Humanities Now Archive
Chika Okeke-Agulu, "Gazbia Sirry and Egyptian Modernists in Nasser’s Revolutionary Egypt"
This lecture comes out of a study of the mid-twentieth-century emergence of postcolonial strongmen in Africa, and artists’ response to this phenomenon. Chika Okeke-Agulu examines the work of Egyptian artist Gazbia Sirry (1925–2021) to show how, in the wake of the 1952 Free Officers Revolution, leading modernists were influenced by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s charisma and aligned their art with his brand of Egyptian nationalism and Pan-Arab ideology. Tracing formal and tonal shifts in Sirry’s art, Okeke-Agulu analyzes how she responded to Nasser’s increasingly repressive regime and the devastating outcome of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
Chika Okeke-Agulu, an artist, critic and art historian, is Robert Schirmer Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies, and Director of Africa World Initiative at Princeton University. He is editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. His most recent books include El Anatsui: The Reinvention of Sculpture (2022); African Artists: From 1882 to Now (2021); Yusuf Grillo: Painting. Lagos. Life (2020). Okeke-Agulu was the Slade Professor of Fine Art, University of Oxford (2023), and is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Cosponsored by History of Art
Poster
Adam Shatz, "The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon"
Frantz Fanon has been dead since 1961, yet his name is invoked with increasing frequency, and has itself become a kind of Rorschach test in discussions of white supremacy, the Middle East, and settler-colonialism. In his talk at the Whitney Humanities Center, Adam Shatz, the author of a new biography of Fanon, The Rebel’s Clinic, will reflect on the Martinican psychiatrist’s life, work, and contemporary legacy.
Adam Shatz is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is the author of Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination and the host of the podcast “Myself with Others.”
About The Rebel’s Clinic
In the era of Black Lives Matter and the war in Gaza, Frantz Fanon’s shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. This searching biography tells the story of Fanon’s stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller. Fanon left his modest home in Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war was over, he fell under the influence of existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of “dis-alienation” in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA in a Maryland hospital.
Today, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin’s essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel’s Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon’s extraordinary life—and a guide to the books that underlie today’s most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.
Sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center; Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration; and Department of French
Denise Ferreira da Silva, "On Interiority: An Exploration of the Infrastructures of Subjectivity"
Join the Whitney Humanities Center for this Humanities Now lecture by artist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva. Author of the field-changing books Toward a Global Idea of Race and Unpayable Debt, Ferreira da Silva writes on crucial global issues, which she approaches from an anticolonial black feminist perspective.
Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at NYU. Her artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism.
She is the author of scholarly books including Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) and Unpayable Debt (2022) and coeditor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (2013).
In collaboration with Arjuna Neuman, her filmography includes Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters: Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020), and Ancestral Claims/Ancestral Clouds (2023). With Valentina Desideri, she organized The Sensing Salon, a studio practice that expands the image of art beyond objects, events, and discourse to include the healing arts. Ferreira da Silva has performed shows and given lectures in prominent artistic spaces, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), MASP (São Paulo), The Guggenheim and MoMA (NYC).
The day before Ferreira da Silva’s lecture, she and her codirector Arjuna Neuma will join us for a screening and discussion of their experimental film essay, Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023). Come for the film and stay for a talkback with the directors, moderated by Yale professor of Spanish and Portuguese Santiago Acosta. Learn more about the screening here.
Sumana Roy, "The Quest for the Plant Script"
If plants could write, what stories would they tell us? What might we learn—about ourselves and the botanical world—if we learned to read, write, and translate a language rooted in vegetal life?
Join Sumana Roy as she explores why these questions have captivated our writers, artists, thinkers, and scholars over the last hundred years. In this lecture, Roy traces the evolution of our century-long fascination with the “plant script,” a term she uses to describe our various attempts to parse a language from plants.
“The Quest for the Plant Script” begins with the Indian plant physiologist and physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose’s concept of torulipi—or “plant script”—a record of a plant’s responses to external stimuli written in their own “handwriting,” through which he hoped plants would write their autobiographies. Starting with Bose’s experiments and moving through Rabindranath Tagore’s songs about the “language of flowers,” to poets writing about the syntax of falling leaves, to artists trying to coax a vocabulary out of plants, or creating a “tree alphabet,” Roy examines our ongoing search for the plant script, its codes, its compulsions, and its intimate histories.
Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree and Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries, Missing: A Novel, My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, and two poetry collections, Out of Syllabus and V. I. P: Very Important Plant.
Willie James Jennings , "To Build a Sad Land: Coloniality, Racial Reasoning, and the Imagined Built Environment of Christian Zionism"
At the place where a Christian doctrine of salvation joins nationalism and private property, we meet the workings of Christian Zionism. As a form of political theology, it presents a particular configuration of the body, the building, and design calibrated to enact human participation in divine providence and sovereignty on the ground. It also creates the Jewish and the Palestinian subject, each constituted within a colonial plantation vision of existence. Yet the sad land Christian Zionism creates participates in the logics of territoriality and coloniality that shape the tragedies of our current built environments. Drawing on work from his forthcoming two-volume work on the Christian doctrine of creation, and specifically volume two on race, theology, and the built environment, Dr. Jennings in this lecture explores the challenges of thinking life between territoriality, racial existence, and a religious imagination calibrated through ownership.
Willie James Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at the Yale Divinity School. His book The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale 2010) was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the largest prize for a theological work in North America. His most recent book examines the problems of theological education within Western education: After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Eerdmans, 2020). Jennings is now working on a major monograph provisionally entitled Unfolding the World: Recasting a Christian Doctrine of Creation as well as a finishing a book of poetry entitled The Time of Possession. Writing in the areas of liberation theologies, cultural identities, and anthropology, Jennings has authored more than forty scholarly essays and nearly two dozen reviews, as well as essays on academic administration and blog posts for Religion Dispatches. Jennings is an ordained Baptist minister.
Method and Decolonizing Praxis in Literary Studies, "A colloquium on vital books in the humanities"
The theoretical underpinnings and praxis of literary studies have come under scrutiny in influential books published in recent years. Focusing on two such books, this event appraises the state of criticism, its value and suppositions, and future directions. Panelists discuss the significance of Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth (Chicago 2023), and Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum (Cambridge 2023), edited by Ato Quayson and Ankhi Mukherjee, while pursuing productive lines of inquiry beyond the texts. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear and engage leading scholars of literary criticism, including Ankhi Mukherjee, Ato Quayson, Debjani Ganguly, Elaine Scarry, Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Joe Cleary, Jonathan Kramnick, and Paul Saint-Amour.
Schedule
12:15 LUNCH
(for those who RSVP by March 23)
1:00 DECOLONIZING THE ENGLISH LITERARY CURRICULUM
Joe Cleary, Yale University
Debjani Ganguly, University of Virginia
Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Johns Hopkins University
Moderated by Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Yale University
2:15 ON METHOD: CRITICISM AND TRUTH
Ankhi Mukherjee, University of Oxford
Paul Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania
Elaine Scarry, Harvard University
Moderated by Anastasia Eccles, Yale University
3:30 LITERARY FUTURES AND FUTURES OF LITERARY CRITICISM: A CONVERSATION
Jonathan Kramnick, Yale University
Ato Quayson, Stanford University
Ankhi Mukherjee, University of Oxford
Moderated by Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Johns Hopkins University
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, "Unlearning Together at the Thresholds of Museums"
Ariella Azoulay engages with the museum as a world-destroying technology and addresses the impossibility of decolonizing colonial museums without decolonizing the world, with a special focus on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world.
The day before Azoulay’s lecture, she will join us for a screening of her film The World Like a Jewel in the Hand—Unlearning Imperial Plunder II. The screening will take place on Wednesday, March 6, at 4:30 pm, in Alice Cinema (L01). Learn more about the screening here.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University, as well as a film essayist and curator of archives and exhibitions. She is the author of several books, including The Jewelers of the Ummah (Verso); La résistance des bijoux (Rot-Bo-Krik); Potential History—Unlearning Imperialism (Verso); Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso); The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books); and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press). Azoulay is also known for her film essays: The World Like a Jewel in the Hand (2023); Un-documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019); and Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47–48 (2012). Her exhibition credits include Errata (Fundació Tàpies, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020) and The Natural Violence of Rape (Berlin Biennale, 2022).
Mark Anthony Neal, "The Love Languages of Black Fatherhood"
Thirty years ago, Gary Chapman posited the idea of the “Five Love Languages” – “Words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, gifts, and physical touch.” When we think of Black men—Black fathers—we rarely think in terms of “love languages,” but rather that of established stereotypes, absence, and shame. In this talk Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal documents how the shifting presentation of men in a patriarchal society has forced Black men to play catch-up each time the goal post of cultural expectations moves. Using historical context, personal reflection and data, Neal argues that American culture does not have enough language to adequately understand or describe Black fatherhood.
Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of several books including the recent Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Music Archive (NYU) as well co-editor of That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, now in its third edition. For the past 13 years, Neal has hosted the Webby-nominated video-podcast Left of Black.
Lady Jaydee and Chigozie Obioma, "Conversation and musical performance"
The music of Tanzania’s “Queen of Bongo Flava,” Lady Jaydee, has long inspired the literary work of Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma. In this inaugural Humanities Now event, we bring together in conversation the novelist and the singer—Chigozie and Jide—to reflect on the landscape of African music and literature.
Lady Jaydee, born Judith Mbibo in Tanzania, is widely known as the “Queen of Bongo Flava”—the East African modern pop genre. Jide, as most of her fans call her, has released nine studio albums, with the latest—Love Sentence—released in 2023. She has won more than thirty local and international awards: multiple Kilimanjaro Tanzania Music Awards (KTMA) for best female artist, an M-Net Award for best female artist of the year, and a BBC Radio Music Award for best song of the year for “Distance.” Lady Jaydee holds the East African record for the fastest-selling album, selling nearly one million copies within a few days of the album’s release. She has performed in Tanzania, across Africa, and around the world, including at Nelson Mandela’s ninetieth birthday in 2008. Currently, she stars as a coach on the inaugural season of The Voice Africa, a Pan-African edition of the reality TV singing competition.
Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His two novels, The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), were shortlisted for the Booker Prize and have been translated into thirty languages. He has received the 2016 L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction, the prestigious Internationaler Literaturpreis, the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer prize for fiction, an NAACP Image Award and has been nominated for two dozen prizes for fiction. He is the James E. Ryan Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the program director of the Oxbelly Writers Retreat. He is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University. His third novel, The Road to the Country, will be published in June 2024.
Sponsored by Council on African Studies, Whitney Humanities Center, and Yale Schwarzman Center