Author Archives: Fiona Lee

Nov 16, DRIVING WITH FANON film screening

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Please join us for our first event of the year, during which we will also kick-off an exploration of our theme for this year, “Freedom.”

 

Film description (excerpted from Africa is a Country):

Driving with Fanon is a filmic meditation on violence, memory and the human condition in post-colonial Africa. Avant-garde filmmaker, Kwena Mokwena travels through Freetown, Sierra Leone with the ghost of Frantz Fanon, engaging a new generation into conversation about the radical black scholar, psychiatrist and revolutionary thinker. Through this film, we drive into the 21st century Africa guided by a Sierra Leonean journalist and writer , Lansana Fofana.  This film uses a dynamic digital language to deconstruct dangerous stereotypical depictions of violence in Africa. Kwena’s daring use of funky hip-hop grooves and free jazz treatments turn the dull documentary format into an exciting experimental moment where young Africans can ask the hardest questions facing their generation. Driving With Fanon juxtaposes classical cinematography with video art and music video like montages that create a new audio-visual language. It is a digital libation.

 

Film preview:

Reading: Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence, trans. Farrington

Our heartfelt thanks to Sean Jacobs (http://africasacountry.com/) for making this event possible.

Download a pdf of the flyer here.

Summer Reading Group

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The following are the reading lists for previously held summer reading groups.

SUMMER 2009

June
Cheah, Pheng. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

July
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York & London: Routledge, 1994.

August
Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

SUMMER 2008

June
Hardt and Negri; Empireand Multitude

July
Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

August
Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

SUMMER 2007
Reading List (pdf)

Past Events: 2008 and before

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Some of our past events include:

Gayatri Spivak in conversation with Peter Hitchcock about Other Asias (Spring 08).

“Writing Across Borders” Asian Women Writers, with Meena Alexander, Jessica Hagedorn, and Kimiko Hahn, English, Queens College/CUNY (Spring 08).

Waf’a Abdellatif Zeinal’Abidin, English, University of Mosul, Iraq and the Radcliffe Institute (Spring 08).

Michele Grossman on aboriginal women’s writing in Australia (Spring 07).

Sukhdev Sandhu of NYU spoke about his work in progress on underground London.

Ashley Dawson on South Asian Youth Cultures in Britain after 9/11.

Sachidananda Mohanty lecture: “Empire, Education, and Community Building: Early Women’s Writing in India, 1898—1950.”

David Eng (Rutgers) spoke on transnational adoptions.

Peter Hitchcock spoke on “Postcolonial Genres.”

 

Poetry Event: Kishwar Naheed and Meena Alexander

Tuzyline Jita Allan spoke on “Lindsay Collen: Postcolonial Considerations.

Screening of Hanif Kureishi’s film “My Son the Fanatic,” followed by a discussion moderated by Peter Hitchcock.

Black British Film Evening screening and discussion of Sankofa’s “Passion of Remembrance.”

USA premiere of Cameroonian feature film Potent Secrets, starring (and written by) English program student Joyce Abunaw.

Shakuntala Bharvani, a Visiting Fulbright Lecturer from the University of Mumbai gave a talk entitled “Bombay to Mumbai: Mapping the City’s Myriad Voices.”

“A Transnational Mushaira”: an evening of international poetry, featuring Meena Alexander and other poets.

Discussion with Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, editors of The Edward Said Reader.

An African/(-American) Women and Literature Panel: Visiting Scholar Margie Orford of the Comp. Lit. Dept. on Namibian Women Writers and the Women Writing Africa Project, and Denise Rodriguez from the English Dept. on Tony Morrison.