine Zaayman opens the workshop onto imaginative interpretations. She invites participants to bring material from their institution that calls for special care, to be discussed and analysed in the context of Azoulay’s provocations to unlearn imperialism in archival and museum practices, and to acknowledge and explore the emotional implications of doing this work.
The workshop, taking place online, is closed due to only being able to accomodate a limited number of people. If you work in an institution with collections or materials of coloniality and are interested in attending a later edition please email inwardoutward@beeldengeluid.nl.