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2nd Public Lecture Resisting the Humanitarianization of the World: Room 4.36, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, June 5, 5:00 p.m. By giving succor to human beings regardless of national affiliations, transnational humanitarian action seeks to humanize the globe by making it a place that is more hospitable to humanity at large. In fact, the humanitarianization of the world destroys the worlds of aid-receiving peoples because it regards them as passive suffering victims and objects of pity and erodes their dignity and self-determination. Farah’s Gifts broaches the question: 'How can a given people emerge and announce itself as a subject with a world so that it can be a participating member of the larger world of a humanity comprised of a plurality of peoples when the global system deprives them of having a world in the first place by creating structural relations of dependency that infantilize them into a prolonged ‘minority’ (Unmündigkeit)?’ This paper examines how the novel transformatively reinscribes Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift in order to suggest that we should look beyond regimes of giving that are rooted in Western Christianity and Abrahamic monotheism to gift practices from Somalian folk traditions for a solution to geopolitical inequality. In what manner of speaking is storytelling the paradigmatic example of generous giving that creates a shared world? |