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Theorization and the Global South:Berlin Notes
Get PDFCritiquing the colonialist, imperialist, and Eurocentric perspectives that have historically impacted knowledge production about the so-called Global South, the discussion will delve into a reflection on the historical and geopolitical inequalities that have shaped theorization. The recently published volume, Displacing Theory Through the Global South, a collection of essays by Berlin-based scholars, edited by Iracema Dulley and Özgün Eylül İşcen, proposes a commitment to expanding notions of universality, making theorization not only relevant and generative, but ultimately, transformative. A staged reading by Iracema Dulley and Juliana Streva will start off the discussion. Followed by a Q&A with the audience. Displacing Theory Through the Global South Ed. by Iracema Dulley and Özgün Eylül İşcen Cultural Inquiry, 29 Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2024 ISBN 978-3-96558-067-1 | Paperback | 14 EUR | vi, 229 pp
Unrecognized in Life, Misrecognized in Death
Get PDFWhile diverse queer subjects are recognized and protected in international human rights law, in countries with essentialist binary configurations of gender encoded into the national statutes, non-conforming and non-binary gender identities are neither recognized nor protected. The law in Uganda is exclusionary because it is based upon the acknowledgement of a binary gender taxonomy. Alternative gender identities are erased, invisible, and unwritten in the law. Consequently, legal definitions of personhood, marriage, family, and citizenship are heteropatriarchal and heterosexist. Against this background, Nyanzi examines what it means to live as a transgender person, specifically as an effeminate man in Uganda. When criminalization of one’s existence within Uganda becomes difficult, thereby forcing one to flee, what does it mean to live as a transgender asylum seeker from Uganda to Kenya? When dehumanization of life as a queer forced migrant ultimately leads to unnecessary death, what does it mean to die as a transgender person in exile? How does justice differ between a dead queer asylum seeker and a dead queer citizen? Nyanzi compares between publicly available biographies of (in)justices of two East African queer people, namely Trinidad Chriton and Edwin Chiloba. While both were murdered in Kenya, the former was living as an asylum seeker in Kakuma Refugee Camp and the latter was a citizen. Queer injustices are evident in their lives and deaths through pathologization, criminalization, demonization, misconception, alienation from true African culture, misgendering, dead-naming, and public ridicule and condemnation. Amidst widespread dehumanization, the public mourning and grieving of LGBTIQA+ collectives for Trinidad and Edwin challenged universalization of the un-grievability of queer Africans. Stella Nyanzi is a multiple award-winning knowledge producer who is currently a stipendiatin of the Writers-in-Exile program of PEN Zentrum Deutschland and a fellow of the Center for Ethics and Writing co-organized by Bard College and PEN America. She obtained her PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2009) based on ethnographic fieldwork research about youth sexualities in The Gambia. She also has a Master of Science degree in Medical Anthropology from University College London (1999) and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mass Communication and Literature from Makerere University (1997). Her current research specialization is in the multidisciplinary subfields of Queer African Studies, African Feminism, Critical Masculinity Studies, Dissidence Studies, and sexual and reproductive health rights. She has many academic peer-reviewed scholarly publications in journals and edited book volumes available here. She is also a dissident poet with published poetry collections including No Roses From My Mouth: Poems from Prison (2020), Don’t Come in My Mouth: Poems that Rattled Uganda (2021), and Eulogies of My Mouth (2022). Furthermore, she is a social justice activist whose organization, participation, and leadership of activism intersects women’s rights, LGBTIQA+ rights, labour rights, free expression and academic freedom, digital democracy, civil and political rights, among others — specifically in Uganda and Africa more broadly. Moreover, she is an engaged politician belonging to Uganda’s opposition political party called the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC). She contested in the 2021 national elections for the position of Woman of Parliament for Kampala District constituency
Dreams of Independence:Radical Imaginings in 1960s Africa
Get PDFIn everyday language, a dream refers to an ideal projection, imagined in a waking state. Dreamers are not considered to be very productive or to be people of action. Within the political field, the whole semantics of the dream is spontaneously disqualified. Nevertheless, it is possible to aesthetically, philosophically, and politically re-signify the state of conscious dreamers. In this lecture Kisukidi’s aim is to reread and decipher some projects and thoughts of the Independence in Africa through the ideas of ‘utopia’ and ‘dream’. Kisukidi will try to show, through the political hopes of some anticolonial (political and religious) leaders in central Africa, how they tried to dismantle the reality of defeat and emphasize the long survival of traditions of political struggle, by reshaping our understanding of the very concept of History.Nadia Yala Kisukidi is a French philosopher, writer and academic, who has re-examined the notion of Blackness with its colonial implications in France and the rest of Europe
What Can a Vulnerable Body Do?:On Power Within Powerlessness
No full textWhen Spinoza famously posed the question ‘what can a body do?’, he (re-)introduced the body into philosophy and associated the body with power. This marked the beginning of a long tradition in which the body is treated as a proper object of philosophy, but only insofar as its (virile) effects on the world are concerned. The result is a mistrust of the vulnerable body, which is suspected of being brute, necessitated matter and is characterized by the absence of all form, of all power. When philosophers address it, they usually do so in order to ‘save’ it by highlighting its hidden, forgotten powers. How can one get out of this impasse and think of a body without starting from the question of how effective its hold is on the world? Estelle Ferrarese will try to answer this question by reflecting on the phenomenon of sobbing. Estelle Ferrarese is Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at Picardie-Jules-Verne University in France. She is Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She has been Visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York and a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, as well as a research fellow at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. She is the author of several monographs: Le Marché de la Vertu (2023); Vulnerability and Critical Theory (2018), Adorno and the Fragility of Caring for Others (2020); Ethique et politique de l’espace public. Habermas et la discussion (2015). She has also published numerous articles on Critical Theory, forms of life, and vulnerability as a political category
The Filmed Body as a Model of Understanding African Queer Lived Experiences
Get PDFIn Africa, a combination of cultural and religious practices, repressive laws instituted during the colonial period, and homophobic nationalisms have ensured that individuals who identify as queer experience their difference in private spaces and at the margins of societies. African people who identify as queer navigate different forms of social silence and this has an important impact on how they toggle between invisibility and visibility and ultimately how they experience embodiment and relationality. Given such a situation, Gibson Ncube explores queer lived experiences in Africa through the lens of the body in films. The body in films is a powerful model for understanding the complexities of identity, desire, and gender within diverse African communities. By examining how queer individuals navigate their physical selves in relation to societal norms, it is possible to gain insight into the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and cultural contexts. Drawing mainly on the work Ncube did in the book Queer Bodies in African Films (2022), he contends that the filmed body as a model serves as a canvas upon which societal expectations and personal expressions of gender and sexual identities collide. By zooming in on the body, Ncube is interested in how the filmed queer body is invested with multiple and often intersecting discourses and narratives. It is inscribed with more than just desire, eroticism, and sexuality. It is as a disruptive figure whose materiality calls for a rethinking not just of how gender and sexual identities are performed and staged but also how they are constructed and embodied. Thus, considering the body as a model allows for a rich understanding of the multifaceted tapestry of queer lived experiences in Africa. Gibson Ncube lectures at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). He has held fellowships supported by the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center (USA) and Leeds University Centre for African Studies (UK). He is currently an AfOx Visiting Fellow at Oxford University. He has published widely in the fields of comparative literature, gender and queer studies as well as cultural studies. He co-convened the Queer African Studies Association (2020-2022) and was the 2021 Mary Kingsley Zochonis Distinguished Lecturer (African Studies Association, UK). He currently sits on the Editorial Boards of the following journals: Journal of Literary Studies, the Canadian Journal of African Studies, and the Nordic Journal of African Studies. He is currently the Assistant Editor of the South African Journal of African Languages and the French Book Review Editor for the Canadian Journal of African Studies
