The First London Anarchist Studies Network London Social - Be There or Be Somehere Else!
Tuesday 2nd March, 7pm - Freedom Bookshop, Whitechapel.
This is an opportunity for Anarchist students, researchers and Anarchist academics living, working or visiting in the capital to meet, talk and socialise. Freedom have even agreed to raise the ceiling to ensure all those pointy heads fit in the building!
Bring a bottle and get yourself down there.
Freedom is at Angel Alley, 84b Whitechapel High Street - nearest tube Aldgate East. For those arriving late, we will at some stage decamp to the nearby White Hart public house for further refreshments.
ASN wins £1400 for 2009 activities
The ASN was today (14/04/09) awarded £1400 by the PSA to fund our activities in 2009. In a seperate bid, the PSA also awarded the group £2000 for its forthcoming joint conference with the Marxism specialist group (see below).
Is Black and Red Dead?
An historic conference co-organised by the ASN and the PSA Marxism Specialist Group. A full call for papers, registration forms, payment details and posters can be found here.
New Call for Papers: Anarchism, Labor Unions, and Working People
Click on Call for Papers above
Call for Papers: Anarchism and Sexuality in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries
Leeds, 19 February 2010.
ANARCHISTS ORGANISE PISS-UP IN BREWERY (01/08/08)
To celebrate the second birthday of the establishment of ASN in November 2007, members organised a tour of Nottingham's Castle Rock Brewery. Hangovers contributed to it taking this long to post up the announcement.
Panel Report
*Modernity, Third World and “Third Spaces” CONVENOR: Sureyyya Evren PAPERS PRESENTED: Sharif Gemie: 'Women’s Writing and “Third Spaces”: Some Iranian Examples’ Sureyyya Evren: ‘Modernity, Third World and Anarchism’
A SHORT REPORT
Modernity, Third World and “Third Spaces” was a panel that discussed anarchism in the third world, relationships between anarchism and modernity, specifically in the context of third world countries, and – in general - ideas about liberty/emancipation in those political environments.
The panel was conducted in a small, friendly room which turned out to be an ideal place for discussion at the end of the panel.
In his paper, Sharif Gemie tested Homi Bhabha’s concept “Third Spaces” with reference to three women writers from the Islamic world describing women’s lives in Muslim countries: Chahdortt Djavann, Azar Nafisi and Shirin Ebadi. Gemie discussed the features shared by all those writers and differences with the help of Bhabha’s work. Gemie noted shared qualities of those writers as follows: they are all written in major Western languages, even if some of the authors have used assistants as editors. They are all published in the West; they all accept as a working premise that the topic of women’s lives in Muslim countries is of some fundamental and inherent importance: arguably a feminist argument; they all seem to imply that female authors have some specific and important quality to bring to this debate, although this point is rarely made explicitly; they all gravitate towards a personalized, even first-person, form of writing, even when debating issues of general, social or political importance. None of the authors indicate an affiliation to any organized political or religious tendency: implicitly, their claim is that they are just ‘ordinary women’, and therefore representative of a larger constituency – although not necessarily the majority of their respective countries.
Gemie also supported his presentation with images of women from Iran in various circumstances. As his talk ended we had a spectrum of approaches to the problem of women’s daily lives in Muslim countries, and particularly in Iran.
And in his paper, Sureyyya Evren discussed two main articles on conceptualizing non-Western or Third World anarchism written by Jason Adams and Sharif Gemie. Evren underlined Adams’ attempt as a suggestion of rewriting anarchist history and reconceptualising anarchism by adding non-western anarchisms in to the ‘anarchist canon’ and Gemie’s attempt as a search for a genuine ‘anarchism of the third world’ that is unique to third world. Evren situated himself closer to Adams’ attitude because he also thinks that the ‘anarchist canon’ should be rewritten with non-eurocentric and non-essentialist concerns. (Later, during the discussion, Gemie said that he wouldn’t disagree with this, but he finds Adams and Evren too optimistic in a way, and as pessimist in this issue, finds it much more realistic to work for a separate ‘anarchism of the third world’). Evren also emphasized problems of anarchist history writing in the sense of handling theory and practice(experiences), claimed that many problems are rooted in the modernist assumptions beneath histories and conceptualization of anarchism and prejudices about third world anarchism is thus constructed. Evren noted that ignoring the cultural contextual differences within worldwide anarchist circles do not help for a unified understanding.
The discussion afterwards was quite lively and bilingual (in French and English). Ranging from topics of cultural differences to Islamic women, veil and semi-naked Western women! (25 % of the participators were women, representing a relatively high rate in the conference.) Actually, Sharif Gemie reminded everyone that there must be an end to the discussions (because it was going on and on). But it is pretty obvious that it won’t be easy to forget the exceptional moment when Sharif Gemie said, as the last words of our panel, which was one of the last sessions on Saturday, that he haven’t been in such a wonderful anarchist conference before, adding: “and I am 50…”
For some, these were the last words of the whole conference…
Sureyyya Evren