The guerrilla features prominently in modern and contemporary cultural production, blurring the lines between subjective and objective historical reconfigurations. Here we can cite seminal works like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep not Child (1964), the radical docudrama of Gillo Pontecorvo’s the Battle of Algiers (1962), and the defiance against gendered violence in Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi” (1981). Drawing a parallel between revolutionary groundswells and cultural form, recent manifestations of the guerrilla aesthetic can be seen in Sahar Khalifeh’s humanizing depiction of Palestinian resistance in Silent Spring (2007), Tongo Eisen-Martin’s militant poetics in Blood on the Fog (2021) and Özlem Yasar’s rendering of female Kurdish guerrilla fighters in Kobanê (2022).
Conceptual investigations have emphasized how such representations radically displace the terrain of social and aesthetic environments in what Matt Applegate labels the “irruptive force” of the guerrilla allure. For Kimberly Mairs the urban guerrilla advances new forms of militant subjectivity that “trouble the anchoring of hegemonic memory” while transforming “the interstices of the quiet but stubborn politics of everyday life” into “the shifting emplacement” of revolutionary knowledge and experience. Theoretical works such as Barbara Harlow’s Resistance Literature (1987) and Alain Badiou’s Philosophy for Militants (2012) provide discursive supervision for our panel’s rationale, while Neferti Tadiar’s Remaindered Life (2022) also reminds us of the necessity to foster militant struggle against what she labels “the permanent condition of the not-yet human.”
While acknowledging these conceptual interpretations of guerrilla aesthetic reproduction, we also seek to push beyond the question of irruptive displacement to advance what might be called the autopoiesis of radical livingness, specifically drawing attention to how matrixes of insurgent rejuvenation can disrupt the invasive assemblages of capital’s social metabolism. This collective reorientation informs the interdisciplinary work of this panel, which we posit as part of an evolving discussion of militant regeneration and its teleological implications.
Tahrir Hamdi will begin by highlighting some of debates about the arc of “resistance literature” and cultural politics that has emerged within the Palestinian struggle against settler-colonialism, by using the works of Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, and the cartoonist Naji Al Ali. Hamdi attempts to situate the revolutionary concept of “sumud,” or steadfastness in Arabic, thereby revealing a form of defiant art that speaks on behalf of the colonized and oppressed. Centering on the motif of militant regeneration, Hamdi’s presentation highlights some of these artists’ ideas and writings that continue to live and exist in sumud, since, for Palestinian literature and culture, there can be no aesthetic outside the freedom of Palestine and Palestinians.
Continuing to work through this historic framework of guerrilla resurgence and its aesthetic contours, James Bliss will draw specific attention to the work of Kuwasi Balagoon, an army veteran who participated in Black guerrilla movements like the Black Liberation Army. Bliss contextualizes Black militancy in the post-1968 era by examining Balagoon’s life writing, trial speeches, and poetry, collected posthumously. By focusing on how Balagoon’s New Afrikan Anarchism intervenes in the debates about Black radicalism and identity politics into the 1970’s, Bliss traces the trajectory of racial capitalism into the present context.
Expanding upon the intersections of Black militancy, racism, and imperialist violence, Ben Papsun examines the anticolonial politics of Black Arts Movement poet Jayne Cortez through the framework of militant radical activist and theorist Frantz Fanon. With specific attention to poems from the collections Firespitter (1982) and Coagulations (1984), Papsun argues that Cortez’s depiction of colonial oppression and her engagement with other Pan-Africanist artists and radicals can be understood as a form of “counter-assimilation,” or a necessary step towards the productive deployment of guerrilla counterviolence.