Imagining ‘Flea Time’ Against Our Temporal Wounding
por Shivangi Mariam Raj
Palestra em Inglês, integrada no Salão Coreolinguístico, organizado por Paula Caspão e Carlos Manuel Oliveira, e co-produzido pelo Centro de Estudos de Teatro (FLUL) e pela Associação Parasita.
Esta palestra começa por interrogar a história, situando-a como um lugar de apagamento e extração, ao mesmo tempo que reflete sobre a violência do seu olhar positivista. Examina a forma como o regime global de fronteiras tem vindo a escrever a história corpórea e a história espacial, mutilando as nossas narrativas e a nossa experiência do tempo. Shivangi Mariam Raj defende que o que é celebrado como civilização é, na realidade, uma tecnologia de deslocamento temporal que constrói a infraestrutura primária do genocídio. A palestra aborda em seguida as temporalidades galácticas, geológicas e hiperlocais, bem como a lentidão, o acúmulo e a falha como métodos, de modo a propor uma prática alternativa do tempo, o “Tempo da Pulga”, uma noção emprestada à obra do escritor palestiniano Bassel Al-Araj.
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Imagining ‘Flea Time’ Against Our Temporal Wounding
by Shivangi Mariam Raj
(Talk in English, part of the Choreolinguistic Salon, organized by Paula Caspão and Carlos Manuel Oliveira, and co-produced by the Theatre Research Centre (FLUL) and Parasita Association.
This lecture begins with an interrogation of history, situating it as a site of erasure and extraction as well as reflecting on the violence of its positivist gaze. It examines how the global border regime has been writing corporeal history and spatial history, thereby maiming both our narration and our experience of time. Shivangi Mariam Raj argues that what is celebrated as civilisation is, in fact, a technology of temporal dislocation that builds the primary infrastructure of genocide. The lecture turns to galactic, geologic, and hyperlocal temporalities as well as to slowness, accrual, and glitch as methods in order to propose an alternative practice of time, “Flea Time,” drawn from the work of Palestinian writer Bassel Al-Araj.
Shivangi Mariam Raj is a writer from Delhi/Uttar Pradesh, India. As an independent researcher, she is interested in visual cultures of majoritarian violence across South Asia, language as the site of caste apartheid in India, and spectral temporalities as forms of resistance in Kashmir. She utilizes essays, poetry, and reportage for individual memory to coalesce into a broader inquiry of the politics of public remembering. Her practice combines approaches in sociolinguistics, soundscapes, photography, counter-cartographies, translation, and ethnography. Her writings have been widely published in national and international publications, and translated into French, Spanish, Urdu, Punjabi, Tamil, Hindi, and Georgian.
In 2013, she was awarded the Commonwealth Youth Exchange Grant for her documentation of the spatial dimensions of oral literature in the Jaunsar-Bawar region of Uttarakhand, India. She is a university drop-out and was previously working with Oxford University Press. She is the 2024–25 Editorial Fellow for Logic(s) Magazine at INCITE Center of Columbia University, and the recipient of Graham Foundation’s 2024 grant for research for her project, “Shadow Thresholds: Architecture of Ruin in India.”
She now serves as the Head of Communications at The Funambulist.