Film and Literary Studies

On May 31st 2012, we organized a whole-day art event called Cultuur?Barbaar! (“Culture?Barbarian!”) at Scheltema Leiden (http://barbaarskunstcomplex.wordpress.com). Around fifteen artists and acts from several disciplines (visual art, poetry, music, photography, conceptual art) got together to perform their interpretation of the theme barbarism for an audience of around 150 visitors.

The event was an artistic response to the conference Barbarism Revisited: New Perspectives on an Old Concept, which was organized by Leiden University and the University of Bonn from May 30th to June 1st 2012. Our goal was to “barbarise” the conference. To “barbarise” the conference, for us, meant to intervene in the academic discussion without reverting to the same theoretical dialogue that belongs to it.

Our intervention was to take shape through artistic research. According to Balkema and Slager’s definition, this is a form of research in which the art event is used as a means of producing knowledge other than the knowledge obtained through academic discourse, by using a different language and methodology, and focusing more on the experimental and tentative nature of making artistic statements.

That this is not done unproblematically, is something we found out when we tried to engage in academic concepts through this mode of artistic research, in the vein of Hubert Damisch. The objective of our article, then, is twofold. First, we want to read the art event critically, asking whether we succeeded in our goal. At the same time, however, we want to discuss our methodology (i.e. art-based research) and bring it in discussion with Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments on the problems of creating concepts through art.

While remaining close to the art event itself, discussing the projects of several participants, we will also question, in a broader sense, the effectivity of trying to contribute to (or intervene in) a conference through an art event.

This year's pride season marked the 50 th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, an event that, while not the beginning of the Gay Rights Movement in the United States, should at least be viewed as one of the first major milestones in the movement's history. In the Netherlands, too, the history of LGBT activism has been commemorated in the recent exhibition 'With Pride' , organised by IHLIA LGBT Heritage (see the review by Michiel Odijk in this issue). After its first successful run at the Amsterdam Public Library, the exhibition toured the Netherlands and opened in Utrecht during its annual pride festivities on June 3. While praised for its thorough documentation of 40 years of Dutch queer resistance, there was also critique. A number of activists and scholars pointed to a lack of inclusivity and representation, which they argued compromised the exhibition's validity.Wigbertson Julian Isenia and Naomie Pieter, founders of Black Queer and Trans Resistance Netherlands (BQTRNL) and Black Queer Archive, represent two of these critical voices and address the structural exclusion of queers of colour in history writing and archival practices in their work. Julian co-edited the previous issue of Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies (vol. 22(2): ‘Sexual Politics Between the Netherlands and the Caribbean: Imperial Entanglements and Archival Desire’) and, together with Gianmaria Colpani, Julian and Naomie organised the roundtable ‘Archiving Queer of Colour Politics in the Netherlands’ (Colpani, Isenia, & Pieter, 2019). In response to the IHLIA exhibi- tion, they proposed an exhibition under the title Nos Tei (Papiamentu/o for ‘We are here’ or ‘We exist’), which is to serve as an addition to the original ‘With Pride’ exhibition and ran independently from 11 July until 4 September

We invite contributions to a Special Issue on "Radioactive Empires: The Nuclear Relations of Coloniality." This issue draws its title from the landmark 1986 article, "Native America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism" by Winona LaDuke and Ward Churchill, in which the authors posit colonialism as having a radioactive quality: everything it does cannot be undone, and in its doing, it imperils "everyone alive and who will be alive." Over 30 years on, we seek to reflect on this work by mapping the cross-temporal and cross-cultural impacts of the nuclear relations of coloniality, attending to the place of nuclear weapons in colonial histories and contemporary realities, as well as the impacts of nuclear energy production, storage, and waste on Indigenous territories. This expansive focus allows us to bring together diverse contexts that might include (but are not limited to): uranium mining on Indigenous territories across the US, Canada, and Australia; the storage of US nuclear weapons in Europe; the legacies of US, British, and French nuclear testing in the Pacific; and nuclear waste radiation and contamination in Palestine. Putting these ostensibly distinct incidences of extraction, energy production, and militarization into relation allows us to map the significance of nuclearity in the dynamics of colonial projects. Please submit an abstract of 300 words outlining your proposed contribution, noting which type of submission it is (article, provocation, critical reflection), and a short bio.