9 October, 2025 (Thursday), 16:30 – 17:30 JST
Mirai Crea 2F, Large Conference Room (in-person only)
About the Lecture
Drawing on years of scholarly inquiries, and my ongoing anthropological inquiry in Japan, this talk turns to Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki to explore how their works of “art” can imagine peace not only as the radical absence of the violence of empires, but as acts of love rooted in the possibility of ethical and historical responsibility, and memories for the futures unknown. It will turn to how this love itself as hospitality is an opening that refuses the proprietary political logic of belonging to a “race, gender, class, nation” or a particular human collective or place. Or how it is borne toward the scattered traces of life forms or living beings that political and scientific modernity as atomic bombs has silenced, reduced to ashes, or made to evaporate.
“Peace” or as I write elsewhere, “Hospitality, friendship, love, care, loss, mourning or responsibility as human practices, relationships, and rights beyond the law, living, and critical imagination lie beyond the domain of empires, whether modern or ancient. The right and responsibility of the imperial colonizer or conqueror has always been the destruction of the target people and the conquest of their land. It has never been the right and responsibility toward the other or of the other to cohabit the Earth. Hospitality has, therefore, always been both a countersignature and a welcoming of conquest and exploitation for the racial capitalist imperial colonizer.”
The haunting question, then, is this: how are we to witness Iri and Toshi Maruki’s art, not as “aesthetic beauty,” but as a pursuit of planetary peace, where peace itself unfolds as an act of love, and love as the radical openness of hospitality?
About the Speaker
Dr Fazil Moradi is a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and Visiting Researcher at Hiroshima University; Associate Researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences; and Affiliated Scholar at the Centre for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes against Humanity, CUNY, New York. Dr Moradi was a Writing Fellow and Visiting Associate Professor at the Johannesburg Institute University for Advanced Study (2021-2024); Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the University of Halle, and has collaborated with medical scientists at the University of Gothenburg. Moradi explores modernity’s violence across Iraq, Rwanda, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Western Europe and Japan. His recent works include Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq (Rutgers UP, 2024); “In Search of Decolonised Political Futures: Engaging Mahmood Mamdani’s Neither Settler nor Native,” Special Issue. Anthropological Theory, 23: 4, (2023); “Spectres of Anton Wilhelm Amo” (Janus Unbound, 2025, Special Issue, co-edited by Stefanie Bognitz); “Catastrophic Art,” Public Culture (2022); “Worldwide-ization of Epistemicide,” Journal of Genocide Research, 22: 4 (2025); Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation (Routledge, 2017, co-edited by M Sixhohenbalken and R Buchenhorst). His current research is supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education.
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