Guest seminar at UCLA

This August, I had the privilege of discussing my paper on ‘Disappointed Hope’ with members of the UCLA Working Group in Memory Studies.

The paper pushes against the dominant perception of disappointment as a demobilising affect and explores the politically transformative potential of disappointment. I argue that the resisters’ grappling with their disappointment can lead them to reconfigure their horizon of hope towards a persistent, practice-oriented striving for greater freedom and justice that is willing to bear the risk of failure. I develop the political relevance of such disappointed hope through a selected first-hand account of the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt, Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed, written by a prominent Egyptian activist and writer, Ahdaf Soueif.

Michael Rothberg, Arielle Stambler, Yair Agmon and Arnould Arps offered such thoughtful reflections on the ways of memorialising activism, the different kinds of disappointment resisters face and the role of memoirs in responding to the complexities and failures of resistance. A warm thank you to all for such an engaging conversation.