Schedule

At-A-Glance Schedule

Detailed Schedule

Friday, April 25, 2025

University Hall, Corporation Room

9:30–10 am EST

Coffee

10–10:15 am EST

Opening Remarks

10:15–12:15 pm EST

SESSION 1

Namrata B. Kanchan

The ‘Hindu’ Sultan of Bijapur: The Reception of the Early Modern Sultan Ibrahim Adil Shah II in Twentieth-Century South Asian Scholarship

From the late 1500s, Bijapur’s sultan Ibrahim Adil Shah II (r. 1580–1627 CE) used the concept of nauras—emerging from the Sanskrit aesthetic realm—across the socio-political milieu of his kingdom. An able ruler under whose governance Bijapur prospered, Ibrahim Adill II was also a gifted musician, who produced a musical treatise and fashioned himself as a spiritual instructor of the world to promote arts in his domain. Some contemporary painters often depicted the sultan with rudraksha malas (beads worn by Hindus) and musical instruments, which twentieth-century scholars interpreted as arising out of an ‘eccentric’, ‘religiously unorthodox’, ‘artistically absorbed’, and Hinduphile sultan’s indulgence in leisure over statecraft. In this presentation, I present the varying twentieth-century interpretations of these images by colonial and postcolonial Muslim and European scholars attempting to locate these ‘unsettling’ early modern paintings at a time when a set definition of a modern, masculine, Muslim male was taking shape in postcolonial India.

Georgia Ennis

Discerning Real Amazonian Fakes: The Multivalent Semiotics of Indigenous Reclamation Media

Racialized images of Indigenous Amazonians as Ecologically Noble guardians of the rainforest are widespread in environmental media and activism. Anthropologists have also repeatedly noted how Amazonian activists present images of themselves that are more ideal than “real” for distant publics. In contrast, some Kichwa cultural activists and performers in the Ecuadorian Amazon describe themselves as reclaiming aesthetic forms that have been discouraged under settler colonialism. Still others have more ambivalent reactions to these projects. In this talk, I provide a semiotic explanation for the diverse analyses that emerge from various typified perspectives (Gal and Irvine 2019) on the aesthetics of Amazonian activist media. Rather than judging what is “real” or “fake” in Amazonian media and self-presentation, I highlight the multivalent semiotic systems through which signs such as face paint, feathers, and historical forms of dress are interpreted as real or fake by discerning experts (Reyes 2017).

Suzie Telep

My “Afropean” Musical Journey: A Black Feminist Jazz Cosmology between Europe, Africa, and the Americas

This paper presents a creative response, including a written artist statement and performance video I created for the new journal Feminist Art Practices and Research: Cosmos. It relies on my decade-long experience as a Black female jazz singer and scholar studying language and race among the French Cameroonian diaspora. As a French Black woman of Cameroonian descent, my “Afropean” journey (Miano 2024, Zap Mama 2006) spans multiple geographical spaces – France, Cameroon, the United States, and the Caribbean – that all shape my Afro-diasporic identity. Through personal reflections and song analyses drawing on an Africa-centered Black feminist perspective (Lorde 2019, Salami 2020, hooks 1984, Soumahoro 2022), I discuss how my Afropean music aims to constitute a “Black feminist jazz cosmology” that implicitly challenges dominant Western narratives through sensuous knowledge – combining the intellectual and the emotional, embodied experiences of my multiple positionalities in the world. I address these key questions: What does it mean to be a Black African woman born and raised in postcolonial France? How can I reconnect with my multiple identities in a legally race-blind country such as France, where it seems to be a contradiction to be Black and French? How does living in the U.S. help me redefine my Black woman identity? My Afropean musical cosmology is an artistic response to my experience of being silenced as a Black woman in French society. It enables me to reclaim my voice and those of other Black women. Finally, I address the question of language: in a colorblind French society that upholds monolingualism as a symbol of national identity implicitly tied to Whiteness, how does singing in different languages help me disrupt postcolonial linguistic hierarchies and assert my Afro-diasporic plural identifications?

Chair: Joshua Babcock

12:15–1:30 pm EST

Lunch

1:45–4:15 pm EST

SESSION 2

Felisa Vergara Reynolds

Colonization on Film: Portraits by the Colonizers and the Colonized

In “Mythical Portrait of the Colonized,” from The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi paints a portrait of the life of the colonized under colonial oppression:

Just as the bourgeoisie proposes an image of the proletariat, the existence of the colonizer requires that an image of the colonized be suggested. These images become excuses without which the presence and conduct of a colonizer, and that of a bourgeois would seem shocking. But the favored image becomes a myth precisely because it suits them too well (79).

This project began as a graduate-level seminar with a simple query: How is colonialism represented on film? This involved asking two important questions: 1. Who is doing the representing? And 2. What or who is being represented? As we well know, History is written by the victors and thus most of the colonial representation on film is from an occidental point of view. This leads to a preponderance of certain tropes, such as (but not limited to): The White Savior, the “Civilizing Mission,” Racism, and Exoticizing/Degrading the Other. For my talk I have chosen a few examples that show two sides of colonization on film. In the “traditional” portrayals of colonization, I show how these films mainly serve as propaganda for colonialism. To counter this propaganda, and to highlight the importance of representation, those films are followed by what I term as “counterprograming.” These films are from the point of view of the oppressed and show colonialism in all its brutality. The films representing the colonizer will be Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Out of Africa (1985), Indochine (1992), and Extraction (2020). The “counterprogramming” will be represented by La noire de (1966), Sugar Cane Alley (1983), A Dry White Season (1989), and Lumumba (2000). The difference in the representation of colonialism will shock, but certainly not surprise.

Lanre Akinsiku

And Then What?

Writing fiction means moving between what a story is and what it could be at any given moment. Because this gap is infinite, navigating it can be disorienting, terrifying, and, when the stars align, marvelous. This talk is about how I engage with the politics and possibilities of those moments in my work, and why I use surrealism as a strategy for subverting some of the deadening fictions that comprise “reality.”

Paja Faudree

Botanical Reparations: Psychedelic Plants, Indigenous People, and the Violence of “Discovery”

This talk will present material from my forthcoming book, examining the global rise of recreational and pharmaceutical interest in Salvia divinorum. A psychedelic variety of sage, the plant is endemic worldwide only to the Sierra Mazateca of southern Mexico, a region that since the 1960s has been known for its psilocybin mushrooms. I analyze competing narratives surrounding the history and current status of these psychedelic species to argue for a new understanding of how commodified “things” move through the world. That reframing requires recognizing the essential but routinely erased role that women and Indigenous people from the Sierra played in the “discovery” of these psychedelic substances. Making those contributions visible advances what I call botanical reparations: the case for placing Indigenous people at the center of the “psychedelic renaissance” and of social reckonings about the past, present, and future of the psychedelic plants they’ve created and cared for.

Joshua Babcock

The Master Has No Tools—or House

As Audre Lorde famously declared, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (1979), a declaration Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò echoed in Elite Capture (2022) when calling on us to build a new house. But what is a tool? What is a house? In this talk, I build on these interventions, drawing on abolitionist university studies (Moten and Harney 2013; Boggs et al. 2019), abolitionist anthropology (Shange 2019), and the raciolinguistic perspective in semiotic anthropology (Rosa and Flores 2020; Ke-Schutte and Babcock 2023; Smalls 2024) to undertake a reparative reading (Sedgwick 2003 [1995]) of 19th and 20th-century colonial texts on “primitive science.” I combine this with autoethnography and fieldwork reflections on the indeterminate social lives of totalizing colonial technologies in Singapore. I ask: what if tools are not things but relations—relations that emerge in dynamic processes of thinking, making, and doing? What if elite capture is neither inescapable nor inevitable?

Chair: Suzie Telep

4:15–4:30 pm EST

Break

4:30–5:15 pm EST

Keynote: Kamala Visweswaran

Genocide/Genre

Genocide and genre both have linguistic roots in the Latin, genus, as does the word gender. This talk explores the ways in which gender marks the point at which genocide is enunciated through archives of the visual. It explores the mass media production and circulation of forensic photographs of the Gujarat genocide and probes the work of these images which take sexual violence as a limit to be transgressed. I am interested in the ethical instability of the archive of sexual violence, and in its forms of visual aestheticization.

5:15–6 pm EST

Roundtable and Q&A

Kamala Visweswaran in conversation with Samson Allal, Joshua Babcock, Paja Faudree, Felisa Vergara Reynolds, and Suzie Telep

Saturday, April 26, 2025

Stephen Robert '62 Hall, True North Classroom

9:30–10 am EST

Coffee

10–11 am EST

Workshop: Exploring Ekphrasis

Lanre Akinsiku, Samson Allal, and Renia White

How do poets use the ekphrastic form—the written description of a work of art—to unsettle, destabilize, and re-engage language and image? How does one write through and/or from within the openings of an image? In this workshop, Lanre Akinsiku, Samson Allal, and Renia White will guide us on an exploration of how the ekphrastic form can inform our relationships to language, visual art, and poetry.

11–11:15 am EST

Break

11:15–12:45 pm EST

Work-in-Progress Writing Workshop

Small-group discussions of attendees' pre-circulated works-in-progress. Attendees are encouraged to engage with the draft works before attending the workshop.

Download the pre-circulated papers.

12:45–1:45 pm EST

Lunch

1:45–2:45 pm EST

Picturing the Erased; Writing the Unsayable: A Generative Writing Session

Grace Talusan

Creative nonfiction offers narrative possibilities towards imagining and speculating voices and stories that are marginalized. Writing these stories alone, especially when it feels like everything is working against their existence, can be challenging. In this 60-minute generative writing session, we will go through a step-by-step process inspired by photographs to write a short flash piece. With no pressure to share your writing, we will write in community as an act of resistance to erasure.

2:45–3 pm EST

Break

3–4:30 pm EST

Work-in-Progress Writing Workshop

Small-group discussions of attendees' pre-circulated works-in-progress. Attendees are encouraged to engage with the draft works before attending the workshop.

Download the pre-circulated papers.

4:30–4:45 pm EST

Break

4:45–6 pm EST

Closing Remarks

Performance Plenary and Reception

Why does a conference need to end with a keynote? Why not an open mic? Against the academic fiction that a “serious” event needs a “serious” conclusion—ideally featuring a solo speaker on the stage—we will instead gather in a communal space to perform, reflect, read aloud, and share our stories in any other way we choose. You’re welcome to perform in any language or combination of languages, even languages you’re not “fluent” in (it’s time to unsettle the fiction of the “fluent” speaker!). You’re also welcome to perform or share in any genre or mix of genres, from poetry to literary reading to song and anything in between or beyond. Translation into English is optional.

Against the colonial image of languages and modes of public presentation and performance as objects that must be complete, consistent, virtuosic, and standardized, we will stage partial connections, collaborative meaning-making, orality without literacy, literacy without orality, the refusal of totality, the refusal of mastery, and the refusal to assume that we are entitled to effortlessly know the meaning(s) of what another person has said. Among the many results of genocide, languages of the land—now known globally as Indigenous languages—are rarely if ever heard in public. Many of us never speak non-English languages publicly. And many of us can speak languages without reading/writing or write/read without speaking. But what if this wasn’t a shameful sign that something has been “broken”? What if this was a resource to play with, embrace, and innovate through? This session will be an opportunity to do just that. We will gather to listen, to speak, to write, to sign, to share, some of us with understanding(s) but most of us without. And that will be the point.

Interested in sharing, presenting, speaking, and/or contributing something asynchronously? Please complete this form! There are no prohibitions or requirements on what languages you can use or how you can use them. All genres are welcome.