The Aníbal Quijano Chair: Communal Feminisms

Kurdistan and Latin Amefrica

Tuesday, 22 and Wednesday, 23 October 2019 - 7pm
Place
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200 and Study Centre
Organized by:

Museo Reina Sofía

Programme:

The Aníbal Quijano Chair

Made by El Salvador women in ACNUR refuges. Colomoncagua, Honduras, ca. 1983 Dimensions 47 x 53 cm. Courtesy of Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, El Salvador
Made by El Salvador women in ACNUR refuges. Colomoncagua, Honduras, ca. 1983 Dimensions 47 x 53 cm. Courtesy of Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, El Salvador

The second edition of the Aníbal Quijano Chair sets up a dialogue between two experiences of communal feminisms, understood as the grounds from which to build other ways of life: the farms and gyneceum’s of the Kurdish Confederation, a democratic organisation that questions the state logic of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria; and the movement of public Afro-Latin American self-organisation in Colombia. Both experiments share a testing of cooperative and reciprocal links led by women and are both developed amid violence. Their proposals are not solely ideas. Rather, they are actions which are able to withstand present-day sieges, imagining a future with new codes.

This programme, comprising an encounter, a round-table discussion and a concluding lecture, eschews the rhetoric of heroism and war that intersects conventional political traditions, exploring instead affection that becomes political, in the politicisation entailed in the practice of sustaining life and in the impact of decolonial thought on this new way of doing politics. This edition of the Chair also constitutes a chance to focus again on the legacy of thinker Immanuel Wallerstein (1930–2019), who, recently deceased, was a dear companion of Quijano’s and championed the analysis of the modern world system, key to understanding the drifts of capitalism and cycles of transformation.    

The Aníbal Quijano Chair, coordinated by Rita Segato in collaboration with Elisa Fuenzalida, seeks to open a channel of collective reflection-action and incorporate it into many viewpoints which today encounter colonial modernity stripped of its original promises. The opening edition in 2018 related the issue of the migration crisis in the Mediterranean to memory in colonial contexts, and, more specifically, in the project of decolonial thought formulated by the Peruvian sociologist.  

Check the full programme in the Spanish version.