Chika Okeke-Agulu’s Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria

chika

Dr. Chika Okeke-Agulu, professor of Art and Archeology at Princeton University, is an Igbo-Nigerian artist, art historian, art curator, and blogger specializing in African and African Diaspora Art History. He is widely published in art and scholarly journals on classical, modern, and contemporary African art history and theory. His books include Contemporary African Art Since 1980; Phyllis Galembo: Maske; and Ezumeezu: Essays on Nigerian Art and Architecture. He is editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, by Duke University Press. His most recent publication, which he is joining us to discuss, is Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria from Duke University Press.

Friday October 23rd, 2:00 – 4:00 PM, Rm. 5414
Light refreshments served

Joshua I. Cohen and Abigal Lapin Darsdashti will be responding to Chika Okeke-Agulu’s talk.

Joshua I. Cohen (B.A. Vassar College, Ph.D. Columbia University) is an Africanist art historian specializing in 20th-century cross-cultural exchange.  His areas of interest include African and diasporic modernisms; national post-independence cultural policies in West Africa; international “ballet” performance; “primitivism” in art practice and discourse; postcolonial studies; and museum studies. His first book-length project tracks European and then African modernist engagements with African sculpture between 1905 and 1980.  A second project builds on research conducted in Guinea and elsewhere since 2002, examining international staged productions of West African dance, music, theater, and masquerade.

Abigail Lapin Dardashti is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on formations of ethno-religious and racial identity in the Americas, with a concentration on the Dominican Republic and Brazil. Her dissertation explores the relationship of race, politics, and modernity during the Afro-Brazilian civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century. Her work has been funded by the Smithsonian Institution and the New York Council of the Humanities. Lapin Dardashti is a Graduate Teaching Fellow at City College, CUNY.

The Postcolonial Studies Group (PSG) is a student-run organization chartered by the Doctoral Students’ Council (DSC) at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

This event is co-sponsored by the Institution for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas (IRADAC) and the Africana Studies Group (ASG). 

Patricia White’s “Women’s Cinema, World Cinema”

Patricia White’s “Women’s Cinema, World Cinema”

Today’s globalized network of film festivals defines world cinema as a way to preserve film art and national cinemas against Hollywood domination. White’s new book, Women’s Cinema/ World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms looks at how a new generation of women directors takes on gendered concepts of authorship, taste, genre, and human rights within this context. Her presentation looks at the fiction and documentary work of London-based Chinese writer and director Xiaolu Guo as a mapping of transnational identity in the space between “I” and “she.”

Discussion will be led by Dr. Laura Di Bianco, Hunter College.

Friday, September 25, 2015
Rm. 5414, 2:00 – 4:00 PM
Light refreshments served

patricia white

Patricia White is a scholar of feminist film and professor and chair of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College. She is also the author of Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian and her work has been published in Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, GLQ, Screen and in the edited collectionsInside/Out and A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, among others. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Co- sponsored by the Dept. of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies Group (CSG), The Graduate Center, CUNY

Indian Ocean Crossings: Archive and Aesthetics

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Indian Ocean Crossings: Archive and Aesthetics

Conversation
Feb 27, 2015, 4:00 pm
English Department Lounge (Room 4406)
Periplus Ancient Map (Wikipedia, Public Domain)

How are archives shaped over time by poets, historians, scholars? What are the connections between lyric time and the time of history? And what of migration—how are new geographies illuminated, selves created? We will consider these questions in relation to Indian Ocean crossings, focusing on questions of memory and the transmission of cultural knowledge, affective life and self-inscription in the face of a fluid world. Join Kai Kresse(Columbia); Sylviane Diouf (Schomburg, NYPL); Meena Alexander (The Graduate Center, CUNY; Christopher Ian Foster (PhD Program in English, The Graduate Center, CUNY) for this conversation.

Kai Kresse

– See more at: http://centerforthehumanities.org/program/indian-ocean-crossings-archive-and-aesthetics#sthash.NOv3SSpd.dpuf

Cosponsored by the Ph.D. Program in English, the Postcolonial Studies Group, IRADAC and the Advanced Research Collaborative

– See more at: http://centerforthehumanities.org/program/indian-ocean-crossings-archive-and-aesthetics#sthash.NOv3SSpd.dpuf