Ewa Majewska: Contesting the canon by means of weak resistance. How to re-claim minoritarian heritage? (ENG)

Walter Benjamin rightly claimed that history is never written by the victims. After the last decades we can see however a plethora of ways of re-writing the history, of contesting and re-shaping the canon and of re-claiming place in history.

Such projects, as feminist work of Griselda Pollock or Donna Haraway in the fields of epistemology and art history, critical studies of archives and exclusion, conducted by Howard Zinn among others, as well as the re-articulation of failure and the everyday by authors so different, as Jack Halberstam and Vaclav Havel, lead to interesting conclusion. The hegemony of the victors can be negotiated or maybe even undermined and transversed. How do we do that? Learning from the experiences of the oppressed and transforming our own analytical tools.

Ewa Majewska – is a feminist theorist of culture, associate professor at the SWPS University in Warsaw, Poland, working on the queer studies/archive theory project “Public against their will. The production of subjects in the archives of “Hiacynt Action”, examining the state action targeting gay men in the 1980s Poland. Majewska taught at the UDK Berlin, University of Warsaw; she was a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley; ICI Berlin and IWM in Vienna. She published seven books, including Feminist Antifascism (Verso, 2021), as well as numerous articles and essays in journals, magazines and collected volumes. In 2023 she received the Emma Goldman Award for her research work on equality.

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