THE UNIVERSITY AND ITS PUBLICS: NORTH, SOUTH, AND IN BETWEEN
Critical Epistemology, Knowing
through
Gender
and the
Decolonial
Hacer Escuela/
Inventing School: Rethinking the Pedagogy of Critical Theory
Decolonizing Critical Theory
Technologies of Critique: New Sources for Critical Theory
After Foucault: Gender and Biopolitics in the Americas
Aesthetics and the Critique of Political Theology
Critical
theory
in the
Global
South
PUBLIC events:
APPROPRIATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
From left to right: Huey Copeland, Athi Joja, and Mlondi Zondi.
April 3, 2018 | Northwestern
Visiting scholar Athi Joja delivered his paper "Dumile and the Sketches of Jazz." Exploring how jazz impacted the visual language of the iconic South African artist Dumile Feni, Joja presented an introductory overview of Feni’s unique oeuvre and the intricate ways in which jazz both constitutes much of its subject matter and, more importantly, informs its expressive grammar. Joja argued that in spite of Dumile’s noted stylistic and formal shifts throughout his career, jazz remained the most consistently present idiom in his work, shaping his well-known beautiful line.
Athi Joja.
April 6, 2018 | Northwestern
Athi Joja has completed his residency at Northwestern and returned to the University of the Witwatersrand. During his stay, he focused on comparative approaches to the black arts, particularly in terms of theories of cultural appropriation and the global circulation of black bodies from an Afro-pessimist perspective. To facilitate this work and to broaden their intellectual framework, Copeland and Joja curated a series of 3 monthly events during the quarter: the first 2 were reading and discussion groups—comprising approximately a dozen faculty and graduate students from Northwestern and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—examining recent books exploring black visual cultures from radically interdisciplinary perspectives (Fred Moten's Black and Blur and Tina Campt's Listening to Images); the 3rd and final event was Joja's lecture "Dumile and the Sketches of Jazz."
Spring, 2020 | the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Professor Copeland collaborated with Professor Aranke (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) on the Afro-Pessimist Aesthetics class. The class takes a focused look at current debates in Black Studies around “Afro-pessimism,” while considering how these theoretical interventions have entered popular culture. It analyzes how artists, critics, and cultural producers across various contexts have turned to Afro-pessimism as both a framework for artistic production and a means of critical engagement with it.
November 2020 | Northwestern
"Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power" is a re-publication book workshop with Sampada Aranke and Huey Copeland. Responses by æryka hollis o’neil, Jordan Mulkey, Harrison Graves, and Alex Weheliye, via Zoom (November 2020) as part of Appropriation and Its Discontents.