Events
Seminar
“At the Edge of the World” Revisited
Achille Mbembe
Thursday, November 20, 2008
1:30—3:30 pm
Suzzallo 324
The seminar reading will be made available to registered participants.
To attend, RSVP by November 17.
Achille Mbembe (Institute for Social & Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand; English and Cultural Anthropology, Duke University) is widely recognized as one of the foremost theorists of postcolonial studies today. He is the author of the seminal On the Postcolony, as well as many other books and articles.
This seminar engages Mbembe’s groundbreaking work in history, politics, and postcolonial theory by revisiting his article “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa” (Public Culture, 2000). How has globalization–viewed through the three intertwined concepts of boundaries, territoriality, and sovereignty–shifted in the decade since the article was written? Which elements of Mbembe’s analysis have been amplified and which have been muted in the post-9/11 world? What are the implications for our future understandings of globalization and postcolonial theory?
Walker-Ames Lecture
Rethinking the Future in a Neo-Liberal Age
Achille Mbembe
Thursday, November 20, 2008
6:30 pm
Kane 110
Workshop
Workings of Culture in Africa and its Diaspora
Friday, November 21, 2008
9:00 am—3:30 pm
Communications 202
To attend, RSVP by November 14
Join faculty and graduate students for a roundtable discussion of their own research and writing on the workings of culture in Africa and its diasporas in relation to Sarah Nuttall’s books, Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics (2006) and Entanglement (forthcoming). Presenters will include Stephanie M.H. Camp (History, Rice University), Laura Chrisman (English, UW Seattle), Susan Harewood (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell), Ron Krabill (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell), Georgia Roberts (English, UW Seattle), and Lynn M. Thomas (History, UW Seattle). Registered participants will receive lunch and workshop readings.
Keynote Lecture
Notes from Johannesburg, Elusive Metropolis
Sarah Nuttall
Friday, November 21, 2008
1:30—3:00 pm
Comunications 120
Johannesburg is Africa’s premier metropolis. Yet few efforts have been made to insert South Africa's largest city into urban and cultural theory on its own terms. In this lecture, Sarah Nuttall will attempt to define the city's metropolitan modernity, drawing it in to a set of global conversations about cities. She will focus on notions of the surface and the underneath of the city in its historic, psychic, and aesthetic invocations.
Sarah Nuttall is Senior Researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and a cutting-edge scholar and theorist of cultural studies scholarship emanating from Africa. She is co-editor of Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature, and History in South Africa and Australia (1996), Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (1998), Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies (2000), and a special issue of Public Culture titled Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2004). Most recently, she edited Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics (2006). Her monograph, Entanglement, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
Obiora Udechukwu (Fine Arts, St. Lawrence University), "If You Call Your Plate a Potsherd...' The Postcolonial Artist and Tradition"
Thursday, May 22, 2008, 3:30 pm
Communications 202
"Highly Opinionated Hot Picks in Contemporary African Art" Forum
Featuring Isolde Brielmaier and Trevor Schoonmaker at Seattle Art Museum.
Friday, May 2, 2008, 7:00 pm
Seattle Art Museum - Plestcheeff Auditorium
Join Isolde Brielmaier and Trevor Schoonmaker, two compelling thinkers, who actively contribute to new definitions of African visual expression, as they take the temperature of contemporary African art.
Isolde Brielmaier, New York-based curator and critic/visiting Assistant Professor of Art, Vassar College and Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of contemporary art at Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University will discuss the current landscape of African art.
This program is co-presented by the African Studies Program, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, and the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington together with the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) Public Programs Department and the SAM African Arts Council.
Shaheen Ariefdien, "Cape Flats Up-Rocking: On Race, Resistance and Rap in South Africa."
Thursday April 10, 2008
3:30 pm
Communications 226
African Comics Workshop
Saturday, February 23, 2008
10 am - 4 pm
Communications 202
Download E-Flyer (pdf)