Reading
Alexandra Egan & Kendra Sullivan
Attacking the social body, and mutilating its members through disappearance, incarceration, isolation or annihilation, is key to structural violence—whether enacted through genocidal settler colonial violence or ruling class oppression. There is a literary device that could potentially help us capture and resist this violence: Metonymy. Its original meaning implies the transformation or redefinition of a name (meta + onymy), often through the reconfiguration of the relationship between part and whole. Yet, when names are deeply wounded, when representations are severed from what they represent, when the whole is no more, metonymy must function as a poetic relationship between a (mutilated) part and a (social) whole—a whole that doesn’t exist independently, "out there," but is constituted through the very relationship to its parts. In moments of crisis, the labor of writing should strive to link destroyed lives to a coming collectivity, rather than attempting to restore what has been shattered. This collectivity remains incomplete, uncontainable, and resistant to the violence of destruction. The deep-study session seeks to explore metonymy as an index for a future yet to come while preserving the demands of a time that was brutally interrupted. A bond of (impossible?) kinship, or a form of solidarity connecting utterly different worlds. Readings include texts by Ghassan Kanafani, Iman Mersal, Octavia Butler, Amiri Baraka, as well as watching the film Ma'loul Celebrates Its Destruction by Michel Khleifi, (Belguim/Palestine 1984).
