March Meeting 2022: The Afterlives of the Postcolonial

John Akomfrah delves into themes of memory, identity, postcolonialism, temporality and the politics of aesthetics through his experimentations with the moving image.

Awam Amkpa is Dean of Arts and Humanities, NYUAD and Global Network Professor of Drama, Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU New York.

Anjali Arondekar is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and founding Co-Director of the Center for South Asian Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Artist, curator and writer Brook Andrew’s practice is grounded in his perspective as a Wiradjuri and Celtic person with matrilineal kinship from the Kalar Midday (land of the three rivers) of the Wiradjuri people in Australia.

Carolina Caycedo is a multidisciplinary artist known for her performances, videos, artist’s books, sculptures and installations that examine environmental and social issues. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental historical memory, as a fundamental element for non-repetition of violence against human and non-human entities.

Art historian and artist Iftikhar Dadi is the John H. Burris Professor in the Department of History of Art and Director of the South Asia Program, and board member of the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University.

Muriam Haleh Davis is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Naminata Diabate’s work seeks to redefine how we understand specific forms of embodied agency in the neoliberal present in global Africa.

Fouad Makki is Director of the Polson Institute for Global Development (2019–present) and Associate Professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University. He is also a founding board member of Cornell’s Institute for Comparative Modernities.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a Professor at Columbia University. Her core interest is humanities for social justice. She has taught globally and held permanent posts in several US universities, including at Iowa, Texas-Austin, Emory and Pittsburgh.

Poet and writer, Nathalie Handal is a Visiting Associate Professor of Practice in Literature and Creative Writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her poetry draws on her experiences of dislocation, home, travel and exile.

Jolene Rickard is a visual historian, artist and curator interested in the intersection of indigenous knowledge and contemporary art, materiality and ecocriticism with an emphasis on Hodinöhsö:ni aesthetics. She is former Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Programme (2008-2020) and Associate Professor in the departments of History of Art and Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a scholar of racial inequality in public policy making and the various ways that Black communities have challenged or resisted these constraints.

Before joining the Africa Institute in Sharjah in 2022, Professor Lalu was a founding director of the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa (2008–2019).

Nidhi Mahajan is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the University of California in Santa Cruz and also the inaugural Fatima Mernissi Postdoctoral Fellow in Social and Cultural Studies at The Africa Institute in Sharjah.