For now

The book that I mentioned in my last post is taking shape: Marta Cenedese and I have just signed a contract with Bloomsbury Academic for our edited volume Activist Writing / Activist Reading. We are very excited to be working towards its publication with an excellent group of contributors!

Amid the work on this, I got to start my summer with ‘Poetry and Solidarity’ – a talk by Anna Bernard (King’s College London) that I had co-organised as a collaboration between this Veni project and the Modern and Contemporary Literature research group’s seminar series. In her presentation, Anna shared work from her upcoming book on cultural expressions of the Nicaraguan, South African, and Palestinian national liberation movements in the period from 1975 to 1990. This timely talk was held at Utrecht University on 18 June, shortly after the university’s executive board had responded to peaceful protest in solidarity with Palestine here by once again unleashing police violence on its students and staff.

After the end of our academic year, I travelled to another place making far too many headlines for the repression of protests lately: Berlin. I’m all the more grateful that I got to join a conference full of politically engaged and intellectually engaging speakers there: “FOR NOW”: Diasporic Provisions. Containers – Storytelling – Return, which took place at SAVVY Contemporary and the Humboldt-Universität from 2 to 4 July. Huge thanks to Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen, Anne Potjans, Fenja Akinde-Hummel, Thao Ho and Jasper J. Verlinden  – the team behind the ERC Consolidator Grant Project ‘Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary’ – for curating these days so very carefully. It was a joy to share the panel ‘Telling Stories of Conditional Belonging’ with Soheil Asefi (CUNY) and to think through the political demands and cultural responses of the 1980s as well as our current moment here, too. In times of academic institutions disregarding their own community, it is particularly precious to spend time with colleagues like these.