Brooklyn Institute for Social Research presents:

Don DeLillo: Fiction, Paranoia, and Empire (In-Person)

Instructor: Jude Webre

https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/new-york/don-delillo-fiction-paranoia-and-u-s-empire-in-person/

Lauded as one of the most skillful practitioners of what might be called the paranoid style in American fiction, Don DeLillo captures with keen detail and hypnotic prose the casual recklessness of Americans in the world, uncertain of the levers of power that secure and undergird their self-importance. Coming “of age” artistically in the 1980s, DeLillo drew on the atmospherics of three decades of Cold War and U.S. superpower to construct characters and plots that embody and exemplify the contemporary American condition: opaque, suspicious, violent, fantasy-laden. In two novels in particular, The Names (1982) and Libra(1988), DeLillo offers character studies of American “innocents abroad,” moving through the medium of U.S. power, yet always unsure—of friends, enemies, and purpose. In The Names, the fictional James Axton, a risk analyst adrift in the turbulent Eastern Mediterranean of the late ‘70s, assesses the terroristic threats that menace his corporate clients; while, in Libra, the historical Lee Harvey Oswald, perennial enigma at the heart of the Kennedy Assasination, travels the road of political illusion, disillusion, and eventual co-optation by the CIA. Subject to large, shadowy forces, both Axton and Oswald raise questions, for themselves and the reader, about meaning, knowledge, identity, and the nature of power. Reading DeLillo, we encounter new connections between geopolitics and postmodernity: In what ways is U.S. superpower, in its overwhelming diffusion, a force for destabilization—not simply of enemy regimes, but of norms, unities, meanings and narratives?

In this course, we’ll read both novels in full against the backdrop of the second phase of the Cold War and the political and economic structures that defined that period. Starting with The Names, we’ll situate the expansion of American corporate power into the Middle East during the period of the Islamic Revolution, as risk is used to hedge resistance and upheaval while Americans abroad sort through the countercultural legacies of the Sixties. At once fascinated by science, language, and information in the ruins of ancient civilization and drily satirizing the self-absorption of expat culture, DeLillo’s narrative marks the neoliberal turn of the 1980s on the eve of American ascendency both in the region and globally. With Libra, we’ll track back to the beginning of this period, with DeLillo’s scrupulous, ambivalent retelling of Oswald’s path to historical destiny, from bitter poverty in the Bronx (growing up near the young DeLillo) to his leftist turn in the U.S. military, subsequent defection to the Soviet Union before becoming an unwitting tool in the CIA’s machinations against Kennedy. Uncovering the loam of social history that shaped Oswald, DeLillo considers the complex set of forces and unmanageable totality that lies beyond all of his characters. A practitioner of what one critic calls the “systems novel” and another the “paranoid chronotope,” DeLillo helps us to understand the world system of the Cold War—and today—as manifested through American hegemony. In addition to the two novels, we’ll read Cold War historiography by Charles Maier, Andrew Bacevich, and Odd Arne Westad, as well as theory and criticism by Immanuel Wallerstein, Tom LeClair, and Frida Beckman, plus interviews with DeLillo himself.

Course Schedule

Thursday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
April 11 — May 02, 2024
4 weeks

TOUR KICKOFF FOR ERICA DAWN LYLE

7 PM $10 NOTAFLOF

w/

Erica Dawn Lyle

Gabby Fluke-Mogul

Selendis Sebastian Johnson/Orchid McRae Duo

Centered on the release of Constructing Worlds Otherwise, filmmaker and organizer Marisa Holmes joins interlocutor and popular educator George Quispe in conversation with author Raúl Zibechi to discuss points of encounter for societies in movements found throughout our continent. From the OCCUPY movement, to Indigenous organizing in the Cauca region of Colombia, the speakers will engage with the legacies, struggles and critical lessons from below.

Through the projection of fragments of recently digitized militant films and videotapes (8mm, Super8, and Hi8), shot in Monterrey between the 1970’s and 1990’s, an attempt will be made to take a tour of the history of incorporating cinema in social and political struggles in Northern Mexico. This topic, seldomly explored in the history of independent political cinema in Mexico, will serve as a lens toquestion and think about the use, preservation, and cataloging of this type of cinema. As well as take into account the essence and significance of these audiovisual registers as fragments consisting of unfinished films and raw footage and consider its afterlife in society

While the footage screened is silent, the conversation will be in Spanish with limited English interpretation. This event is organized in collaboration with Archivistas en Espanglish.

RSVP link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/spoon-jackson-no-moon-releaselistening-party-tickets-868522784027?aff=oddtdtcreator

El devenir editorial del archivo político. Un conversatorio con el Archivo Itinerante de Gráfica Zapatista y Letra Muerta .

¿Cómo deviene un archivo de gráfica política en la práctica editorial? 

El Archivo Itinerante de Gráfica Zapatista y Letra Muerta harán un recorrido de su historia de re/junte y socialización de sus materiales. Además, expondrá ideas y conceptos que le han impedido contestar esa pregunta a la que le han venido dando vueltas por varios años.

El A.I.G.Z, conformado por el artista Eden Bastida Kullick, tiene sus primeros inicios en 1994 durante su adolescencia, desde un impulso o interés de archivar y recopilar carteles, afiches, calcomanías, volantes, camisetas y prensa en relación al EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), lo cual ha realizado desde entonces de manera constante.El archivo actualmente reúne producciones visuales realizadas por más de cien artistas de tres generaciones distintas cuyas producciones están influidas por el zapatismo. El archivo ha recorrido de norte-sur el continente realizando exposiciones en Buenos Aires, Nueva York y Montevideo y que se proyecta pueda visitar territorio zapatista próximamente.

Letra Muerta es etra Muerta Inc., compuesta de las diseñadoras Faride Mereb y Oriana Nuzzi, es una editorial fundada en Venezuela en el 2014. Luego de años de trayectoria abre sus puertas en Williamsburg, Nueva York, como un estudio de diseño editorial, centro de talleres y estudio de archivos. En el taller todas las personas son bienvenidas, pero mayormente  se enfocan en proyectos y artistas de Latinoamérica y el caribe, y en especial el trabajo hecho por mujeres, y quienes habitan en los márgenes del mundo.

Este evento es organizado en colaboración con Archivistas en Espanglish.

Regístrate aquí: https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/archivistas-en-espanglish/cine-militante

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research presents:

Don DeLillo: Fiction, Paranoia, and Empire (In-Person)

Instructor: Jude Webre

https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/new-york/don-delillo-fiction-paranoia-and-u-s-empire-in-person/

Lauded as one of the most skillful practitioners of what might be called the paranoid style in American fiction, Don DeLillo captures with keen detail and hypnotic prose the casual recklessness of Americans in the world, uncertain of the levers of power that secure and undergird their self-importance. Coming “of age” artistically in the 1980s, DeLillo drew on the atmospherics of three decades of Cold War and U.S. superpower to construct characters and plots that embody and exemplify the contemporary American condition: opaque, suspicious, violent, fantasy-laden. In two novels in particular, The Names (1982) and Libra(1988), DeLillo offers character studies of American “innocents abroad,” moving through the medium of U.S. power, yet always unsure—of friends, enemies, and purpose. In The Names, the fictional James Axton, a risk analyst adrift in the turbulent Eastern Mediterranean of the late ‘70s, assesses the terroristic threats that menace his corporate clients; while, in Libra, the historical Lee Harvey Oswald, perennial enigma at the heart of the Kennedy Assasination, travels the road of political illusion, disillusion, and eventual co-optation by the CIA. Subject to large, shadowy forces, both Axton and Oswald raise questions, for themselves and the reader, about meaning, knowledge, identity, and the nature of power. Reading DeLillo, we encounter new connections between geopolitics and postmodernity: In what ways is U.S. superpower, in its overwhelming diffusion, a force for destabilization—not simply of enemy regimes, but of norms, unities, meanings and narratives?

In this course, we’ll read both novels in full against the backdrop of the second phase of the Cold War and the political and economic structures that defined that period. Starting with The Names, we’ll situate the expansion of American corporate power into the Middle East during the period of the Islamic Revolution, as risk is used to hedge resistance and upheaval while Americans abroad sort through the countercultural legacies of the Sixties. At once fascinated by science, language, and information in the ruins of ancient civilization and drily satirizing the self-absorption of expat culture, DeLillo’s narrative marks the neoliberal turn of the 1980s on the eve of American ascendency both in the region and globally. With Libra, we’ll track back to the beginning of this period, with DeLillo’s scrupulous, ambivalent retelling of Oswald’s path to historical destiny, from bitter poverty in the Bronx (growing up near the young DeLillo) to his leftist turn in the U.S. military, subsequent defection to the Soviet Union before becoming an unwitting tool in the CIA’s machinations against Kennedy. Uncovering the loam of social history that shaped Oswald, DeLillo considers the complex set of forces and unmanageable totality that lies beyond all of his characters. A practitioner of what one critic calls the “systems novel” and another the “paranoid chronotope,” DeLillo helps us to understand the world system of the Cold War—and today—as manifested through American hegemony. In addition to the two novels, we’ll read Cold War historiography by Charles Maier, Andrew Bacevich, and Odd Arne Westad, as well as theory and criticism by Immanuel Wallerstein, Tom LeClair, and Frida Beckman, plus interviews with DeLillo himself.

Course Schedule

Thursday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
April 11 — May 02, 2024
4 weeks

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research presents:

Don DeLillo: Fiction, Paranoia, and Empire (In-Person)

Instructor: Jude Webre

https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/new-york/don-delillo-fiction-paranoia-and-u-s-empire-in-person/

Lauded as one of the most skillful practitioners of what might be called the paranoid style in American fiction, Don DeLillo captures with keen detail and hypnotic prose the casual recklessness of Americans in the world, uncertain of the levers of power that secure and undergird their self-importance. Coming “of age” artistically in the 1980s, DeLillo drew on the atmospherics of three decades of Cold War and U.S. superpower to construct characters and plots that embody and exemplify the contemporary American condition: opaque, suspicious, violent, fantasy-laden. In two novels in particular, The Names (1982) and Libra(1988), DeLillo offers character studies of American “innocents abroad,” moving through the medium of U.S. power, yet always unsure—of friends, enemies, and purpose. In The Names, the fictional James Axton, a risk analyst adrift in the turbulent Eastern Mediterranean of the late ‘70s, assesses the terroristic threats that menace his corporate clients; while, in Libra, the historical Lee Harvey Oswald, perennial enigma at the heart of the Kennedy Assasination, travels the road of political illusion, disillusion, and eventual co-optation by the CIA. Subject to large, shadowy forces, both Axton and Oswald raise questions, for themselves and the reader, about meaning, knowledge, identity, and the nature of power. Reading DeLillo, we encounter new connections between geopolitics and postmodernity: In what ways is U.S. superpower, in its overwhelming diffusion, a force for destabilization—not simply of enemy regimes, but of norms, unities, meanings and narratives?

In this course, we’ll read both novels in full against the backdrop of the second phase of the Cold War and the political and economic structures that defined that period. Starting with The Names, we’ll situate the expansion of American corporate power into the Middle East during the period of the Islamic Revolution, as risk is used to hedge resistance and upheaval while Americans abroad sort through the countercultural legacies of the Sixties. At once fascinated by science, language, and information in the ruins of ancient civilization and drily satirizing the self-absorption of expat culture, DeLillo’s narrative marks the neoliberal turn of the 1980s on the eve of American ascendency both in the region and globally. With Libra, we’ll track back to the beginning of this period, with DeLillo’s scrupulous, ambivalent retelling of Oswald’s path to historical destiny, from bitter poverty in the Bronx (growing up near the young DeLillo) to his leftist turn in the U.S. military, subsequent defection to the Soviet Union before becoming an unwitting tool in the CIA’s machinations against Kennedy. Uncovering the loam of social history that shaped Oswald, DeLillo considers the complex set of forces and unmanageable totality that lies beyond all of his characters. A practitioner of what one critic calls the “systems novel” and another the “paranoid chronotope,” DeLillo helps us to understand the world system of the Cold War—and today—as manifested through American hegemony. In addition to the two novels, we’ll read Cold War historiography by Charles Maier, Andrew Bacevich, and Odd Arne Westad, as well as theory and criticism by Immanuel Wallerstein, Tom LeClair, and Frida Beckman, plus interviews with DeLillo himself.

Course Schedule

Thursday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
April 11 — May 02, 2024
4 weeks

PIT Movie Night #1! Inspirational documentaries about West Indian radicals in 1970’s London: the hard-leftist dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson — his music, activism and the classes he led at Keskidee Center, the first dedicated arts-educational center for the Afro-Carribean diaspora in Britain; and Barbara Beese, Darcus Howe, Frank Crichlow and the heroic activists of The Mangrove Nine.

presented by MACC and Cinemóvil

A letter reading and writing featuring:

In person:

Solange Azore

Chalay Chalermkraivuth

Tiffany Joy Butler

Charlie Markbreiter

Aditi Natasha Kini

Dina Abdulhadi

Sending a video:

TK Lé

Gabrielle Octavia Rucker

Jess Rizkallah

Lena Afridi

New York Anarchist Book Fair Presents:

Thinking Revolutionary Health: Artsakh and Palestine in the Horizon of Planetary Struggles

On September 19th, the Azeri state, using as pre-text of a ‘terrorist’ attack against its occupation forces; relying on military arms and diplomatic support from Israel and Turkey culminated a 10 month genocidal siege against the self-governed republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) with a full scale invasion forcing its largely Armenian inhabitants to choose between death or abandonment of their ancestral lands. On October 7th, using as pretext of a ‘terrorist’ attack by Hamas militants, relying on military arms and diplomatic support from Europe and the United States, the Israeli state culminated a 17 year genocidal siege of the self governed enclave of Gaza with an attempt to destroy not only communities but also nearly every element of the sustenance of common life including homes, neighborhoods, refugee camps, mosques, churches, cemeteries, historic sites, art, cultural spaces, bakeries, markets, stores, libraries, schools, universities, aid centers, newsrooms, health clinics and hospitals. In Artsakh and now in Gaza we see a genocide unfold in real time. Where the former was met largely with tacit approval and indifference by most states, in Gaza we see the explicit collaboration by Western States including a coordinated campaign to criminalize attempts to stop this genocide.

Yerevan based journal Revolutionary Health as well as friends from Anti-Denialist Coalition convene a gathering at PIT by inviting some of the contributors to the last edition of the journal published in the summer of 2023 before these most recent invasions.

We will try to open the collective discussion by first inviting a few of the contributors to relate their contributions to the journal to Artsakh, Palestine and/or the wider health of our planetary struggles. Afterward we will open to a discussion with everyone.

Contributors will include:

Reading Materials:

Revolutionary Health

Summer 2023

http://transversality.org/rh/revolutionary_health_vol2.pdf

Exit Plans Palestine

Condemning Hamas / Condoning Genocide

October 2023

http://centreparrhesia.org/shards/condoning_genocide.pdf