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Contact: [email protected] VolumeVolume 29 27 Fall Spring no. 2n. 2017 2 2016 www.GCadvocate.comwww.GCadvocate.com [email protected]@cunydsc.org Whose Community?: A Scalar Report from Graduate Center Grounds pg. 28 The Siege Comes to NY pg. 17 The Revolution Should not be Televised pg. 12 editorial The Rebel’s Time Contents Remembering Vidrohi’s Poetry of Revolution www.GCadvocate.com [email protected] Bhargav Rani EDITORIAL CUNY LIFE “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot Bhargav take its poetry from the past but only from the future.” Rani The Rebel’s Time: Whose Community?: Remembering Vidrohi’s A Scalar Report from Nandini Poetry of Revolution Graduate Center Grounds his oft-quoted sentence from Marx’s production, The Seige, in New York; the first of a two- Ramachandran Bhargav Rani Angela Dunne and pg. 3 Conor Tomás Reed The Eighteenth Brumaire of Lou- part investigation of the oeuvre of the radical leftist pg. 28 is Bonaparte, was the subject of documentary filmmaker Peter Watkins; and an essay Alessandro much debate in a recent seminar on on the revolutionary underpinnings in George Or- Zammataro FEATURES “Revolution” at Columbia Univer- well’s writings. In the way of a prologue, this editorial 100 Years of the sity, whose problematics formed explores the messianic quality that infused the words The Revolutions Russian Revolution the basis of the first editorial of the of the revolutionary poet, Vidrohi. What this issue of- Should not be Televised: The Advocate this semester. The central fers is a particular “constellation” of creative produc- Oeuvre of Peter Watkins Women and the point of contention between two of the guest speak- tions in history drawn from the fields of theatre, film, Curtis Russell Russian Revolution Ters, Gayatri Spivak and Étienne Balibar, was over the literature and poetry, that we hope our readers will pg. 12 Tatiana Cozzarelli specific meaning of “poetry” in Marx’s text. While “make” meaning of by mediating it with the material pg. 38 Balibar interprets Marx’s choice of word as a meta- conditions of their own lives, conditions that inform phor for political imagination, for Spivak, “poetry” our understanding of art and revolution. The Siege comes to NY here signifies just that – poiesis, “to make,” a creative To understand the poiesis of Vidrohi’s words, we Ashley Marinaccio REVIEW production in the form of theatre, songs, dance, lit- must first understand the space that produced him pg. 17 Between Value and Valor: erature, art. Spivak argues that Marx is here shifting – Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi. Review of Corey Robin’s from a discussion on the “form” of revolutions to the To be a student at JNU is, in the first instance, to be actual “content” of revolutions, and to her, “poetry” a student of history: to apprehend history not in its The Reactionary Mind: Orwell’s Revolution was what Marx acutely recognized as the privileged bowdlerized continuity and as it manifests in the an- Conservatism from Edmund Harry Blain mode of infusing the concept of revolution with radi- nals of the dominant, but in the disarticulating dis- Burke to Donald Trump pg. 22 cal content. continuities experienced by the dominated. Within Asher Wycoff The present issue of the Advocate stems from this the thresholds of the university’s sprawling campus, pg. 43 tension between poetry and political imagination history breaks its imposed silences and the ghosts in the concept of revolution and its content, and ex- of the dead speak through the living. In the face of plores its resonances in artistic, cultural and literary erasure, they are made visible on the walls plastered productions. This month’s features include an inter- with political graffiti and they are given a voice in view with members of the Freedom Theatre, a Pales- the slogans of “Inquilab Zindabad!” (“Long Live the tinian theatre company that recently debuted their Revolution!”) that reverberate like a refrain. A morn- Front Cover: Yuichi Ikehata, “Fragmented beauty”. Ikehata’s works incorporate pieces of daily life to challenge 2 — — Fall no. 2 2017 Fall no. 2 2017 — — 3 “distinction between truth and reality” through deconstructed sculptures. v editorial editorial ing walk to class is itself a lesson sity canteens. In the liminal shade in left politics. When the adminis- in history imparted not just by of the evening light, students sit tration asked him never to set foot Marx and Lenin, Ambedkar and perched on crude stone blocks on campus again, Vidrohi’s rebel- Bhagat Singh, Irom Sharmila and dissect history over chai and lion was absolute: he simply never and Che Guevara, but also by the samosas. The usual banter and left JNU. He made the campus his indentured farmer and the dis- gossip of student life easily segue home for over thirty years, breath- possessed peasant gazing down into serious interrogations of his- ing poetry into the students’ from the walls of the university tory, until the pleasant evening movement till his death. Present buildings. And an evening cup of air is pregnant with the weight of at every protest, march and dem- chai at the cafeteria is accompa- competing philosophies. Althuss- onstration, he kindled the histori- nied by cultural protests, solidar- er is invoked in the same breath cal consciousness of the students ity marches and demonstrations, as Ambedkar, just as debates on through the revolutionary force of and political-cultural groups com- local and national politics seam- his poetry. He spoke of class strug- memorating revolutionary poets lessly lead into Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s gles and emancipation of women, and writers, performing street poetry. In a space conditioned attacked capitalism and religion, plays, or singing songs of resis- by free debate and intellectual and in his poems, conflated his- tance. Subjugated histories are exchange, a new temporality is tories of oppressions and upris- resurrected, forgotten heroes re- produced. But these philosophi- ings that spanned an astounding membered, and the promise of cal excursions are but cadences of temporal breadth. Vidrohi was a revolution is kept alive in these the rhythm kept by the timekeep- lokshahir, a “people’s poet,” in the songs. er, Vidrohi. From a dark corner of true sense. If we are to go by Agamben’s Ganga dhabha, seated under the For Agamben, to be “contem- thesis that “[e]very conception of shade of a massive tree, this frail, porary” is not a social given of the history is invariably accompanied disheveled man in ragged clothes, present, but is a distinctive modal- by a certain experience of time a vagabond poet, spewed a dan- ity of apperception and existence. which is implicit in it,” it is unsur- gerous barrage of words at the It is a “singular relationship with prising that this emancipation world. At those moments that one’s own time, which adheres of history, albeit in the utopian they were not a relentless string of to it and, at the same time, keeps enclave that is JNU, fosters and vile expletives, Vidrohi’s verse put a distance from it.” To be a con- conditions a radically different history on trial. temporary is, thus, to apprehend experience of time. The tempo- Ramashankar Yadav, popularly time “through a disjunction and rality of its student life chimes in known as “Vidrohi,” literally “the an anachronism.” Vidrohi was, in tantalizing proximity to the hour rebel,” was once a student of JNU. that sense, Agamben’s “contem- of revolution. Its romance is a ro- Born in 1957 in the small town of porary.” His contemporariness mance of rebellion and resistance. Sultanpur in Uttar Pradesh, the lived in his dogged resistance The rhythms of its everyday are Hindi-heartland of the country, against the temporal regimes of syncopated by dreams and po- he enrolled in the university in the the neoliberal everyday, regimes litical aspirations that transcend early eighties to pursue a Ph.D. in governed by the logic of produc- the everyday. At the core of this Hindi. He was soon expelled for tivity and deployed in the service time capsule—its heart, where his participation in a mass stu- of capital. It was a corporeal distil- its beats are most palpable—is dent movement against the ad- lation of the temporality of resis- Ganga dhaba, one of the univer- ministration and his involvement tance that the university produces Credit: Tanushree Bhasin 4 — — Fall no. 2 2017 Fall no. 2 2017 — — 5 editorial editorial in its most radical and austere its violent erasures and oppres- I think about it, to rediscover the present, Vidro- to invoke Benjamin, where this says. And it is the same story over manifestation. Vidrohi, in Agam- sive silences, and Vidrohi strives Again and again I think about it, hi begins his poem by situating historical juncture is posited in again in the “jungles of Savan- ben’s words, firmly held “his gaze to ignite an insurrection through a That why is it that on the step- this image of the “burnt corpse relationship with every other in- nah,” in the “mountains of Scyth- on his own time so as to perceive radical archeology of the past. ping stone of every ancient civi- of a woman” and the “scattered stant of institutionalized violence ia,” and the “plains of Bengal.” not its light but rather its dark- One of Vidrohi’s most famous lization, bones of human beings” in one in history even as it is mediated Those scattered bones could just ness.” The astronomical metaphor poems, “The Burnt Corpse of a One find’s the burnt corpse of a of the oldest urban civilizations by the present.