Event Date: 27 June 2019

Room B01
Clore Management Centre
Birkbeck, University of London
Torrington Sq
London WC1E 7HX

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities presents:

On Rosa Luxemburg: Drucilla Cornell and Jacqueline Rose In Conversation

Speakers: Professor Drucilla Cornell and Professor Jacqueline Rose

The work of Rosa Luxemburg has never been more important. It was Luxemburg who first argued that capitalism ravaged the resources of the world, was inherently imperialist, and therefore endless wars were inevitable. Her warnings against certain forms of nationalism and all forms of authoritarian government including so called socialist governments has never been more timely. Her concept of spontaneity still has everything to teach us about the possibility and process of revolution in our times. Her unique commitment to socialism as a transformation of all social relations, her searching link between public and private life, still challenges us to rethink how and why feminism is central to revolutionary politics.

Drucilla Cornell is an Emeritus Professor at Rutgers University in Political Science and a Professor Extraordinaire and the University of Pretoria in South Africa. From 2003 to the present Professor Cornell has run a project called the uBuntu Project in South Africa which combines research into indigenous ideals and values, and advocacy for their importance in all aspects of the new dispensation, including law. From 2007 to 2010 she held the National Research Foundation Chair in indigenous values, the customary law, and the dignity jurisprudence for the Constitutional Court. She has written numerous books, her most recent being /Law and Revolution in South Africa: uBuntu, Dignity and Constitutional Transformation.

Jacqueline Rose is Professor of Humanities and co-director at Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London. Her books include Sexuality in the Field of Vision, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Proust Among the Nations and Women in Dark Times. Mothers – An Essay on Love and Cruelty was published last year. She is also the author of a novel, Albertine, and writes regularly for the London Review of Books. She is a co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices in the UK and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Chair: Professor Jaco Bernard-Naudé (Cape Town)