6:00 to 8:00pm
Skylight Room

The Committee on Globalization and Social Change presents a book launch and discussion of Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (2019, Oxford University Press). Featuring author Massimiliano Tomba (University of California, Santa Cruz) in conversation with Behrooz Ghamari (Princeton) and Robyn Marasco (Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY). 

Scholars commonly take the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, written during the French Revolution, as the starting point for the modern conception of human rights. According to the Declaration, the rights of man are held to be universal, at all times and all places. But as recent crises around migrants and refugees have made obvious, this idea, sacred as it might be among human rights advocates, is exhausted. It’s long past time to reconsider the principles on which Western economic and political norms rest.

This book advocates for a tradition of political universality as an alternative to the juridical universalism of the Declaration. Insurgent universality isn’t based on the idea that we all share some common humanity but, rather, on the democratic excess by which people disrupt and reject an existing political and economic order. Going beyond the constitutional armor of the representative state, it brings into play a plurality of powers to which citizens have access, not through the funnel of national citizenship but in daily political practice. We can look to recent history to see various experiments in cooperative and insurgent democracy: the Indignados in Spain, the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and, going further back, the Paris Commune, the 1917 peasant revolts during the Russian Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. This book argues that these movements belong to the common legacy of insurgent universality, which is characterized by alternative trajectories of modernity that have been repressed, hindered, and forgotten. Massimiliano Tomba examines these events to show what they could have been and what they can still be. As such he explores how their common legacy can be reactivated. Insurgent Universality analyzes the manifestos and declarations that came out of these experiments considering them as collective works of an alternative canon of political theory that challenges the great names of the Western pantheon of political thought and builds bridges between European and non-European political and social experiments.

Massimiliano Tomba is Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Marx’s Temporalities.
Behrooz Ghamari is Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University. Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He joined the Department of Near Eastern Studies in February 2019 after fourteen years at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he was a professor of history and sociology as well as the Director of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies He is the author of three books on different aspects and historical context of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its aftermath: Islam and Dissent in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Abdolkarim Soroush and the Religious Foundations of Political Reform, London, New York:  I. B. Tauris (Palgrave-Macmillan), 2008; Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016; and Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution, New York, London: O/R Books (Counterpoint), 2016. He has also coedited a special issue of Radical History Review (No. 105, Fall 2009), The Iranian Revolution Turns Thirty, Duke University Press; and also a special issue of Iran-Nāmag (vol. 3, no. 2, Summer 2018), Michel Foucault and the Historiography of Modern Iran.He has written extensively on the topics of social theory and Islamist political thought in different journals and book chapters. Currently, he is working on a project on Mystical Modernity, a comparative study of philosophy of history and political theory of Walter Benjamin and Ali Shariati. Prof. Ghamari will also assume the directorship of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies in fall 2019.
Robyn Marasco is Associate Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research and teaching are in the tradition of critical theory, broadly defined. She is the author of The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel (Columbia UP, 2015), which reconstructs the tradition of critical theory around the idea of negative dialectics. Her work has appeared in leading journals in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, including New German Critique, Political Theory, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Constellations, and Contemporary Political Theory. She is the guest editor of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on “The Authoritarian Personality”. She is currently co-editing, with Banu Bargu, a special issue of Rethinking Marxism on “The Political Encounter with Louis Althusser,” forthcoming in 2019. Professor Marasco is an editorial board member of Theory & Event and an editorial associate at Constellations. She is also the chair of Foundations of Political Theory, the largest professional organization for political theorists and a sub-section of the American Political Science Association. Prior to coming to Hunter and the GC, Professor Marasco taught political theory at Williams College.  More recently, she was a Fellow at the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale University.  She is now working on a book entitled, Critique, Politics, and the Family.

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