Alia Al‐saji
Biographic Data
| ID | 1223779 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alia Al‐saji |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alia |
| FAMILY NAME | Al‐saji |
| SIGNATURE | AL SAJI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | McGill University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9768-7256 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 96 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Touching the wounds of colonial duration
I counter a tendency in critical phenomenology to read Frantz Fanon as derivative upon, indeed reducible to, other (European) phenomenologies, eliding the originality and contemporaneity of his method. I propose it is time to read phenomenology through Fanon , instead of centering analysis on his assumed debt to Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's body schema. Fanon reconfigures and ungrounds phenomenology in Peau noire, masques blancs ( Black Skin, White Ma…
A Debilitating Colonial Duration
I argue that the temporality of colonialism is a disabling duration. To elaborate, I focus on a site in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks where disability/debility and racism intertwine – Fanon’s refusal of “amputation” in his experience of cinema. While such disability metaphors have been problematized as ableist, I argue that amputation is more than a metaphor of lack. It extends what racializing debilitation means and makes tangible the p…
Too Late
This chapter draws on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks to ask after the temporal structures of racialized experience – what I call racialized time. In this vein, I analyze the racialized experience of coming “too late” to a world that appears predetermined in advance and the distorted relation to possibility – the circumscription of playfulness and imaginative variability – that defines this sense of lateness. I argue that the racialization…
Frantz Fanon
This chapter argues that Fanon works to interrupt specular and spectacular renderings of suffering and colonial violence. The touch that Fanon advocates is neither optimal grip, violent grasp, nor uniform pressure, nor can it be predicted in advance. His writing touches colonial wounds; by palpating these wounds and dwelling in them, it resuscitates colonial wounds as feelings that are flesh, and does not leave them behind as if their scar tissue…
Weariness
Though fatigue appears a constant of this pandemic year, I argue that we may not all be living the same pandemic. I highlight the non-belonging of most racialized and colonized peoples to a world where flourishing is taken for granted as norm. To think this, I use the term “weariness.” I want to evoke, wearing out, wearing down, as well as the medical concept of weathering. Drawing on Césaire, Fanon, Hartman, Scott, and Spillers, my concept of we…
SPEP Co-Director's Address
The 2017 “travel bans”—curtailing travel into the United States for nationals of several Muslim-majority countries—make palpable the skewed possibility of movement that comes with belonging to a nationality or passport. My experience of navigating travel as an Iraqi-Canadian gives rise to a critical phenomenological reflection on the affective weight of colonial pasts. The colonial past remains with the present; it is intensified through repeated…
A Phenomenology of Racialized Lateness
Bodies and sensings
The racialization of Muslim veils
This article goes behind stereotypes of Muslim veiling to ask after the representational structure underlying these images. I examine the public debate leading to the 2004 French law banning conspicuous religious signs in schools and French colonial attitudes to veiling in Algeria, in conjunction with discourses on the veil that have arisen in other western contexts. My argument is that western perceptions and representations of veiled Muslim wom…
An Absence that Counts in the World
This paper examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy of time in light of his critique and reconceptualization of Edmund Husserl’s early time-analyses. Drawing on The Visible and the Invisible and lecture courses, I elaborate Merleau-Ponty’s re-reading of Husserl’s time-analyses through the lens of Rudolf Bernet’s “Einleitung” to this work. My question is twofold: what becomes of the central Husserlian concepts of present and retention in …
La Vision dans le Miroir
The memory of another past
Leonard Lawlor, Thinking through French Philosophy
The racialization of Muslim veils
This article goes behind stereotypes of Muslim veiling to ask after the representational structure underlying these images. I examine the public debate leading to the 2004 French law banning conspicuous religious signs in schools and French colonial attitudes to veiling in Algeria, in conjunction with discourses on the veil that have arisen in other western contexts. My argument is that western perceptions and representations of veiled Muslim wom…
SPEP Co-Director's Address
The 2017 “travel bans”—curtailing travel into the United States for nationals of several Muslim-majority countries—make palpable the skewed possibility of movement that comes with belonging to a nationality or passport. My experience of navigating travel as an Iraqi-Canadian gives rise to a critical phenomenological reflection on the affective weight of colonial pasts. The colonial past remains with the present; it is intensified through repeated…
Touching the wounds of colonial duration
I counter a tendency in critical phenomenology to read Frantz Fanon as derivative upon, indeed reducible to, other (European) phenomenologies, eliding the originality and contemporaneity of his method. I propose it is time to read phenomenology through Fanon , instead of centering analysis on his assumed debt to Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's body schema. Fanon reconfigures and ungrounds phenomenology in Peau noire, masques blancs ( Black Skin, White Ma…
An Absence that Counts in the World
This paper examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy of time in light of his critique and reconceptualization of Edmund Husserl’s early time-analyses. Drawing on The Visible and the Invisible and lecture courses, I elaborate Merleau-Ponty’s re-reading of Husserl’s time-analyses through the lens of Rudolf Bernet’s “Einleitung” to this work. My question is twofold: what becomes of the central Husserlian concepts of present and retention in …
The memory of another past
Leonard Lawlor, Thinking through French Philosophy
La Vision dans le Miroir
An Absence that Counts in the World
This paper examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy of time in light of his critique and reconceptualization of Edmund Husserl’s early time-analyses. Drawing on The Visible and the Invisible and lecture courses, I elaborate Merleau-Ponty’s re-reading of Husserl’s time-analyses through the lens of Rudolf Bernet’s “Einleitung” to this work. My question is twofold: what becomes of the central Husserlian concepts of present and retention in …
Bodies and sensings
The racialization of Muslim veils
This article goes behind stereotypes of Muslim veiling to ask after the representational structure underlying these images. I examine the public debate leading to the 2004 French law banning conspicuous religious signs in schools and French colonial attitudes to veiling in Algeria, in conjunction with discourses on the veil that have arisen in other western contexts. My argument is that western perceptions and representations of veiled Muslim wom…
A Phenomenology of Racialized Lateness
SPEP Co-Director's Address
The 2017 “travel bans”—curtailing travel into the United States for nationals of several Muslim-majority countries—make palpable the skewed possibility of movement that comes with belonging to a nationality or passport. My experience of navigating travel as an Iraqi-Canadian gives rise to a critical phenomenological reflection on the affective weight of colonial pasts. The colonial past remains with the present; it is intensified through repeated…
Frantz Fanon
This chapter argues that Fanon works to interrupt specular and spectacular renderings of suffering and colonial violence. The touch that Fanon advocates is neither optimal grip, violent grasp, nor uniform pressure, nor can it be predicted in advance. His writing touches colonial wounds; by palpating these wounds and dwelling in them, it resuscitates colonial wounds as feelings that are flesh, and does not leave them behind as if their scar tissue…
Weariness
Though fatigue appears a constant of this pandemic year, I argue that we may not all be living the same pandemic. I highlight the non-belonging of most racialized and colonized peoples to a world where flourishing is taken for granted as norm. To think this, I use the term “weariness.” I want to evoke, wearing out, wearing down, as well as the medical concept of weathering. Drawing on Césaire, Fanon, Hartman, Scott, and Spillers, my concept of we…
Too Late
This chapter draws on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks to ask after the temporal structures of racialized experience – what I call racialized time. In this vein, I analyze the racialized experience of coming “too late” to a world that appears predetermined in advance and the distorted relation to possibility – the circumscription of playfulness and imaginative variability – that defines this sense of lateness. I argue that the racialization…
A Debilitating Colonial Duration
I argue that the temporality of colonialism is a disabling duration. To elaborate, I focus on a site in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks where disability/debility and racism intertwine – Fanon’s refusal of “amputation” in his experience of cinema. While such disability metaphors have been problematized as ableist, I argue that amputation is more than a metaphor of lack. It extends what racializing debilitation means and makes tangible the p…
Touching the wounds of colonial duration
I counter a tendency in critical phenomenology to read Frantz Fanon as derivative upon, indeed reducible to, other (European) phenomenologies, eliding the originality and contemporaneity of his method. I propose it is time to read phenomenology through Fanon , instead of centering analysis on his assumed debt to Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's body schema. Fanon reconfigures and ungrounds phenomenology in Peau noire, masques blancs ( Black Skin, White Ma…
Philosophy (11 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Art (4 works) · Colonialism (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Psychology (4 works) · History (3 works) · Literature (3 works)