Northwestern Events Calendar

Hide past events

Apr
5
2017

Wednesdays@PAS: Bisi Silva on Developing a History of Women Artists in Nigeria

SHOW DETAILS

When: Wednesday, April 5, 2017
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM CT

Where: 620 Library Place, 1st Floor Conference Room (106), 620 Library Place , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Contact: Program of African Studies   (847) 491-7323

Group: Program of African Studies

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Come join PAS for our weekly lunch and lecture. Lunch provided.

Speaker: Bisi Silva, founder, director, and curator, Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria

Title: Bisi Silva on Developing a History of Women Artists in Nigeria

Bio: Bisi Silva is an independent curator and the founder and artistic director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos, Nigeria, an innovative independent arts organization which opened in 2007 to provide a platform for the development, presentation, and discussion of contemporary visual art and culture. In 2012 CCA launched the ASIKO Art School, an intensive training program focused on the critical methodologies and history that underpin artistic practice, intended to address a gap in visual arts higher education for many artists, curators, and cultural practitioners across Africa. In her presentation, Silva will discuss her practice through these institutions and others, and will share future directions for her work.

Cosponsored with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum.

Attendees must RSVP/register for this event.

Register
Apr
12
2017

Wednesdays@PAS: The Poetics of Voice in Ben Okri's The Famished Road

SHOW DETAILS

When: Wednesday, April 12, 2017
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM CT

Where: 620 Library Place, 1st Floor Conference Room (106), 620 Library Place , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Contact: Program of African Studies   (847) 491-7323

Group: Program of African Studies

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Come join PAS for our weekly lunch and lecture. Lunch provided.

Speaker: Vanessa Guignery (contemporary English literature and postcolonial literature, École Normale Supérieure, Lyon, France)

Title: The Poetics of Voice in Ben Okri's The Famished Road

Bio: Vanessa Guignery is Professor of contemporary English and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Her research focuses more specifically on literary genres and the poetics of voice and silence. She has been a Fellow at the Harry Ransom Humanities Centre in Austin, Texas several times since 2006. She published several books and essays on the work of Julian Barnes, including The Fiction of Julian Barnes (Macmillan, 2006), and Conversations with Julian Barnes (Mississippi Press, 2009), co-edited with Ryan Roberts. She has published articles on writers from India (Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai), Nigeria (Ben Okri), New Zealand (Janet Frame), Canada (Alice Munro) and Britain (Jeanette Winterson, Michèle Roberts, Alain de Botton, David Lodge, Jonathan Coe, Zadie Smith), as well as several essays and a monograph on B.S. Johnson, Ceci n’est pas une fiction (Sorbonne UP, 2009). She is the author of Seeing and Being: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (Presses Universitaires de France, 2012), has edited a special issue of Callaloo on Ben Okri (2015) and published a monograph on Jonathan Coe for Palgrave Macmillan (2015). She is the editor of about fifteen books on contemporary literature in English, including a collection of interviews with eight contemporary writers, Novelists in the New Millennium (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and The B.S. Johnson—Zulfikar Ghose Correspondence (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). Website: www.vanessaguignery.com

Cosponsored with the French Interdisciplinary Group.

Apr
19
2017

Wednesdays@PAS: Understanding the Nature of Cross Border Intergroup Conflicts. A Study of Murle and their Neighbours along the Ethiopia-South Sudan Border

SHOW DETAILS

When: Wednesday, April 19, 2017
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM CT

Where: 620 Library Place, 1st Floor Conference Room (106), 620 Library Place , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Contact: Program of African Studies   (847) 491-7323

Group: Program of African Studies

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Come join PAS for our weekly lunch and lecture. Lunch provided.

Speaker: Tasew Gashaw (PAS visiting scholar; Institute for Peace and Security Studies, Addis Ababa University)

Title: Understanding the Nature of Cross Border Intergroup Conflicts. A Study of Murle and their Neighbours along the Ethiopia-South Sudan Border

Bio: Tasew Gashaw, PAS visiting scholar, is a PhD candidate in the field of peace and security at Addis Ababa University’s Institute for Peace and Security Studies (IPSS). His dissertation is entitled, “Understanding the Nature of Cross-Border Intergroup Conflicts: A Study of Murle and their Neighbours along the Ethiopia-South Sudan Border.” He has a bachelor’s degree in Ethiopian language and literature, and a master’s degree in multicultural and multilingual education from Addis Ababa University. His master’s thesis was focused on the Anyuaa Traditional Conflict Resolution. From 2003 to 2013, Gashaw was a lecturer at Gambella Teacher's Education and Health Science College, and from March 2013 to September 2014, he served as Special Secretary to the President of Gambella People's National Regional State.

Apr
26
2017

Wednesdays@PAS: Detoothing Kampala: Notes on an Emerging Economy of Seduction

SHOW DETAILS

When: Wednesday, April 26, 2017
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM CT

Where: 620 Library Place, 1st Floor Conference Room (106), 620 Library Place , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Contact: Program of African Studies   (847) 491-7323

Group: Program of African Studies

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Come join PAS for our weekly lunch and lecture. Lunch provided.

Speaker: Erin Moore (Buffett postdoctoral fellow)

Title: Detoothing Kampala: Notes on an Emerging Economy of Seduction

Abstract: In 2014, Ugandans were at the center of sex panic of global proportions. That year, along with the more infamous Anti-Homosexuality Act, President Yoweri Museveni signed into law the Anti-Pornography Act, nicknamed the “Miniskirt Bill” by the press. In the months leading up to its enactment, local vigilantes began enforcing the bill by publicly stripping women. In response, feminist activists protested by marching in miniskirts, and foreign donors withdrew millions of dollars in aid. Ugandan panic over miniskirts scapegoated young women for broader political economic insecurities the country faced at the same time that miniskirts had come to symbolize women’s access to new resources from the powerful women’s rights industry as well as from a particularly guileful form of moneymaking called “detoothing.” To detooth is to take a man’s money without reciprocating with sex, that is, to cheat him out of his end of a transactional sexual deal. In this talk, I will argue that in a context where men have long established social authority by controlling women’s productive and reproductive labor, detoothing threatened patriarchal order as young women wrested control over the economic potential of their sexuality. Extraction by way of forestalling a promise, detoothing further panicked Ugandans as a metonym for other “seductive economies” they endure – economies that thrive on the continued deferral of consummation.

Bio: Erin Moore received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2016. She is a sociocultural anthropologist interested in transnational processes, international development and global health, and the study of gender, sexuality, and youth. Her geographic focus is urban Uganda, and sub-Saharan Africa more broadly. Her doctoral research explores the global movement to “empower” adolescent girls as it unfolded through the transnational channels of a major NGO and into the lives of teenage women living in Kampala, Uganda’s capital.

May
3
2017

Wednesdays@PAS: From Digital Literacy to Social Engineering: Sponsoring and Censoring Nollywood in the Twenty-First Century

SHOW DETAILS

When: Wednesday, May 3, 2017
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM CT

Where: 620 Library Place, 1st Floor Conference Room (106), 620 Library Place , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Contact: Program of African Studies   (847) 491-7323

Group: Program of African Studies

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Come join PAS for our weekly lunch and lecture. Lunch provided.

Speaker: Noah Tsika (media studies, Queen’s College, CUNY)

Title: From Digital Literacy to Social Engineering: Sponsoring and Censoring Nollywood in the Twenty-First Century

Sponsored by the Nollywood Working Group.