Narratives With Consequences: Storytelling Animals in a Colonized World
Saturday, February 20, 2021
12-3pm Eastern (US+Canada).
Kevin Tucker
To quote Neil Gaiman, “storytellers are liars.” We are storytelling social animals, and stories are what root us into place and time. Stories are powerful and beautiful, given the undue burden of both entertaining and orienting us. But in a world built of expansionist global empires, colonial frontiers and imperialist networks, disjointed societies and disemboweled ecosystems, stories can also be dangerous.
Power shifts stories into narratives. It stills them in time: once etched in stone, now cast into fiber optic cables. The undercurrent of the era of empires is the creation of consequential stories. As the nature of our daily lives are muddied with a reliance upon a world’s worth of resources, the narratives we tell take on a false simplicity. A world divided is studied in fragments: “experts” master individual subjects rather than the interweavings of a complex system and whatever we touch in this post-industrial life is treated as an individual triumph of evolution, not as a relic of organized domination.
In this seminar, we will turn our focus upside down; embracing the complexity of the world as it is handed to us in pieces, we will examine how the narratives we are told and sold are meant to keep our attention on a world in fragments. This fracturing prevents us from seeing the bigger picture. When we don’t feel the ways in which civilization erupts the consequences of our lives onto the world, we can justify the destruction that we are taught not to look at. Ultimately, we will question how the storytelling animal can understand where it has gotten and create new stories to ground us again.
Readings:
- Gathered Remains, Kevin Tucker (Medium Essay) — Buy the complete eBook here (linked essay is 1st chapter of the book)
Facilitator: Kevin Tucker is a primal anarchist writer, musician, and publisher. His work focuses on the nature of colonialism and extractivism in expanding civilization, with an emphasis on the trauma of genocidal and ecocidal campaigns, and the impacts of domestication. His books include The Cull of Personality, Gathered Remains, and For Wildness and Anarchy. His current book, The Gospel of Empire, focuses on the role of missionaries as agents of colonization. He is the founding editor of Species Traitor and Wild Resistance journals, as well as the guitarist/vocalist of Peregrine, an anti-civilization, anti-fascist death metal band. He lives on occupied Lenni Lenape and Susquehannock lands with his wife, Natasha, who co-hosts the Primal Anarchy podcast with him, and kids.
Time: Saturday, February 20, 12pm-3pm. Online via Zoom.
Seminar Cost:
- $30 – Member Ticket for Incite Seminars Patreon Supports at any level
- $45 – Non-Member (True Cost) Ticket
- $90 – Generous Supporter Ticket
- $15 – Student/Contingent Scholar/Activist Ticket
- Solidarity pay-what-you-can tickets are also available for those who cannot afford any of the above tiers.
Registration
Please register by buying a ticket at our Eventbrite page. If you have any questions or concerns, please email inciteseminarsphila@gmail.com.
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