‘The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora: Lorraine Hansberry and the Multiplications of Insurgency’

This paper is from Ferguson’s book-in-progress entitled The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora. An experimental and conceptual text, the book is comprised of a series of fictional visits to a make-a-believe black queer bookshop and art gallery, made up of actual artifacts that invoke the histories of black queer art and activism, their responses to the ongoing legacies of colonialism and slavery, and the entanglements those legacies and neoliberalism.

Three Frontiers to one Boundary: The Making of the Ottoman-Iranian Boundary

MEC Boardroom is in the Kirdar Building, 68 Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6DU - on the ground floor at the bottom of the main staircase.

One of the longest-in-the-making and the oldest among Muslim countries, the Ottoman-Iranian frontier, from 1514 to 1914, underwent four centuries of evolution to reach its final form. At present, the modern states of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey share these boundaries that emerged from the conflation of numerous borders. In this talk, Sabri Ateş will examine the emergence and transformation of religious-ideological, geopolitical, and medical borders.

‘Black Internationalism's Politics of Land’

This paper draws out those structures of solidarity and global visions of Black freedom articulated around the event of the 1974 Sixth Pan African Congress in Dar es Salaam and the identification of industrial agriculture as a central pillar of Black liberation. As Quito Swan notes in his analysis of the call for 6PAC, organizers positioned technological innovation in relation to cultivation practices as a central path towards economic self-reliance. But the question of land use drew the attention of writers who lived and travelled in and around East Africa at this historical juncture.

‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Agora: The Queer Politics of Literariness’

“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Agora: The Queer Politics of Literariness” traces the relation between the linguistic turn in literary studies and the emergence of queer theory. Showing how the advent of structuralism followed by the wide-spread dissemination of deconstruction, introduced a cultural anxiety about the separation of literary studies from its vitalizing social contexts, this talk examines the logic by which that separation got taken up by theorists of queer negativity and reframed precisely as a political response to the social order’s dominant values.

Theo Hickfang

I am DPhil student in Political Theory at Wolfson College and the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. My research is funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation.

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