Temporalities of Liberation: History and the Question of Freedom 

Dates: 23 April,  30 April, 7 May, 14 May, 21 May, 28 May, 4 June, 11 June 2025
Time: 13:30-15:30
Location: Maastricht University
Instructors: Faisal Hamadah, Timo Makori
Credits: 5 ECTS
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* This course is fully booked. 

“Revolutions are history breathing in and out,” writes the historian Enzo Traverso. This course takes Traverso’s pithy formulation and attempts to operationalize it for contemporary times which, while not revolutionary themselves, seem to be bubbling in that direction. We aim to study the collective ‘structures of feeling’, individual perplexities, social conundrums  and political projects against oppression that have informed historical thinking and practices of revolution. We will inquire into the subjugated historicities, notions of personhood, society, time, space and the political that are embedded in revolutionary projects. How are revolutionary subjects forged? What kinds of bodies do representations of revolutions feature most prominently? What imaginaries, cultural logics and political forms are associated with revolutions? What are the temporalities of revolutions? Do they have beginnings and endings? If, to riff on Traverso again, “revolutions rescue the past by inventing the future,” what futures are made possible by discrete revolutionary imaginaries?

In this course, we will read histories, ethnography and artistic works based on historical revolutionary processes that are aimed at either creating or restoring popular forms of sovereignty. We will ask how revolutions, instead of mirroring a laten popular will, aim to ‘invent’ the people. We will explore how similar political goals and ideals come to realize themselves differently in different contexts. In this way too, we will treat the subject of revolution as a window through which one can analyze the gendered and racializing workings of colonialism, modernity, the state and global capitalism in different contexts.

Learning Objectives

• Examine what the term “revolution” has meant in different contexts through a comparative study of ethnographies on 20^th/21^th C revolutionary processes
• Interrogate the relationship between revolutionary politics, modernity, history, conceptions of time, gender, space and the political form of the nation-state
• Explore the paradoxes of key social concepts such as sovereignty, resistance, recognition, hegemony, counter-hegemony,  ideology, charisma, structure and agency
• Apply contemporary and historical insights through informed conversations and debates about current political struggles taking place across the world.
• Hone students’ research, reading, presentation, discussion and writing skills

Possible readings

• Arendt, Hannah 1965. On Revolution. London: Penguin Books, only pp. 41-58.
• Arendt, Hannah. “On Violence” [abridged], in Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology (N.Scheper- Hughes and P. Bourgois, eds.). Blackwell: 236-243.
• Bayat, Asef (2020). Revolution without revolutionaries: Making sense of the arab spring. Stanford University Press.
• Buck-Morss, Susan (2009). Hegel, Haiti and universal history ; and, universal history. University of Pittsburgh Press.
• Cabral, Amilcar. 1973. National Liberation and Culture in Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral, eds. African Information Service.
• Castells, Manuel (1997) Mexico’s Zapatistas: The First International Guerilla Movement ̈ in Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol.11
• Césaire, Aimé. Aimé Césaire: The collected poetry. Trans. Clayton Eshelman and Annette Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Clover, Joshua (2019). Riot. strike. riot.: The New Era of Uprisings. Verso.
• Fanon, Frantz. 1963 [1961]. “Concerning Violence,” [abridged from The Wretched of the Earth] in On Violence: A Reader (B. Lawrence and A. Karim, eds.). Duke: 78-100.
• James, C.L.R. 1989. The Black Jacobins. Knopf Doubleday Publishing.
• Holloway, J., & Peláez, E. (1998). Zapatista!: Reinventing mexico’s revolution. Pluto Press.
• Koselleck, Reinhardt. 1985. Historical criteria of the modern concept of revolution. Pp. 39-54 in his Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
• Lenin., Vladimir Ilyich. 1992 [1917]. The State and Revolution. London: Penguin Books Available online at https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/lenin/state-and-revolution.pdf . Chapter II.
• Martin Holbraand. 2018. “I Have Been Formed in This Revolution”:Revolution as Infrastructure, and The People It Creates in Cuba” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 478–495.
• Ross, Kirsten (2017). Communal luxury: The political imaginary of the Paris Commune. Verso.
• Serge, Victor (2012). Memoirs of a revolutionary. New York Review Books.
• Scott, David. 2004. ‘Romanticism and the longing for anticolonial revolution’. Chapter 2 of Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham & London: Duke University Press
• Siobhan Shilton. 2013. “Art and the ‘Arab Spring’: Aesthetics of revolution in contemporary Tunisia” French Cultural Studies, Volume: 24 issue: 1, page(s): 129-145. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957155812464166
• Steven C. Caton, Hazim Al-Eryani and Rayman Aryani ¨Poetry of Protest: Tribes in Yemen’s ‘Change Revolution’ pp121- 147 The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: the Arab Spring and Beyond, Edinburg University Press
• Sub Comandante Marcos “Our Word is our Weapon” http://faculty.washington.edu/caporaso/courses/203/readings/marcos_our_word_is_our_weapon.pd ff
• Swinehart, K. 2019. Decolonial time in Bolivia’s Pachakuti. Signs and Society 7(1), 96-114 (available online: https://doi.org/10.1086/701117).
• Takriti, A. R. (2016). Monsoon revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965-1976. Oxford University Press.
• Traverso, Enzo (2024). Revolution: An intellectual history. Verso Books.
• Trouillot, Michel Rolph (1997) “The Power in the Story” pp. 1-30 & “The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event pp. 70-107 “Silencing the Past: Power and The Production of History”, Beacon Press
• Varzi, Roxanne 2006. Chapter 1 of Warring Souls: Youth, Media and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran. Durham: Duke University Press

Film

• The Battle of Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo (2hrs, 3 min)
• “Off-Frame: Revolution Until Victory” Mohannad Yaqubi (1h 2m)
• “The Trials of Spring” by Gini Reticke, 2015.

 

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