Revolutionary Disappointment and Recalibration
Principal Investigator(s): Adom Getachew, Daragh Grant, Ghenwa Hayek, Jennifer Pitts, Lisa WedeenUsing theoretical, historical, and multi-sited ethnographic approaches, this project considers questions of revolution, despair, political retrenchment, nostalgia, the politics of waiting, and temporality more generally. We intend to engage with the work of revolutionaries, artists, and scholars in exile and those who have stayed in their countries of origin to reflect on themes of generational change and of evolving priorities, and to investigate the multifarious efforts to navigate everyday life when dreams have been dashed and loved ones lost.
Centered on debates in the Middle East, the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, and Europe, the project sets out to theorize the experience of what happens in the moments between “past and future” (to borrow Arendt’s phrase), when politically engaged actors are forced to confront the formidable challenges to revolutionary action, the sense of defeat, the struggle over narrative, questions of “grievability,” and the hard work of mourning. At the same time, referencing David Scott’s recent work, the project asks what revolutionary thinking might look like when encouraging versions of revolutionary temporality (for example, the Marxist idea of linear progress) are no longer easily embraced. Is revolutionary thinking even possible without a revolutionary temporality? In this light, the project thinks with Fanon and Benjamin, among others, about how we are to understand the political efficacy, pleasures, and horrors of violence. And it treats artists from the Global South as theorists in their own right, interlocutors whose aesthetic and political understandings of these issues are at once conceptual and lived.