Ariela Aisha Azoulay, following Alex Gourevitch’s view of strike, writes that the right to strike is derived from the right to resist oppression. “Alongside the radical conception of strike, and by no means as its replacement,” Azoulay proposes “to consider the strike not in terms of the right to protest against oppression, but rather as an opportunity to care for the shared world…Going on strike is to claim one’s right not to engage with destructive practices, not to be an oppressor and perpetrator…”. The working group’s primary interest would be to reimagine and reconceptualize the ontology and aesthetics of strike under regimes of surveillance, censorship and arbitrary expulsions during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In terms of location, the working group shall invest in discussions on strikes and archives with practices, methods, and examples from all parts of the world. The aim is to first make historical observations of strikes in specific geographical regions, and then to reflect broadly on questions of transnational comparison and how strikes have or have not been archived in history and literature. In so doing, the members of the working group shall engage in scholarly conversations on literary and visual culture, literary history, historiography, labor studies, and decolonial theory through the subject of strike across diverse contexts. A strike can signify a halt, a cessation, collective dissent, and/or exit(s). By looking at the works of current scholars, artists, and workers, the working group would try to trace the innovative approaches towards archiving such striking moments in history through interdisciplinary lenses.
Participating Members:
Lu Biltucci, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Aj Boyd, History
Avigyan Banerjee, History
Sarah Coffman, History
Elliot Frank, English
Preetha Mani, AMESALL, Preetha Mani
Suddhadeep Mukherjee, Comparative Literature
Aditi Saraswat, Comparative Literature
Organizers
Preetha Mani is Associate Professor of South Asian Literatures in the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures and Core Faculty Member in the Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research interests include modern Hindi, Tamil, and Indian literatures; South Asian feminisms and women’s writing; literary multilingualism; world literature; translation studies; realisms, modernisms, and literary form; and postcolonial studies.
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Suddhadeep Mukherjee is a third year PhD student in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He currently works as the graduate assistant for the Global Asias Initiative at Rutgers. Suddhadeep has pursued his BA and MA in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. His areas of interest are South Asian women’s literatures, orality, indigeneity, translation, visual studies, and archival theory.
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