Dr Jennifer Leetsch (Bonn University’s Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies, Germany) will be giving a lecture entitled “Experimental Black Life Writing: Yrsa Daley-Ward’s Instagram Poetry” on Monday 10 May at 13.00 in Room ‘Commu 2’ at the University of Liège. 

For more information, contact Delphine Munos: delphine.munos@uliege.be.

All welcome!

Synopsis: 

My talk explores the work of Black British writer and Instagram poet Yrsa Daley-Ward in order to tease out new experimental forms of black life writing in on- and offline media, and to activate critical engagement with questions of authorship and authority, identity and belonging. I will first examine Daley-Ward’s work along the lines of its aesthetic, collaborative and socio-economic practices, and secondly locate it within a twenty-first-century context of digital spaces of online self-expression and social media. 

This approach, located the intersection of postcolonial studies and digital media studies, updates and reinvigorates discussions about the shifting technologies of the self, in order to place them in a dialogue with more innovative and connective aesthetic strategies to tell stories of the self on- and offline. Combining theories of collaborative autobiography and digital life writing, the paper will argue that by making her art available to an online audience, Daley-Ward generates spaces of participation and emancipation which contribute to new forms of world-wide relationality.