On Naked Agency and Open Reading

Naminata Diabate

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Cornell University

Saturday, March 27, 2021
11:00 AM EST; London, 3:00 PM; Lagos, 4:00 PM;
Johannesburg, 5:00 PM; Nairobi, 6:00PM

Join us on the ALA YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaYYHGM8iraoQF48xeCnMKw

Naminata Diabate is an associate professor of comparative literature at Cornell University. A scholar of gender, sexuality, and race in Africa and African diaspora studies with linguistic expertise in Malinké, French, English, Nouchi, and Spanish, her work seeks to redefine how we understand specific forms of embodied agency that determine the neoliberal present in global Africa. Taking as her archives literary fiction, cinema, visual arts, digital media, and field research, Diabate’s most recent work has appeared in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 46 (2020), Routledge Handbook of African Literature (2019), African Literature Today ALT 36 (2018), Critical Interventions (2017), Research in African Literatures (2016), and Fieldwork in the Humanities (2016). Her book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa, was published by Duke University Press in 2020. Currently, she is working on two monographs, “The Pleasure Turn in Neoliberal Africa” and “Digital Insurgencies and Bodily Domains.”

 

For more information:

Professor Akinwumi Adesokan at adesokan@indiana.edu
Professor Ghirmai Negash at negashg@ohio.edu
Professor Matthew H. Brown at web@africanlit.org