7-9pm

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97–99 Hoxton Street, London N1 6QL
Map

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In collaboration with Basecamp for Tactical Imaginaries in the Netherlands, cultural worker and writer Wassila Abboud hosts a discussion with historian Ziad Kiblawi. The conversation centres on the anti-colonial origins of Lebanese Marxist philosopher Mahdi Amel’s work, focusing on the period between 1960 and 1967, when Amel lived and taught in Algeria by invitation from the National Liberation Front (FLN).

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This event follows the launch of Abboud’s new publication A History that Never Arrived—Mediations on the Liminalities of Mahdi Amel, which was the outcome of the fourth iteration of the Open Archief project. The publication engages with Amel’s archive, exploring how revolutionary histories continue to shape political realities in the present.

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A History that Never Arrived—Mediations on the Liminalities of Mahdi Amel is in English and Arabic, features new contributions such as essays by decolonial feminist Françoise Vergès and will be available to purchase at Peer, by donation. Donations for the publication go towards emergency funds in Lebanon.

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This event is £5, please book here.

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BIOGRAPHIES

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Wassila Abboud is a writer and cultural worker researching between Amsterdam and Beirut. Her work engages with critical theory, philosophy, and visual culture and takes on a speculative and materialist approach, examining militant histories, anticolonial subjectivities. Through intergenerational archives, essay, film, and diagrammatic forms, she examines how the histories imposed on us in the present can be read through past fragments and inheritances. Her approach moves beyond the separation of the personal, theoretical, and historical, treating their entanglement as both a field and a medium for radical social thought.

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Ziad Kiblawi is an intellectual historian and a translator of modern Arab social and political thought. His research centers on Arabic critical theory, and the logico-historical conditions necessitated by the category of critique. Mainly, he looks at the transformations of the analytic categories of critique between the 1950s and 1980s—from Arab Existentialism and Neo-Kantian culturalism in Arab Nationalism to the Marxist and psychoanalytic tendencies in historical thought.