Writing Workshops

Writing About Resistance in Times of Repression with Eraldo Souza dos Santos

$150

2 Sessions

Out of stock

Saturday & Sunday 12:00 pm EDT - 3:00 pm EDT May 10 to May 11, 2025

Online via Zoom

In his essay “Resist, Refuse” (2018), Teju Cole argues that the word “resistance,” once holy, has now become unexceptional. “Faced with a vulgar, manic and cruel regime,” he argues, “birds of many different feathers are eager to proclaim themselves members of the Resistance.”

Do we, in fact, use the word “resistance” too much and in inappropriate ways? If so, what forms of action or refusal can be properly characterized as resistance? More crucially, what is resistance and what does resisting entail?

Cole’s provocation will be our starting point in this writing workshop. We’ll be reading and discussing writings from authors such as Angela Davis, Julián Fuks, Ilya Kaminsky, Han Kang, and the Combahee River Collective. By combining readings and writing prompts, we’ll also explore genres such as the autobiographical essay, the declaration, the manifesto, and the revolutionary poem. Over the course of the workshop, special attention will be paid to the uses of the first person and the roles of the narrator in accounts of resistance.

Participants will have the opportunity to produce and workshop at least two short pieces and receive feedback in the second meeting. They can also meet with the instructor about their work in a one-on-one consulting session.

Assigned reading will include selections from: Sophocles’s Antigone; Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”; Toni Morrison’s Beloved; Angela Davis, An Autobiography; Han Kang’s Human Acts; Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic; Julián Fuks’s Resistance, and more.

Course Outline:

Day 1: Resistance across history and genres
Day 2: Publishing narratives of resistance

This course is held online via Zoom.

Led by

Eraldo Souza dos Santos

Eraldo Souza dos Santos

Eraldo Souza dos Santos is a Brazilian writer based between São Paulo and upstate New York. They recently joined Cornell as a Klarman Fellow and will join UC Irvine as an Assistant Professor within the Poetic Justice Cluster in Summer 2025. Their first book project is an autobiography of their illiterate mother and a meditation on the lived experience of enslavement in modern Brazil. At the age of seven, their mother was sold into slavery by her white foster sister. It was 1968—eighty years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil and four years into the anti-communist coup d’état, during the month in which the military overruled the Constitution by decree. Two pieces stemming from this project have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

About this series

Writing Workshops

We strive to make our classes the most inviting and rewarding available, offering an intimate environment to study with award-winning, world-class writers. Each class is specially designed by the instructor, so whether you’re a fledgling writer or an MFA graduate polishing your novel, you’ll find a perfect fit here.

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