Reading Group #4: Phoebe Giannisi and Marios Chatziprokopiou

Chimera, Local Tropics, The Place of Scraps: Polyphonic readings for the species, gender, race and sexuality. 

Thursday 01 April 2021 at 18.00-21.00

online

The seminar embarks on the key question by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the subaltern speak?" (1988) to focus on the practices of ethnography, poetry, and performativity, further raising issues of postcolonial, feminist and queer theories. The participants in the seminar read live selected texts from the books Chimera (Χίμαιρα) and Local Tropics (Τοπικοί Τροπικοί) by Phoebe Giannisi and Marios Hadjiprokopiou, respectively. These readings, and their live, performative versions, are then put in a dialogue with the work of the indigenous, Canadian, poet Jordan Abel, 'The Place of Scraps'. The connecting thread: the shifting of dominant ethnographic discourse on gender, race, and sexuality and how these (re)inscribe in the field of literature - written and/or vocalized. 

The arguments of the three poet(es)s' are inscribed in a genealogy of relations between ethnography and art with a particular emphasis on language (from the work of Michel Leiris to that of Michael Taussig) and discussed in conversation with the critical essays on ethics and politics of performativity and ethnography by David Conquergood.