| Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences School of Humanities History at Sydney 2024 | Powerful Stories Seminar Series   “Unauthorized Archives” in the 21st Century. Writing History and Creating Community Through Art in Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya Mark Le Vine (UC Irvine) & Lucia Sorbera (Sydney) 12.30pm – 2.00pm Vere Gordon Childe Centre (F09) and Zoom In the third issue of the reestablished journal Souffles Monde/Anfas al-‘alam – which continues the trajectory of the pioneering Maghrebi intellectual journal of the same name that first published in the late 1960s – we introduced the concept of “collaborative ontologies” as a methodology for re-empowering a praxis-based critical theory. Our premise is that any viable 21st century critical theory needs to be grounded in engaging with, learning and taking the lead from Indigenous ways of knowing and being (epistemologies and ontologies) as being developed and practiced today by Indigenous scholars, activists and practitioners in both post-settler colonies of the Global North (Australasia and North America) as well as Global South (Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia). Our work builds on the genealogies and trajectories of critical theory, postcolonial studies, and decolonial studies, in particular the feminist streams across them. We argue that engaging with the histories, experiences, ideas and practices of Indigenous scholars and activists based on Indigenous research principles and methodologies is crucial to developing new forms of collective knowledge production, solidarity and action in a world increasingly – literally – on fire, with multiple polycrises that have rendered most theories and strategies for social change more or less inoperative today. In this seminar, we apply the concept of collaborative ontologies to our work with grassroots communities of artists in Port Harcourt (Nigeria), Ezbet Khairallah (Cairo, Egypt), and the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, to explore new ways of writing history from below, and building “counter-archives,” which feminist scholars describe as collective record keeping of radical and unauthorized stories (Salime, 2022; Dakhli, 2020). We argue that this is not a merely theoretical exercise. In fact, our argument is that only through sharing our most basic experiences of being-in-the-world can we develop authentically collaborative ways of knowing and acting in it, and through these activities finally move away from an increasingly necrocapitalist modernity, and towards a global political, economic, cultural, and discursive system that heals rather than destroys our world. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Mark Le Vine is Professor of modern Middle Eastern and African histories and cultures at UC Irvine and founding director of the Program in Global Middle East Studies. A 2020-21 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author and editor of a dozen books, most recently We’ll Play till We Die: Journeys Across a Decade of Revolutionary Music in the Muslims World (California, 2022), Altered States: The Remaking of the Political in the Arab World (Routledge 2023), and Art Beyond the Edge: Creativity and Conflict in a World on Fire (California, 2025) Lucia Sorbera is Senior Lecturer and Chair of Discipline of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney. She published widely in history of Egyptian feminism, women’s political activism, and cultural productions in the Arab world, among them, the book Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures. Beyond Norms and Transgression from the Abbasids to the Present. Day (with Serena Tolino and Aymon Kreil, I.B. Tauris, 2021). Her forthcoming book, Biography of a Revolution. The Feminist Roots of Human Rights in Egypt, is published by University of California Press. The Powerful Stories Network is presented by History at Sydney & the Vere Gordon Childe Centre Click here to register your attendance Zoom link to be sent with event reminder. Venue: Vere Gordon Childe Centre (F09) Contact: Please contact Mike McDonnell for more information: michael.mcdonnell@sydney.edu.au Seminar image: Courtesy of Dr Lucia Sorbera  |
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