MSU Presents: Decolonizing the Global Imaginary Talk Series

BRAZIL’S DECOLONIAL MODERNISM, TROPICALIA, AND THE CARIB REVOLUTION: Variations on a Tupi-Indigenous Theme
Thursday, March 26th (11:30 am) – Dickson Hall 179
Speaker: Robert Stam (University Professor, Dept. of Cinema Studies, NYU)
This lecture-video presentation will place in relation representations of “first contact,” in Brazil, the Brazilian Modernist Movement of the 1920s, and its relation to the “Indian,” along with Tropicalia’s musical relation to the same theme in the 1960s, with emphasis on the representation and self-representation of the “cunha,” the indigenous Tupi woman, including as present-day activists.

MUSLIM SPACES, JEWISH PASTS: Genealogies of the Split Arab / Jew Figure
Thursday, March 26th (2:30 pm) – Schmitt 104
Speaker: Ella Shohat, (Professor of Cultural Studies, Depts of Art and Public Policy and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU)
On Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab/Jew Figure Revisited
In this essay, Ella Shohat argues that the question of the Arab-Jew must be posed in such a way as to address the complex imaginaries of both “the Arab” and “the Jew,” which, in contrast to present-day ethno-nationalist common sense, must be rearticulated as mutually constitutive categories. Elaborating on her earlier dialogue with Edward Said’s account of the bifurcated Semitic myth– one rendered as the Orientalist (the Jew) and the other as the Oriental (the Arab), Shohat offers a genealogical reading of this gradual splitting, locating it prior to the partition of Palestine and even to the emergence of Zionism–with the dissemination of colonizing Enlightenment discourse. But more crucially, Shohat asks where the indigenous Jew of “the Orient,” and more specifically the Arab-Jew, might fit conceptually within this split? Her talk features analysis of French orientalist paintings, specifically “L’execution de la Juive” by Dehodenque, foregrounding the uses of gendered representations.

UNRULY VISIONS
Thursday, April 30th (2:30 pm) – SBUS 101
Speaker: Gayatri Gopinath (Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, and Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU)
This lecture will be based on her 2019 book, “Unruly Visions: Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora,” where she will be speaking on Queer Diaspora. In 1991, Gayatri Gopinath received her Bachelor’s Degree in Latin American Studies from Wesleyan University, and later received her Ph.D in English and Comparative Literature in 1998, from Columbia University. Her areas of interest include: Transnational queer and feminist studies; postcolonial studies; Asian diaspora studies; visual art; performance.