Description:

workshop: DREAMT TERRITORIES and DIASPORIC POLITICS: Art, Futurity, and Philosophy, sponsored by Critical Theory
Wed. 5/25  |  3:30pm  |  Kresge 2351 (Kaplan Institute seminar room)

lecture: Black Hopes - A Philosophy of Independences, sponsored by Comparative Literature 
Thurs. 5/26  |  4pm  |  Kresge 2351 (Kaplan Institute seminar room)

*Refreshments for participants served from 3pm, dinner will be available at 5:30pm

**The workshop will be followed by Yala Kisukidi’s lecture on Thursday May 26th, 4 pm, Kresge 2351: “ Black Hopes: A Philosophy of Independences,”  sponsored by the Comparative Literature Studies Program.

We invite graduate students, early career researchers and faculty to attend a workshop devoted to a pre-publication collection of essays by Nadia Yala Kisukidi. Professor Kisukidi will introduce the volume and respond to the presentations. 

Graduate Student Presenters 

DECOLONIZING PHILOSOPHY
Maïté Marciano, French and Francophone Studies: Decolonizing Philosophy (or Philosophy as Anthropological Object)
Micol Bez, Comparative Literary Studies: Laetitia Africana: Philosophy, Decolonization and Melancholy
 

UNIVERSALITY and RACE
Yemi Ajisebutu, Comparative Literary Studies: The Universal in the Bush
Sreddy Yen, English: Black Universalism (Or The Happy Aporias of Antiracism)
Ishan Mehandru, Comparative Literary Studies: Black Universalism (Or The Happy Aporias of Antiracism)
 

NÉGRITUDE, TEMPORALITY, and RACIAL HOSPITALITY
Spencer Nabors, Philosophy: Racial Hospitality
Kang Kang, Comparative Literary Studies: Racial Hospitality
Jordan Mulkey, African American Studies: Nostalgia and Post-Colonial Utopia in Senghor’s Négritude
 

GEOPOLITICS
Marlon Millner, Religious Studies: As an Ideal, You are Yet To Come Into Being: Letter to Europe, and Geopolitics of the Diaspora
 

ART and CITIES
Soumya Rachel Shailendra, Comparative Literary Studies: Kinshasa, Dreams of Remembrance 
Ibou Tall, French and Francophone Studies: In Congoville, the ‘Belgian-Negros’ (Senghor) Never Saw The Light of Day: Travelling (back) In Time
Ruslana Lichtzier, Art History: Sleeping Standing Up (Notes on Lucid Dreams)
 

Supported by the Critical Theory Cluster, the Program in Comparative Literary Studies, the Program in African Studies, the Black Arts Initiative and Weinberg College in Arts and Sciences. 

The seminar will be conducted in English. 

NADIA YALA KISUKIDI is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis University where she specializes in French and Africana Philosophy. She has served as vice president of the Collège International de Philosophie (2014-2016) and as a co-curator of the Yango II Biennale, Kinshasa RDC (2021). She has also contributed to the creation of a "Global South" research network between Haïti, France and Colombia. She has taught in Switzerland and France, and lectured widely in the United States. In 2022-23 she will be a visiting  fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination,  Columbia University.  She is the author of  books on Bergson, and (with Djamila Ribeiro) on African  diasporic and feminist Black thought  (Bergson ou l’humanité créatrice, 2013;  Dialogue Transatlantique: Perspectives de la pensée féministe noir et des diasporas  africaines, 2021). She has edited or co-edited  a number of special issues and anthologies  at the intersections of Philosophy, African studies,  French and Francophone studies, and Religious Studies. She is a specialist in twentieth century and contemporary Francophone philosophy of the African continent and  twentieth century French philosophy, and  the author of numerous articles on the négritude tradition, twentieth century French philosophy,   diasporic micro-politics, critical,  decolonial, and feminist theory, and trans-national Black studies . She has  recently written about and contributed extensively to contemporary  public debate  about art restitution and about the teaching of decolonial thought and African philosophy in the French university system and beyond.