Workshop with Nadia Ellis (University of California)
WHEN
WHERE
Käte Hamburger Centre CURE
Neugrabenweg 4
66123 Saarbrücken
LANGUAGE
ENGLISH
PROGRAMME
This workshop considers how subtle aesthetic gestures in African-descended Caribbean religion might imply radical political and subjective propositions for living in the absence of colonial repair. In it, Nadia Ellis will engage with with one of the Caribbean’s foremost modern artists, Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds (1911–1989), who appears in the ethnographic archive of Jamaican religion as a remarkable visual presence of Revival ceremony, ritually adorned, charismatic, with powerful physical gestures. Yet his visual art evinces a quality of Revival aesthetics less often noted: a tendency toward lightness and suspension that maps onto some of Revival’s complex ritual and symbolic features. In dialogue with histories of Jamaican Revival and the myth of “the Flying African,” as well as a range of visual, historical, and literary texts, Ellis advances an aesthetic principle one might call float—one that is atmospheric, hovering, and perspectival—in Black diaspora art and culture. Learning from these texts, she proposes that to float is to have access to an eccentric form of anticolonial subjective practice. It is to be confounding, elusive, and sometimes humorous—modes which, deployed strategically, might temporarily enable an avoidance of capture within a context of postcolonial enmeshment.
Nadia Ellis, professor of English and specialist in Black diasporic, Caribbean, and postcolonial literatures and cultures, is among the leading scholars in her field. Her research engages the intersections of queerness and diaspora, imperial identification and colonial resistance, and performance and theory, as well as the aesthetic and affective dimensions of Black belonging. Her book Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2015; Honourable Mention, William Sanders Scarborough Prize, MLA) traces literary trajectories from the Caribbean to Britain and the United States, examining forms of Black belonging animated by queer utopian desire and diasporic aesthetics. In addition to this work, her published essays explore queer and Black performance, sexuality and the archive, and popular music, including Jamaican dancehall. She has received fellowships and grants from the American Association of University Women, the Social Science Research Council, and the UC Berkeley’s Hellman Fund and Townsend Center for the Humanities, and has been honoured with the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award (2020) and the American Cultures Innovation in Teaching Award (2016). She received her PhD in English from Princeton University, her M.Phil. in English from the University of Oxford, and her B.A. in Literatures in English from the University of the West Indies (Mona) Jamaica.
Moderation: Markus Messling and Mario Laarmann
CURE workshops are primarily aimed at internal participants. External participants with an interest are warmly invited to contact us by email at kontakt@khk.uni-saarland.de. Participation is possible, subject to availability, following prior registration.
