TWENTY-ONE YEARS, FOUR MONTHS: The Journal of a Kurdish Political Prisoner

TWENTY-ONE YEARS, FOUR MONTHS: The Journal of a Kurdish Political Prisoner

Please note that this talk was delivered with the assistance of a translator. Join for a discussion of the journal of Kurdish revolutionary, Ali Poyraz. He spent twenty-one years and four months in Turkish prisons. He was born in 1962 in Bozüyük, an Alevi village in the Gürün district of Sivas. According to Yeni Özgür Politika, his political consciousness was shaped by his older brother, Hüseyin Poyraz (also known as Rubar Dicle), a member of the PKK Central Committee. In 1981, Ali was captured by Turkish authorities in a rural area of Pazarcık while serving as a PKK cadre. Tried by a military court, he was sentenced to death. Although the Turkish Supreme Court upheld the sentence, it was later commuted to twenty-one years and four months of imprisonment following the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey under Prime Minister Turgut Özal.Ali’s journal records his thoughts and observations, providing invaluable insight into life inside Turkish prisons, including the organisation, morale, and activities of political prisoners. His journal is a mine of information that lends itself to much probing and understanding of the conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK over the past 45 years. This book is published for scholarly purposes, following the recent disbandment of the PKK as an armed force, and the changing political landscape in Turkey today.We will discuss this powerful and important book, followed by a wider discussion of political imprisonment more generally.This event will be chaired by Dr Becka Hudson is a postdoctoral researcher at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research looks at the interaction between imprisonment, mental health diagnosis and colonial domination. She also has 15+ years experience working in campaigns, for struggles against criminalisation, housing injustice and state racism.

LECTURE: Laurence Housman and the Women’s Suffrage Movement

Learn about Housmans’ namesake and his efforts to fight for women’s suffrage. This free talk is in collaboration UCL, who hold the Laurence Housman archive. Personal items of Housman’s taken from the archive will be on display.This public lecture will explore Housmans Bookshop namesake Laurence Housman (1865-1958) and his active role in the women’s suffrage movement. It will shed new light on UCL’s Laurence Housman Collection by discussing how Housman’s sociopolitical values emerged during the Victorian period as he developed an artistic practice as an Aesthetic and Decadent illustrator. Housman was also a writer who would go on to contribute to Votes for Women (1908-18), a suffrage newspaper edited by Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence. He would later collaborate with his sister, the engraver Clemence Housman, to found the Suffrage Atelier, an artists’ collective. Using illustration as a form of social and political resistance, Housman designed An Anti-Suffrage Alphabet (1911), a work that featured many women artists who would go on to forge professional careers, including Pamela Colman Smith.Dr Michelle Reynolds is a researcher in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and visual culture. Her PhD thesis, which she completed at the University of Exeter, considered the professionalisation of women illustrators and cartoonists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and their relationship to the socio-political and cultural phenomenon of the New Woman. Her research interests include women artists and designers, illustration and book studies, gender and sexuality, reform movements, dress histories, and graphic satire.

Police the Beats: Lambros Fatsis w/ Adèle Oliver

We are absolutely delighted to welcome Lambros Fatsis to Housmans to discuss the criminalizing of black culture, music and youth. We are thrilled also to welcome back the brilliant Adèle Oliver, author of ‘Deeping it: Colonialism, Culture and Criminalisation of UK Drill’, to interview Lambros about his work.Policing The Beats is a bold analysis that exposes the racist policing of Black music. The emergence of UK drill music made headline news, portraying it as a criminal enterprise instead of recognising it as an art form. This new rap subgenre, however, is neither the first nor the only Black music to be targeted this way.Policing the beats rewinds the tape to demonstrate how music has been used as an instrument for policing Black people, from the era of colonial slavery to the present day, revealing the racist legal processes that make crimes out of rhymes.This original and readable book offers the first in-depth account of the policing of Black music in Britain, highlighting the relationship between politics, culture and criminal (in)justice and inviting music lovers, scholars and activists to tune in.

Superweak: Thinking in the 21st Century: Laurent de Sutter in conversation with Alfie Bown

Using the stealth capacities of hermeneutic distrust as his weapon of choice, de Sutter’s writing breaks into unrecovered areas of subtle teachings, shedding light on philosophemes gleaned from Aristotle to punk-led attitude, biojewelry, and the historical buildup of authority billed to the triumph of reason in its many intrusive morphs.— Avital Ronell, New York UniversityWe welcome back the brilliant Alfie Bown to Housmans, this time in the company of Belgian philosopher Laurent de Sutter. The two will be focusing their conversation on the nature and necessity (or, rather, superfluity [as posited by Laurent]) of critique. As a jumping off point they will be using Laurent’s recent work of theory, Superweak: Thinking in the 21st Century. The book is described below:‘We have become superheroes. Nothing can resist us anymore: not persons, ideas, facts, realities, or beings. We owe our superhuman strength to a tool we have taken up that submits everything to the scrutiny of our judgment: critique. After its first formulation at the end of the sixteenth century, the project of critique spread from one sphere to another until it became almost universal: we have all of us been transformed by our equal capacity to judge, approve, and reject.If modernity is defined as the journey we have taken to move away from the myths and dogmas of the past, then critique, with its emphasis on reason and the autonomy of judgment, has been the lynchpin of modernity.Today, however, the critical project shows signs of exhaustion. We are beginning to realize that being right is useless, now that everyone can lay claim to the same power as we can. The democratization of reason, proceeding alongside the development of critique through modernity, has produced a stalemate: for every judgment that we pronounce, there is another opposing one – with grounds as solid as our own, and the same right to assert itself. Rather than elevating us above the world, critique has mired us in an impasse of claim and counter-claim. The age of critique is now over and in its place we need to develop a postcritical form of thinking, one he calls “superweak,” a form of thinking based not on establishing grounds, pronouncing judgment, and determining duty, but on welcoming possibility, exploring what the world has to offer, and cultivating a vertiginous appreciation for moving within a world less grounded and less bounded by the terms of critical reason.’Professor Laurent de Sutter is Professor of Legal Theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. He is the author of more than twenty books translated into a dozen languages. In English, he is the author of Narcocapitalism: Life in the Age of Anaesthesia (Polity, 2017) and After Law (Polity, 2020, French Voices Award, Leopold Rosy Prize of the Belgian Royal Academy). He is the editor of the Theory Redux series at Polity Press and of Perspectives Critiques at Presses Universitaires de France.Dr Alfie Bown is Lecturer in Digital Media Culture and Technology at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Dream Lovers (Pluto, 2022), an investigation into dating apps, sexbots and virtual relationships, Post-Comedy (Polity, 2024), Post-Memes (Punctum, 2019) and The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), a psychoanalytic study of video games which is available in Spanish, Portuguese, Serbian, Slovak and many other languages. Currently, he is working on the relationship between psychoanalysis and cybernetics. He is also editor of Everyday Analysis, a pamphlet house and monthly talk series.

NO TO NUCLEAR! Linda Pentz Gunter in conversation with Jonathon Porritt

‘Linda Pentz Gunter has done a great service in highlighting the nuclear chain reaction and exposing the huge human and environmental costs. We need this book for our environment and a peaceful world’– Jeremy CorbynWe are delighted to welcome Linda Pentz Gunter to Housmans to discuss her new book No To Nuclear. Brilliantly written, clear, concise and exacting, this brilliant book shows us that there is no silver bullet for the climate crisis—but that hasn’t stopped people searching. Seizing its chance, the nuclear power industry wants us to believe that theirs is the only technical fix for our deliverance. The public, politicians and the media have been easily swayed.This should come as no surprise. After all, the pro-nuclear PR campaign is richly funded and has an army of lobbyists sowing myths while the industry reaps the rewards of taxpayer-funded subsidies.No To Nuclear calls the industry’s bluff. Blasting aside its claims to be safe and green, Linda Pentz Gunter makes the irresistible case that nuclear power is too slow, too expensive, too dangerous and too integrally connected to the nuclear weapons complex, to serve as a rational energy choice.The book also delves into the lives of Indigenous peoples and communities of colour, who have been harmed the most by the nuclear sector, and questions whether the way we devalue nature and the environment is costing us the chance of a genuinely just energy transition.Linda Pentz Gunter is the founder of the US-based non-profit Beyond Nuclear and serves as its international specialist. Previously, she was a journalist at USA Network, Reuters, and The Times. She launched, and writes for Beyond Nuclear’s online magazine, Beyond Nuclear International.Joining Linda in conversation we welcome the environmentalist and writer Johnathon Porritt. Jonathon is a great advocate for the Green Party and frequently contributes to magazines, newspapers and books, and appears on radio and television.‘Linda Pentz Gunter has the great skill that more writers should have: to take a crucial and complex issue and make it truly accessible. This rigorous and comprehensive work is a gift to everyone who wants to understand the nuclear power paradox’– Kate Hudson, previous General Secretary of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament