Naked Agency / Protest: Between the Occult and the Internet
Wednesday, May 4, 2022
Online Event
9:00 am – 10:30 am EDT/GMT-4
9 am New York l 3 pm Vienna9:00 am – 10:30 am EDT/GMT-4
The last two decades have registered an outstanding wave of naked protests globally. In Africa, the proliferation and hypervisibility of what is erroneously called "genital cursing" can be explained by multiple factors, including the power of the digital sphere and the intensification and multiplication of negative biopolitical conditions.
In this lecture, organized by the OSUN project on Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, Naminata Diabate, Cornell University, traces the historical trajectory of mature women’s insurrectionary disrobing and examines its recent deployment during moments of socio-political duress. Diabate meditates on the impact of internet media to reframe the terms of the debate around women’s agency. As news and images of the gesture travel outside of their original site of performance, the women’s agency takes on new forms. Diverging, thus, from the longstanding logic that frames the women as endlessly empowered and empowering, Diabate proposes that we think of women's agency as naked, in the keys of instability and openness.
Naminata Diabate is an associate professor of comparative literature at Cornell University. A scholar of gender, sexuality, and race, drawing on archives of literary fiction, cinema, visual arts, and digital media, her most recent work has appeared in a monograph, peer-reviewed journals, and collections of essays, including Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (2020), Routledge Handbook of African Literature (2019), African Literature Today ALT 36 (2018), Critical Interventions (2017), Research in African Literatures (2016), and Fieldwork in the Humanities (2016). Her book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa was published by Duke University Press in 2020 and awarded the African Studies Association 2021 Best Book Prize. This year, she holds the Ali Mazrui Senior Research Fellowship at the Africa Institute of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, working on two monographs, “The Problem of Pleasure in Global Africa” and “Digital Insurgencies and Bodily Domains.”
This lecture series is jointly curated by faculty involved in Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, an OSUN project that offers a sustainable platform for students and professors from network institutions to engage in rigorous academic work, express themselves freely, inspire each other through art, and work closely with local and international initiatives to further the feminist agenda for social justice.
Join via Zoom.
For more information, call 845-758-6822,
or visit https://osun-eu.zoom.us/j/97179676540.
Time: 9:00 am – 10:30 am EDT/GMT-4
Location: Online Event