Dear friends of the UMIH,
First, a reminder about the call for applications for UMIH Research Clusters, Research Affiliates, and Graduate Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year. The
deadline for applications is Thursday, April 30, see attached files or visit our website for more information.
For this week, the UMIH is very glad to support the following three events organized by
Mosaic. Interdisciplinary Critical Journal:
- Literature’s Strike: Melville, Bartleby Theory, and Benito Cereno
Michael Krimper (NYU)
Tuesday, March 17th, 7-8:30pm, Cross Common Room, St. John’s College
Michael Krimper's work on inoperativity,
désoeuvré, idleness, and the correspondences between
Georges Bataille's notion of "unemployed negativity" and Walter Benjamin's "dialectics at a
standstill" offer one of a number of crucial theoretical pathways to keeping the possibility of a
subversive politics alive in the continuing end times in which we live. One of Krimper's
aesthetico-political hunches is that the poetics of drifting typical of Baudelaire's Flâneur might not
only rupture the work of the crowd (whether capitalist, communist, or fascist), but also resensitize
the crowd in ways that would make for an open-ended and plural form of sociality. Dr. Krimper’s
lecture will revisit the theoretical reception of Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by
writers ranging from Maurice Blanchot to Giorgio Agamben to the anonymous collective Tiqqun,
as well as its political renewal during the events of Occupy Wall Street. It will ask how we can
reread this reception now in the wake of Bartleby theory and politics, bringing it into conversation
with the slave revolt of another short story by Melville “Benito Cereno.” Its aim will be to
elucidate the art of refusal in Melville, his techniques of abdication and abolition, enacting a
general strike in and through literature that speaks to the urgency of living otherwise in times of
distress.
-Graduate Seminar: “Nonsovereign: Inoperativity from Battaille to Agamben”
Michael Krimper (NYU)
Wednesday, March 18th, 11-1pm, 409 Tier
-Dying-In
Banu Bargu (University of California-Santa Cruz)
Thursday, March 19
Time: 11:00AM-1:00PM
ZOOM
RSVP for Dr. Banu Bargu's Zoom Lecture "Dying-In" and/or Graduate Student Seminar – Fill out form
Dr. Bargu’s lecture concentrates on the intersection between climate protest and what she calls corporeal agency, a kind of truth telling, that risks or sacrifices
the singular body for the common good. The lecture will build on the work of Dr. Bargu’s 2024 book
Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal (Oxford UP).
Jorge A. Nállim
Director, Institute for the Humanities
Acting Head and Professor, Department of History
405 Fletcher Argue Bldg.
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, MB R3T 5V5
https://umanitoba.ca/arts/jorge-nallim
Sanda McGee Deutsch and Jorge A. Nállim (eds.),
Antifascism(s) in Latin America and the Caribbean: From the Margins to the Center (Cambridge University Press, 2025). For more information, visit our blog,