Alia Al-Saji
Current research interests
Al-Saji’s research traces two interrelated trajectories. The first trajectory explores questions of corporeity, memory, and intersubjectivity in terms both of affectivity and perception. She aims to think intersubjective relations in temporal terms, drawing on the philosophies of Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Frantz Fanon.
In the second trajectory, Al-Saji develops a phenomenology of what has been called “cultural racism”. She offers a critical race feminist analysis of representations of Muslim women in contemporary Western contexts by questioning the ways in which race and gender are at play in attitudes toward the Muslim headscarf or “veil”.
Al-Saji is currently completing a monograph on Hesitation: Critical Phenomenology, Colonial Duration, and the Affective Weight of the Past. In this book, she draws on the works of Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon and brings them into dialogue with critical race, decolonial, and feminist philosophies. This manuscript not only presents a sustained argument for thinking intersubjectivity temporally, but also brings together her two research trajectories by asking after the ethics and politics of memory and perception. The book presents an analysis of oppressive—specifically racializing—ways of seeing and the ways they are lived by racialized subjects, in order to generate possibilities for “seeing differently”.
Al-Saji’s research traces two interrelated trajectories. The first trajectory explores questions of corporeity, memory, and intersubjectivity in terms both of affectivity and perception. She aims to think intersubjective relations in temporal terms, drawing on the philosophies of Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Frantz Fanon.
In the second trajectory, Al-Saji develops a phenomenology of what has been called “cultural racism”. She offers a critical race feminist analysis of representations of Muslim women in contemporary Western contexts by questioning the ways in which race and gender are at play in attitudes toward the Muslim headscarf or “veil”.
Al-Saji is currently completing a monograph on Hesitation: Critical Phenomenology, Colonial Duration, and the Affective Weight of the Past. In this book, she draws on the works of Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon and brings them into dialogue with critical race, decolonial, and feminist philosophies. This manuscript not only presents a sustained argument for thinking intersubjectivity temporally, but also brings together her two research trajectories by asking after the ethics and politics of memory and perception. The book presents an analysis of oppressive—specifically racializing—ways of seeing and the ways they are lived by racialized subjects, in order to generate possibilities for “seeing differently”.
less
InterestsView All (32)
Uploads
Papers by Alia Al-Saji
Published in the edited volume: Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race. Edited by Emily Lee. State University of New York Press, SUNY series in Philosophy and Race, 2014, pp. 133-172.
ABSTRACT:
This paper asks how vision becomes racializing and seeks the means for its critical interruption. My aim is not only to understand the recalcitrant and limitative structure of racializing habits of seeing, but also to uncover the possibilities within vision for a critical awareness and destabilization of this structure. Reading Merleau-Ponty and Bergson in dialogue with Fanon, Young and race-critical feminism, I locate within hesitation the phenomenological moment where habits of seeing can be internally fractured. Hesitation, I claim, makes visible the exclusionary logic of racializing and objectifying vision, countering its affective closure and opening it to critical transformation.
Published in the edited volume: Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race. Edited by Emily Lee. State University of New York Press, SUNY series in Philosophy and Race, 2014, pp. 133-172.
ABSTRACT:
This paper asks how vision becomes racializing and seeks the means for its critical interruption. My aim is not only to understand the recalcitrant and limitative structure of racializing habits of seeing, but also to uncover the possibilities within vision for a critical awareness and destabilization of this structure. Reading Merleau-Ponty and Bergson in dialogue with Fanon, Young and race-critical feminism, I locate within hesitation the phenomenological moment where habits of seeing can be internally fractured. Hesitation, I claim, makes visible the exclusionary logic of racializing and objectifying vision, countering its affective closure and opening it to critical transformation.
Freie Universität Berlin, May 17 & 18, 2018
Places are limited, registration required
Speakers: Alia Al-Saji, Flora Löffelmann, Paul*A Helfritzsch, Johanna Oksala
This event invites interested researchers to collectively reflect on the relationship between critique and time. Special attention shall be paid to current critical phenomenological approaches. We are particularly interested in fostering international dialogue around the following questions:
- Can an investigation of time and temporality offer tools for formulating pertinent critique?
- What tools does critical phenomenology have to offer for investigating time and temporality?
- How can we conceive of the past in a critical way?
- What role can decolonial approaches play for such reflective work?
- What is the temporality of critique itself?
- Is critical thinking set in the present only, describing a problematic status quo, or is it apt to foster a better future?
- How and to what extent can temporality be thought of in plural terms, and what implications follow from this conceptualisation?
- Following the last question, what different modes of perception of time and temporality need articulation, specifically when considering categories such as class, gender and race?
- What makes the time we live in a critical time and what conceptual and political tasks follow from this?
- Finally, what is the relationship between affect, repetition and transformation? Links to themes such as trauma and nostalgia are more than welcome.