“Rioting As Writing, Writing As Rioting: Locating a South African Black Feminist Thought in the Autobiographies of Black Women Anti-Apartheid Freedom Fighters”

Zinhle Ka’Nobuhlaluse/ Department of Philosophy, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

It is generally known that Apartheid in South Africa was an oppressive system. However, the intelligibility of the system and our philosophical approaches to Apartheid as a system with multiple and intersecting forms of oppression remain undertheorized, and the system’s complexities remain unknown. My project argues that prioritizing the lived experience of marginalized persons with intersecting identities makes the system intelligible. My presentation focuses on the dissertation’s final chapter, which draws on the dialogical relationship between rioting women, the anti-Apartheid activists Caesarina Kona Makhoere and Mamphela Ramphele, and their writing in the form of the autobiography. I argue that the dialogical relation is embedded in a dialectical method that registers a South African Black Feminist thought. This is to say, it is only by rioting against Apartheid that they are able to write about it, as a system. Their writing is also an act of rioting against the system insofar as it was illegal for Black people to engage in this type of writing. This project is a timely intervention into global circuits of knowledge that undermine (South African) Black women’s knowledge.

“”Imagining Elsewheres: Speculating the Asian Diaspora in North America, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand"

Su Young Lee / Department of English, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

In this project, I argue Asian America and other Asian diasporas in the West can learn from each other and imagine a cross-disciplinary political formation against globally circulated forms of anti-Asian racism. Though Asian American studies and other studies of the Asian diaspora are considered distinct fields that do not overlap because of emphasis on individual national contexts and because Asian American studies has a longer and more prominent history as a field, I imagine alternative groupings of conversations from traditional categories of knowledge and cultural production that are based on geography or the nation-state. Looking to forms of fiction loosely defined as speculative that help imagine alternative relationalities, I explore how understandings of these Asian diasporas might be reconfigured around affective experiences, temporary or event-based affiliations, or more-than-human entanglements with nonhuman species that do not adhere to these boundaries.

“”From Ouadramé to Maïssa: Searching for the Signares in Early Modern Archives"

Brooke Tybush / Department of French and Francophone Studies, Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Rather than viewing Arabic and Persian literature written post-1980 as a vehicle for nationalism or political criticism, I bring these two traditions together through the dual concept of embodiment and dispossession. By engaging different literary genres of six dispossessed writers from the Gulf, I argue that their distinct portrayal of dispossession reframes the literary scene in its attentiveness to the body. Depictions of embodied dispossession expose the way colonial capitalism instrumentalizes statelessness, expatriation, gender, and racialized indigeneity to uphold social reproduction. They simultaneously build a corpus of embodied knowledge that precludes full co-option by the system. I ultimately advocate for a “visceral and parietal poetics” that invites us to see how this literature reimagines sovereign power, geopolitical borders, and tokenistic representation.