Seeing Red: On the Centenary of the Russian Revolution

Beginning with mass demonstrations and strikes on International Women’s Day in February, 1917 and culminating in the Bolshevik “October Revolution” (November by contemporary calendars), the Russian Revolution took place one hundred years ago this year! Please join us for a live recording of the Podcast for Social Research on October 12th at Brooklyn’s own 61 Local, where we’ll contemplate the enduring legacy of the Russian Revolution. This event will feature a panel of BISR faculty including Asma Abbas, Anthony Alessandrini, Ajay Singh Chaudhary, and Rebecca Ariel Porte and will reflect on the resonance of 1917 through its materials: a set of objects to be chosen by the panelists from the rich array of texts, visual art, films, architecture, music, and technology produced by the revolutionary impulse or in response to it. What was the revolution and why did it happen? How did it play out in practical political terms but also how was it envisioned? In what ways have aspects of the revolution resonated in the last hundred years and even endure today? As we consider how to answer critical demands for programs of positive political imagination in our own moment, we’ll ask what the Russian Revolution has to tell us about what it means to conceive a world in which life and its objects might be different and better.

Participants

• Ajay Singh Chaudhary

  Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a core faculty member specializing in social and political theory. His research focuses on social and political theory, Frankfurt School critical theory, political economy, media, religion, and post-colonial studies. He has written for the The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Quartz, Social Text, Dialectical Anthropology, The Jewish Daily Forward, Filmmaker Magazine, and 3quarksdaily, among other venues. Ajay is currently writing a book on the politics of climate change.

• Anthony Alessandrini

  Anthony Alessandrini is a professor of English at Kingsborough Community College-CUNY and is on the faculty of the MA Program in Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is also a member of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change. He is the author of Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different; the editor of Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives; and the co-editor of “Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey. He is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya E-Zine and a contributor to Status Audio Journal.

• Asma Abbas

  Asma Abbas is Associate Professor of Politics and Philosophy and Emily H. Fisher Faculty Fellow at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science in 2005 from the Pennsylvania State University, her MA in Liberal Studies from the New School for Social Research, and an MBA from the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi. She thinks and work in between politics, aesthetics, poetics, and ethics, and is committed to a post-disciplinarity that can hold together the questions that have been severed from each other—politics from ethics, politics from aesthetics, imperialism from identity, capital from colony, or the feminine from the political. Her ongoing curiosities all find a home in a method of inquiry that conduces to its objects instead of commanding them. She is the author of Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), and has written for Hypatia, Theory & Event, Politics & Culture, and Journal of Politics. Her current book project triangulates, love, time, and terror to speak to a politics of the unrequited.

• Rebecca Ariel Porte

  Rebecca Ariel Porte holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research, which centers on nineteenth- and twentieth-century movements in British and American poetry, concentrates on crossings between early analytic philosophy and modern theories of poetics and aesthetics. Reviews and essays have appeared in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and io9, among other publications.

Event Schedule

Thursday, 6:30-9:00PM
October 12, 2017

This event is free to the public with an $8 suggested donation.

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