Reading Group Insurgent Rituals with Lamya Sadiq

At a time when our unfreedoms are so pronounced; wars are raging and we are reminded safety is conditional. Pleasure, comfortable housing, time for loved ones or to be truly sad feel elusive or deferred. Yet it is in these moments that we become most ungovernable, our calls for abundant life and liberation loudest. The soul, the spirit, somehow evades capture.

This reading group attempts to think through the practice of ‘believing’ as a serious political endeavor. How do we cultivate the beliefs which enable us to commit to the feeling of the ‘not-yet’, to the horizon? The present is haunted by the specters of what was, is and will be possible. When we relentlessly invoke a future known only through affect, glimmers, prayers and dreams, we become accustomed to a way of feeling and doing that refuses the fiction of liberal reasoning, capitalist time and nation-states. Every invocation towards freedom intercepts the present with new messages to confuse and disorder the deathly circuits intent on disciplining us.

This is an opportunity to explore, acknowledge and ground ourselves in the rituals (some are not always known nor possible to articulate) that nourish and sustain our belief in something better (Free Palestine!) – the ceremonies through which we call upon our ancestors, develop new architectures for listening and speaking, build relationships with ideas and each other, notice multidimensionally; lovingly reaching forward to the ‘what is to come’.

We will collectively read and discuss texts in relation to our own existing or possible ‘insurgent rituals’. Advance reading is not compulsory but highly encouraged to inspire our discussions.

Selected extracts

‘An Apartment on Uranus’ by Paul B. Preciado

• ‘Marcos Forever’, pg. 81-83,
• ‘The Attractive Force of a Breakup’, pg. 88-90,
• ‘The Courage to be Yourself’, pg. 97-100,
• ‘I Would like to Live’, pg. 220-222

‘Cruising Utopias’ by José Esteban Muñoz

• ‘Queerness as Horizon’, pg. 30 last paragraph

‘Experiments in Imagining Otherwise’ by Lola Olufemi

• ‘a note on design’, pg. 42-43

‘The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study’ by Stefano Harney & Fred Moten

• ‘Hapticality or Love’, pg. 97-99

This reading group is part of iniva’s Research Network programme Contested Sites. It is supported by funding from Freelands Foundation.

Accessibility

If you have any access requirements, please email us in advance at info@iniva.org and we will do our best to accommodate.

About the facilitator

Lamya Sadiq works across social histories, sonic and visual worlds and psychoanalytic theory to locate tools for other-world making. Her enquiries attempt to highlight the ambivalences of the present, searching for ruptures, portals and spectral hauntings that tells us these other worlds always exist/are possible. Lamya is from Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Lamya works at MayDay Rooms Archive and is a wellbeing worker for Hopscotch Women’s Center. She is also a member of Red Therapy, an abolitionist collective attempting to think beyond existing psychiatric and psychotherapeutic systems and practices.

Image credit: East London Big Flame: Red Therapy, 1978. Courtesy of MayDay Rooms Archive