Institute for Research on Women
Please join The Institute for Research on Women on Thursday October 15, as we host Professor Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed (Communication, Cornell University) for our first Book Talk of the academic year! She will discuss her newest book," Media, Culture, and Decolonization: Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana.” Light lunch will be served.
Disability aesthetics always already exist in a number of non-Western social formations but are currently subject to emergent accommodative conditions in the most of the Global North and West; this lecture will address a variety of existing and emergent conditions for disability aesthetics, specifically addressing shamanic, healing, and communal practices that recognize embodied variation. I will also focus in particular on historical instances of aesthetic irony, in the case of disability-related aesthetics under a previously prevailing Moral Model of Disability. Several instances of contemporary and emergent modes of disability aesthetics will then address both means of artistic production and resultant innovative business models, as well as sample practices in a variety of disability-related literary, visual and performing arts.
The story of James Baldwin the playwright, indeed James Baldwin the literary artist, begins at nine or ten as a tween author of a dramatic work and a young boy whose personal inclination and fits of passion were allied to the theater. How fitting that the last major piece of writing the author completed just months before his death, The Welcome Table, is also a work of dramatic literature. From circa 1934, when his first play was performed, to 1987, when he finished his last monograph, theater, although we seldom narrate the arc of Baldwin’s vocation in this way, is a binding thread. Indeed, if we look closely at his published and unpublished body of work, from his first public creative undertaking to his last, it becomes clear that for Baldwin drama was an abiding artistic form, the theater an essential life-force. In the first half of the lecture, then, I will focus on James Baldwin the playwright and in the second half on The Welcome Table. Baldwin’s last work is set in “an ancient rambling stone house, in the south of France,” one identical to his own home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. And it is titled after the bamboo-shaded farmhouse table in his garden—a space of gathering, fellowship, and nourishment that he christened “The Welcome Table”—the name he chose to give his last major work perhaps as a metonym for the house that houses the play, a metaphor for the gathering ground that is the theater, a gesture of gratitude to the house that received and rescued him and enabled his late career. At the center of The Welcome Table is Edith Heming, “actress-singer/star.” Her Provençal home is a much sought-after destination—as reflected by the cast of characters—for artists and revolutionaries, journalists and itinerants, family, friends and lovers who come to commune with this celebrated figure, or to attend her legendary parties, or to find some measure of peace. Building over the course of a single day and culminating in a festive birthday party, The Welcome Table foregrounds Edith’s interior (intimate, personal and communal) world, while exploring themes of gender, race, sexuality, desire, nationality, age, fame, and exile with new theatrical forms and a style characteristic of the author’s late works.
Camille Billops (1933–2019) was a New York legend. A self-determined Black woman and a storyteller, she devoted herself to speaking the unspoken through film, printmaking, teaching, ceramics, archival work, and community building. This lecture proposes Billops as a case study in dissident aesthetics, conducted at the scale of a life. The weekly salons Billops and her husband and collaborator James Hatch hosted at their SoHo loft from the 1970s onward, their publication Artist and Influence, and the oral histories, exhibition flyers, performance programs, audio recordings, and books they collected, were not adjacent to her practice as an artist; they were the practice. Against the erasures of a mainstream art world that frequently excluded artists of color and rarely noted their contributions, Billops and Hatch built an undeniable record and a road map for the future, itself an act of dissent. "Every creative, cultural, and racial experience has to do with my work. I sift and look and taste," Billops wrote. This lecture takes that syncretic method as its subject, offering a blueprint for a life in art in which art-making, truth-telling, and world-building are the same gesture.
In November 1945, 850 women from around the world travelled to Paris across war-ravaged lands to attend the founding congress of the Women's International Democratic Federation. One of these women was Inji Aflatoun (1924-1989), a young communist and women's rights activist who would soon become one of Egypt's most important surrealist painters. Delegates to the congress representing organizations from forty countries met in the Palais de la Mutualité for five days in the last week of November to denounce fascism and discuss the struggle of women around the world for equality and freedom.
Aflatoun’s report on the congress, Eighty Million Women Stand with Us--initially banned by the Egyptian authorities--translated postwar European anti-fascist feminism into anticolonial liberation politics. Defining fascism as "the lowest form of imperialism" allowed Aflatoun to clear space for an ‘unthinkable’ local feminism while creating the conditions for a new language of feminist internationalism that embraced the colonized world. My talk will explore the broader Cold War history in which Aflatoun's forgotten report is embedded and consider it as an example of how translation enables and preserves radical solidarities across time and space despite state repression and cultural erasure
