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23 February 2022

Race, Power, and Poetics Seminar Series Spring and Summer 2022 

Race, Power, and Poetics is a series of events coordinated by Dr Lara Choksey, and Dr Rachel E. Holmes, and Dr Xine Yao. A cross-period examination of the inextricability of its central terms, Race, Power, and Poetics considers the implication of poetic practices and shaping role in racial and ideological dynamics. 

 As part of UCL Department of English Language and Literature’s Research Seminar Programme, our events in the spring and summer terms will take place on Thursday 24 February, 10 March, and 19 May.

Seminar 2: Thursday 24th February, 4.00 - 5.30pm 

Amber Lascelles (University of Bristol): “The Dancing Women Move Forward”: Embodied Black Feminist Resistance to Neoliberalism in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body

Amber Lascelles
In Tsitsi Dangarembga’s acclaimed 2018 novel This Mournable Body, representations of Black women’s bodies lay bare neoliberal myths of racial equality and economic progress. Set in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare in the 2000s, the novel explores narrator Tambudzai Sigauke’s experiences of misogynoir, poverty and poor mental health. This talk argues that in addition to revealing the difficulties of agency, Dangarembga imagines embodied forms of resistance, positioning the solidarity of community as an empowering alternative to neoliberal individualism. This talk is based on a chapter of a monograph-in-progress that traces how writers including Dangarembga, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dionne Brand and Bernardine Evaristo shape global conversations about Black feminism and use their fiction to reimagine the possibilities of solidarity.

 Pre booking by registration with Eventbrite

Seminar 3: Thursday 10th March, 4.00 - 5.30pm 

Penelope Geng (Macalester College): Cripping Benefits in Timon of Athens

Penelope Geng
In act 1, Timon declares “we are born to do benefits” only to discover that in an ablenationalist state like Athens, benefits are available to the exceptional few. What lessons might we draw from the play’s bold depiction of nonnormative and nonproductive embodiment? How have recent productions (staged in this current age of ablenationalism) used casting, costume, music, and design to foreground the text’s representation of disability, race, and civic belonging?

Pre booking by registration with Eventbrite

Seminar 4: Thursday 19th May, 4.00 - 5.30pm

Natalya Din-Kariuki
Natalya Din-Kariuki (University of Warwick): Worldling, Stranger, Citizen: Cosmopolitanism and Migration in Early Modern England

The seventeenth-century writer James Howell claimed to have ‘come tumbling out into the World…a Cosmopolite’. This paper examines how early modern writers drew on the language and ideas of cosmopolitanism, shaped by Stoic and Cynic philosophies and their early Christian afterlives, to engage with debates about travel, migration, and citizenship.    

 Pre booking by registration with Eventbrite

Rescheduled seminar - Date TBA 

Kelechi Anucha (University of Exeter): Racialisation, Recovery, and Form

Kelechi Anucha
This paper builds upon work-in-progress PhD material exploring legibility, illness, care and race. Reading across the work of a selection of poets, it examines elliptical, episodic and opaque in prose poetry and poetic form, aiming to probe the multivalence of legibility in relation to health and "dysfunction", its extractive dimensions, and the implications of a failure to be seen or “read” at critical moments.

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