psp.26.screenshot_20240404_122327.webp
Radical Encounters

Author(s)
Rasha Salti, Ranjit Hoskote

As part of FORMER WEST: Documents, Constellations, Prospects, 18–24 March 2013 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, art critic, poet, and curator Ranjit Hoskote convened a forum on “Insurgent Cosmpolitanism” with cultural theorists and artists whose work addresses and performs the insurgent cosmopolitan condition.

“Insurgent Cosmpolitanism” retrieves the ideal of cosmopolitanism in an active, critical, and insurgent mode: asserting the rights of the citizen to evolve new socialities, associations, and forms of representation that cut transversely across the definitions laid down and the boundaries sanctioned by state institutions. 

As a worldview or way of being, cosmopolitanism has long been open to the charge of being unanchored with respect to a commitment to a specific national or regional reality. The notion of insurgent cosmopolitanism locates itself in opposition to the idea of a universal, normatively dictated “global culture,” to which the cosmopolitan supposedly subscribes. Here, on the contrary, the cosmopolitan moment is located in the uncertainty, surprise, curiosity, and receptivity that attend the heuristic releasement of the self to the Other, on the basis of perceived affinities of predicament, yet in the awareness of radical differences. Such encounters among disparate subjectivities produce a multi-local sense of belonging, and allow citizens of postcolonial societies to transit from a territorially bounded sense of national space to a post-national cultural latitude. They also permit a dissolution of the dogma of “rootedness” through the mode of critical yet empathetic regard towards one’s location in a society or nation-state. Film theorist, writer, and curator Rasha Salti engages with Ranjit Hoskote on these subjects in a conversation title “Radical Encounters.”

Related
Film still from Rafael Balulu’s docume
Film still from Rafael Balulu’s documentary Levantine (2019) showing archival footage of Jacqueline Kahanoff, at the head of the table, in a board meeting of the Israel Broadcasting Authority. Kahanoff became board member in 1965 and had a Fren
3 February 2022
Kahanoff’s Levantinism: The Anachronic Possibilities of a Concept

The modern nation-state is supposed to be ethnically and culturally homogenous; after World War II, both Israel’s implementation of Zionism and Arab Nationalism adopted versions of this purism—purging and excluding from the body social what refuses assimilation.

psp.26.screenshot_20240404_122327.webp
7 November 2021
Radical Encounters

As part of FORMER WEST: Documents, Constellations, Prospects, 18–24 March 2013 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, art critic, poet, and curator Ranjit Hoskote convened a forum on “Insurgent Cosmpolitanism” with cultural theorists and artists whose work addresses and performs the insurgent cosmopolitan condition.

psp.24.thestateiscoagulatedbloodandbonesspreads.webp
12 August 2021
(The State Is) Coagulated Blood and Bones

Mariana Botey’s text The State Is Coagulated Blood and Bones is written as a prologue to Cooperativa Cráter Invertido’s codex-comic Sangre Coagulada y Huesos (Coagulated Blood and Bones, 2021). The two contributions have been conceived in collaboration and are to be read in parallel, allowing for a mutual disruption of discourse and image.

Wall chart depicting an international ne
Wall chart depicting an international network of avant-garde magazines from the 1920s in the section “Platforms of the Avant-Garde: Der Sturm in Berlin and Mavo in Tokyo” of Hello World: Revising a Collection, Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für
12 August 2021
Transnational Trajectories

Long weaponized in the service of capital by the agents of neoliberalism, the nation-state is once again upheld as the bulwark of a white ethnos, securing privilege against migrants and immigrants, and against other nation-states in relations of neocolonial dependence.

Special forces of the Women’s Defense
Special forces of the Women’s Defense Units (YPJ) look out over their training camp situated near Qamişlo, part of a 2014 photo series by Jonas Staal, titled Anatomy of a Revolution — Rojava, and published in The New World Academy Reader #5: Stateles
11 August 2021
Living Without Approval

From: New World Academy Reader #5: Stateless Democracy, Renée In der Maur and Jonas Staal in dialogue with Dilar Dirik, eds. (Utrecht: BAK basis voor actuele kunst, 2015), pp. 27–54

psp.21.kahanoffbroadcast.webp
11 August 2021
Kader Attia and Marion von Osten

From: Once We Were Artists, Maria Hlavajova and Tom Holert, eds. (Utrecht: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst and Amsterdam: Valiz, 2017), pp. 32–52

Nina Støttrup Larsen, The Cut, The Pun
Nina Støttrup LarsenThe Cut, The Punch, The Press, 2021, video still detailing an image of a coffee plantation on a 50 CFA franc banknote, 1946–1958.
11 August 2021
The Horizon of National Liberation: Exiting the Neocolonial State

In 1970–1971, Guyanese radical historian and anti-colonial activist Walter Rodney gave a series of lectures on the historiography of the Russian Revolution at University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Inspired by C. L. R. James’s historical work on the October Revolution, Rodney set out to reveal the parallels between the problems confronting the postcolonial regimes in Ghana and Tanzania, and those that the Bolsheviks faced in building the Soviet state.

psp.23.screenshot_20240404_122549.webp
11 August 2021
The Cut, The Punch, The Press

The video The Cut, The Punch, The Press (2021) is assembled from filmed fragments of a collection of 65 banknotes of the CFA franc, circulated between 1945–2021.