Theory Seminars

Between 2016 and 2022, CEREP held theory seminars, convened by Rebecca Romdhani, approximately once a month during term time. Below is a list of the seminar sessions.

2021-2022

• 22 April 2022, Cristina Sandru, “Postcolonial Postcommunism?,” in What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say (2016), pp. 156-173.
• 11 March 2022, Timothy Brennan, “From Development to Globalisation: Postcolonial Studies and Globalization Studies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (2004), pp. 120-138.
• 11 February 2022, Lipika Pelham, “Hidden Nations: Collective Passing” and “Represent: Passing and Appropriation in the Performing Arts,” in Passing: An Alternative History of Identity (2021), pp. 185-208 and pp. 291-310.
• 10 December 2021, Robert J. C. Young, “The Postcolonial Comparative,” in PLMA, 128.3 (2013): 683-689, and Sruthi B. Guptha, “Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Spaces and Transnational Comparativism: A Critical Reflection,” in RJELAL, 5.3 (2017): 391-395.
• 12 November 2021, Pamela L. Caughie, “In Passing: Prefacing Remarks” and “Passing,” in Passing & Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility (1999), pp. 1-56.
• 15 October 2021, Michael Allan, “Introduction” and “World: The World of World Literature,” in In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (2016), pp. 1-38.

2020-2021

• 23 April 2021, Selina Thompson, “Fat Demands,” in Can We All Be Feminists?, ed. June Eric-Udorie (2018), pp. 31-46, and Rachel Fox, “Against Progress: Understanding and Resisting the Temporality of Transformational Weight Loss Narratives,” in Fat Studies, 7.2 (2018), pp. 216-226.
• 19 March 2021, Jennifer C. Nash, “Strange Bedfellows: Black Feminism and Antipornography Feminism,” in Social Text, 26.4 (2008), pp. 51-76.
• 12 February 2021, Mimi Sheller, “Bodily Moves and Racial Justice,” in Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (2018), pp. 45-67.
• 10 December 2020, Achille Mbembe, “Variations on the Beautiful in Congolese Worlds of Sound,” in Beautiful Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics (2006), pp. 60-93.
• 19 November 2020, Anne McClintock, "Imperial Leather: Race, Cross-dressing and the Cult of Domesticity," in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995), pp. 132-180.
• 15 October 2020, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1.1 (2012), pp. 1-40.

2019-2020

• 18 February 2020, Jonathan Fardy, “Split Screen: Style, Mediation, and Postcolonial Theory in the Digital Age,” in Postcolonial Text, 13.1 (2018), pp. 1-18.
• 11 December 2019, David Scott, “Conscripts of Modernity,” in Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004), pp. 98-131.
• 20 November 2019, Elaine Scarry, “On Beauty and Being Fair,” in On Beauty and Being Just (1999), pp. 55-124.
• 23 October 2019, Sianne Ngai, “Animatedness,” in Ugly Feelings (2005), pp. 89-125.

2018-2019

• 25 April 2019, Anna Everett and S. Craig Watkins, “The Power of Play: The Portrayal and Performance of Race in Video Games,” in The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, ed. Katie Salen (2008), pp. 141-166.
• 21 March 2019, Natalie Osborne, “Intersectionality and Kyriarchy: A Framework for Approaching Power and Social Justice in Planning and Climate Change Adaptation,” in Planning Theory, 14.2 (2015), pp. 130-151.
• 21 February 2019, Danielle Dunand Zimmerman, “Young Muslim Women in the United States: Identities at the Intersection of Group Membership and Multiple Individualities,” in Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 120.4-5 (2014), pp. 299-313.
• 13 December 2018, Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Political Thought of Patrice Lumumba,” in Colonialism and Neocolonialism, pp. 175-223.
• 15 November 2018, Paulo Freire, “Society in Transition,” in Education for Critical Consciousness, pp. 3-18.
• 18 October 2018, Katrina Roen, “Transgender Theory and Embodiment: The Risk of Racial Marginalisation,” in Journal of Gender Studies 10.3, pp. 253-63.

2017-2018

• 18 April 2018, E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother,” in Text and Performance Quarterly 21.1, pp. 1-25.
• 21 March 2018, Julianne Burton, “Don (Juanito) Duck and the Imperial-Patriarchal Unconscious: Disney Studios, the Good Neighbor Policy, and the Packaging of Latin America,” in Nationalisms & Sexualities, pp. 21-41.
• 21 February 2018, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” in Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, pp. 43-84.
• 13 December 2017, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, “Zoocriticism and the Postcolonial: Introduction” and “Agency, Sex and Emotion”, in Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, pp. 134-140 and 185-202.
• 29 November 2017, Gloria Wekker, “‘… For Even Though I Am Black as Soot, My Intentions Are Good’: The Case of Zwarte Piet/Black Pete,” in White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, pp. 139-169.
• 18 October 2017, Sara Ahmed, “Introduction” and “Melancholic Migrants,” in The Promise of Happiness, pp. 1- 20 and 121-159.

2016-2017

• 20 April 2017, Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003).
• 16 March 2017, Elaine Scarry, “The Structure of Torture: The Conversion of Real Pain into the Fiction of Power,” in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford UP, 1985), pp. 27-59.
• 16 February 2017, bell hooks, “Essentialism and Experience” and “Confronting Class in the Classroom,” in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 77-92 and 177-189.
• 15 December 2016, M. Jacqui Alexander, “Imperial Desire/Sexual Utopias: White Gay Capital and Transnational Tourism,” in Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations On Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and The Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 66-88.
• 17 November 2016, Judith Butler, “The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess,” in The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sara Salih and Judith Butler (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 183-203.
• 20 October 2016, Sara Ahmed, “Speaking about Racism,” in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 141-71.