Anaheed Al-Hardan (Palestine) Fellow 11/12

Discipline(s): Sociology, Memory Studies, Social History
ICI-Project: Memories of Palestine: The Nakba and the Palestinian Refugees in Syria

The establishment of the state of Israel on Palestine during the Palestine War (1948-49) is referred to as the Nakba, or Catastrophe, in Arabic. The outcome of the war viz the establishment of a new nation-state was discursively constructed as a fitting epilogue to the European Jewish Holocaust. This outcome also led to the erasure of Palestine as a geo-political entity and to the destruction of Palestinian society through the expulsion of more than two-thirds of Palestinians from the newly established state. The establishment of the state of Israel/Nakba can be theorised as a multistable ontology for, inter alia, Palestinian refugees and their descendants who continue to be unable to exercise their right of return to homes in what is today the state of Israel. This research project expands upon my doctoral research on memories of the Nakba in the Palestinian refugee community in Syria. It will result in a monograph that addresses how the Nakba, as a past/ongoing event, is actively remembered by those who survived the war and those who were born in exile, within the context of the evolution of its meaning in nationalist discourses and the emergence of Nakba commemorative practices

Vita: Anaheed Al-Hardan is a cultural sociologist whose research interests include collective memory and remembrance; post/colonial, feminist and indigenous epistemologies and research practices; modern Arab intellectual and political history, and imperialism and anti-imperialist social movements in the Arab world. She was previously a researcher on the Global Networks Project at the Institute for International Integration Studies at Trinity College, University of Dublin (2006-2007), and she has taught in the Department of Sociology at Trinity College, University of Dublin (2006-2010), where she completed a doctoral dissertation (2011). Entitled “Remembering the Catastrophe: Uprooted Histories and the Grandchildren of the Nakba”, her dissertation explored practices of memory and remembrance of the Nakba in the Palestinian refugee camps of Damascus, Syria.

Bobby Benedicto (Philippines) Fellow 11/12

Discipline(s): Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Urban Studies
ICI-Project: Bright Lights, Gay Globality: Queer World-making in Metropolitan Manila

Bright Lights, Gay Globality is an ethnographic study of mobility, class, and gay life in 21st century Manila. Drawing on postcolonial queer studies and on critical theories of race, affect and mobility, the study traces the emergence of a “bright lights gay scene,” a culturally imaginary space produced by/for privileged Filipino gay men who are simultaneously embedded in a third world city and plugged into a virtual gay globality through teletechnomedia apparatuses. Arising out of tensions between the invincible facticity of location and the never-to-be-completed task of becoming-global, the scene is re-presented in this project as a multistable figure. It appears as an effect of the urban frictions that inspire the making of a first world in the third world, as a space produced in response to dominant heteronormative orders, and as a symptom of the structuring force of fantasy-desires for an always elusive gay modernity. By examining the world-making practices of locally privileged and globally marginal gay men through different spatial registers, the project demonstrates how the figure of the third world queer occupies contradictory positions in incommensurate diagrams of power.

Vita: Bobby Benedicto studied Politics at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and at York University in Toronto, Canada. He received his PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne, where he has also lectured on queer cinema, Asian cultural studies, and postcolonial feminist theory. His dissertation research on technologies of mobility and contemporary queer world-making practices in Metropolitan Manila has appeared in journals such as GLQ, The Journal of Homosexuality, and Asian Studies Review. Bobby's broader research interests include experimental ethnographic methods, "third world" architecture, and imaginative geographies. He is presently working on a project examining the queer uses of dictatorship architecture, based on the recent conversion of Marcos-era modernist structures into sites of Filipino queer performance. As a fellow at the ICI, he will be working on a book project based on his dissertation.

Zeynep Bulut (Turkey) Fellow 11/12

Discipline(s): Music, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Speech Science& Kinesiology
ICI-Project: Between Speech and Language: La Voix-Peau in Contemporary Music

Inspired by a particular aesthetics in contemporary music that destroys the linguistic order of verbal language and amplifies the unnoticed sounds of the human body, this project suggests a new conception of the human voice: “la voix-peau,” skin-voice. Drawing on French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu's notion of "le moi-peau," skin-ego, I analyze the human voice as the first tactile envelope, as skin. By this I mean the embodied sound, which stems from the whole body as well as the vocal folds. I examine the following questions: Can we situate the sensory and affective experiences of sound at the heart of the human voice? Can we conceive the voice as an assemblage of bodily sounds, and as a physical and phenomenal matrix of senses? Is it possible to appropriate such a designation of the voice for unsettling the discursive categories of language, speech and self? In light of these questions, skin-voice can be considered a potential space – a medium of constructive tension – that reveals the multiple facets of the self between speech and language. The aim is to investigate how our voices can communicate the self without being reduced to mediums for verbal language.

Vita: Zeynep Bulut received her Ph.D. in Critical Studies/Experimental Practices in Music, from the University of California at San Diego in June 2011. Prior to her doctoral education, she studied sociology (B.A.), opera, and visual arts (M.F.A.) in Istanbul, Turkey. Analyzing contemporary classical and experimental music, Zeynep investigates the physical and phenomenal emergence of the human voice and its role in the constitution of the self. Her research engages readings in psychoanalysis, neuropsychology, speech science and kinesiology, existential phenomenology, philosophy of mind, ordinary language and action, and performance studies. Since 2003, Zeynep has presented papers in many academic conferences in the United States, Europe, Canada and Turkey, published scholarly articles, and composed and performed voice pieces for concerts, exhibits, and theatre. Most recently, her article “Theorizing Voice in Performance: György Ligeti’s Aventures” appeared in Perspectives of New Music, Volume 48, Winter 2010.

David Kishik Fellow 11/12

Discipline(s): Philosophy
ICI-Project: Sheer Life: A Theory of New York (To Imagine a Form of Life, III)

As Walter Benjamin dedicated his "Arcades Project" to Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, my next book is best described as a philosophical study of New York, capital of the twentieth century. Seen in this way, a world of elective affinities is revealed between the two cities, as the main players in Benjamin’s incomplete work experience a curious metamorphosis: the flâneur transforms into the homeless, the collector into the hoarder, Grandville into Warhol, Victor Hugo into Woody Allen, Baron Haussmann into Robert Moses, Marx into Arendt, Charles Fourier into Jane Jacobs, and the covered arcade into the bare street. But while Benjamin sees Paris as the dream from which we need to wake up, I approach New York as the reality into which we must still awake from our current state of dogmatic slumber. What may be called “The Manhattan Project” is thus an inversion of the principle behind "The Arcades Project": it seeks to pass through what has been, in order to experience the present as the dream that refers to the waking world of the past. New York, I argue, was a "landscape built of sheer life," one that still stands in perfect opposition to Auschwitz's terrain of bare life.

Vita: David Kishik studied philosophy at Haifa University in Israel (BA) and at the New School for Social Research in New York (MA, PhD). He is the author of Wittgenstein’s Form of Life (To Imagine a Form of Life, I), which appeared in 2008 with Continuum (paperback, 2012), and The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics (To Imagine a Form of Life, II), which was just published with Stanford University Press. He is also the co-translator of Agamben's Nudities and What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays.

Sandrine Sanos (France) Fellow 11/12

Discipline(s): (Cultural & Intellectual) History, Literary Theory & Literature, Cultural Studies
ICI-Project: Ambivalent Homes, Multiple Attachments: Displacement, Citizenship, and Gender in France, 1930-1965.

Displacement—that is an imposed “homelessness”—reveals the contradictions of modern politics of citizenship, especially in twentieth-century Europe where violence, war, and genocide have framed much of the history of imperial nation-states. For those who have been displaced, belonging (in a political and cultural sense) is an ambivalent process. This project asks how those who do not “quite belong” have reimagined “home” as the site of multiple and often contradictory and ambivalent attachments. Focusing on two moments—the interwar years, and the years following World War Two— this project explores how a number of female writers, authors, and memoirists who directly or indirectly experienced displacement reflected upon their ambivalent position in relation to “home”—France. How did they articulate in writing their location as “outsiders from within,” as illegitimate subjects who did not quite belong? I believe engaging ambivalence and melancholia as serious political objects allows the disruption of the illusion of singularity, stability, and linearity that inevitably infuse our imagination of citizenship and the nation as “home.”

Vita: Sandrine Sanos studied Modern History at Pembroke College, Oxford University (BA), Women’s and Gender History at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, London University (MA), Historical Sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (auditor), and Modern European History at Rutgers University (Ph.D.). She taught History at Earlham College and has been Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Texas A & M University - Corpus Christi since 2008. Her book The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France is forthcoming with Stanford University Press (Fall 2012). Her research interests include intellectual and cultural history, gender and sexuality, diaspora and genocide, psychoanalysis and film theory. She is currently working on two articles: on the French artist Claude Cahun, and on memory, violence, and gender in Alain Resnais' 1959 film, Hiroshima mon Amour.

Volker Woltersdorff (Germany) Fellow 11/12

Discipline(s): Queer Theory, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Philosophy, Literature
ICI-Project: Paradoxical Pleasures and the Desire to Have it All: Toward a Queer Dialectics

Sadomasochistic desire and experience are thoroughly characterised by paradox: they deploy multistable figures that can be interpreted from either of the two possible outcomes and draw their erotic appeal from this very ambiguity. These sadomasochistic figures are best understood in their complex entirety, comprised as much of contradictory affective and sexual investments as they are of contrasting perspectives. My proposed book project links earlier fieldwork and discourse analysis of contemporary BDSM scenes to the philosophical and political question of dialectics, suggesting that the study of BDSM can contribute to a new and queerer understanding of dialectics. Unlike in many other discourses that rely on dialectics, in BDSM, the tension between contradictions is not resolved at a higher stage of consciousness—or the thrill is lost. Therefore, BDSM pushes us to conceive of another kind of complementarity that differs from the kind of “synthesis” offered by classical dialectics. This project proposes interpreting BDSM practice as a way to reenact and renegotiate the dialectics of our present neoliberal times.

Vita: Volker Woltersdorf (aka Lore Logorrhöe) studied French, German and Italian Literatures at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and received a PhD in Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on gay coming out narrative and practice. From 1999 to 2010 he was Research assistant at the Institute of Comparative Literature of Freie Universität Berlin and Member of the Collaborative Research Centre „Kulturen des Performativen“ within the Research Project “Precariousness of Sexual and Gendered Identities: Everyday Practice and Symbolic Forms”. His book Coming out: Die Inszenierung schwuler Identitäten zwischen Auflehnung und Anpassung appeared 2005 with Campus.