Friday, 20 June 2025, 2.30-3.30PM at Freie Universität Berlin, Institute for English Language and Literature. Click here for more information.
Prof. Dr. Elahe Haschemi Yekani will give a Keynote on “Queer Aesthetics of Unbelonging: Masculinit, Race and Negative Affects in Brandon Taylor’s Real Life and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” at the “Men on the Margins: Postcolonial and Decolonial Masculinities in Anglophone Literatures” Conference at FU Berlin.
Abstract
The ever-recurring discourse on the “crisis of masculinity” is often understood as a crisis of the unmarked normativity and assumed universality of white masculinity. In my earlier work, I have described this as “the privilege of crisis”. In the 1990s and early 2000s, writers like Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith have challenged this notion, often employing humorous tonalities to depict a broader spectrum of racialised masculinities in contemporary Britain. More recently, there have been much more sombre depictions of “men on the margins.” In the US, it is the upheavals around the Black Lives Matter movement but also increasing anti-migrant sentiments that have shaped the climate during the first and now second Trump presidency and continue in the worrying global rise of the New Right. While there is a greater awareness of racial discrimination, racism is frequently only addressed in its most spectacular violent expressions. Yet, this is not necessarily the most common affective experience of Othering that Black and diasporic subjects make. Adapting Raymond Williams’ famous dictum that “culture is ordinary” as “racism is ordinary” in my contribution, I will focus on two works by queer writers of colour from the US whose novels depict the affective toll that racism takes on the lives of their gay protagonists. To highlight that racism is ordinary, is not to belittle its effects. Part of social marginalisation is the continuous unacknowledgeability of racism that does not simply affect everyone in the same way and yet is something banal, something mundane for so many. Both Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) and Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (2020) can be read as literary responses to this unacknowledgeability. Both authors address negative affects that include shame and abjection that stem from the intersectional experiences of racism and anti-queerness – which in turn shape any understanding of masculinity. While Taylor’s book can be read as an almost clinical dissection of white microaggressions, Vuong seeks beauty in the fleetingness of existence. Despite embracing these entirely different tonalities, both novels contribute to what I would describe as an aesthetics of unbelonging that shapes queer of colour literary explorations of masculinity.
You are warmly invited to Dr. des. Priyam Goswami Choudhury’s guest lecture “Baganiya Songs outside the Bagaan: An Archive of Anti-colonial Culture” as part of Prof. Dr. Elahe Haschemi Yekani’s seminar on Postcolonial Entanglements and the Ethics of Reading.
The guest lecture will take place on Monday, May 26th from 2-4 p.m. in room 1.501, Dorotheenstr. 24.
Priyam Goswami Choudhury is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Potsdam with an interest in postcolonialism, Indian poetry, cultural theory, empire and ecologies as well as popular culture. Currently, she is working on a project on the imperial legacies of tea. You can access Priyam Goswami Choudhury’s website here, to find out more about her work and to read her poetry.
The event is open to all students and university members. Prior registration is not necessary.
Anne Potjans and Rebecca Racine Ramershoven will be in conversation about “Unapologetically Feeling: Schwarze Feministische Perspektiven auf die Unterdrückung und Kraft von Gefühlen.” For more information, see here.
In this roundtable, members of the ERC Research Group, “Tales of the Disaporic Ordinary” discuss the reparative potentials of return. Diasporic life often engages ideas of return, driven by a simultaneous pull towards belonging and the desire to escape from the circumstances that prevent it. But temporary forms of belonging also produce provisional forms of return—at the Späti, the Thaipark, in the marginal, the afterhours, the wider family or chosen networks, but also in the neighborhood, at work, etc. These returns create their own kinds of fleeting or recurring intimacies – traces of queerness and repair that pervade diasporic reality.
For more information click here.
Mi., 7.5.2025
18:00 Uhr
HU Hauptgebäude, Raum 1.101
Der Dokumentarfilm “We were here” folgt den Spuren schwarzer Menschen in der Kunst und Kultur der Renaissance und legt dabei einen besondere Fokus auf ihre Beiträge und Leistungen in einer Zeit des Wandels. Er hinterfragt damit das etablierte Bild, das schwarze Menschen in der Frühen Neuzeit lediglich als versklavte, verschleppte und unterdrückte Menschen in Europa präsent waren und legt offen, dass dieses Bild selbst das Produkt (oft gezielter) Verfälschungen durch die Nachwelt ist.
2024 wurde der Film im durch Adriano Pedrosa kuratierten zentralen Pavillion der Biennale in Venedig gezeigt. Die in Kooperation der Institute für Anglistik und Amerikanisti, Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften, Kulturwissenschaften und Romanistik organsierte Veranstaltung holt ihn erstmals an eine deutsche Universität.
Im Anschluss an die Vorführung gibt es die Möglichkeit für Fragen und Diskussion mit dem Regisseur Fred Kuwornu.
Der Film wird auf Englisch mit deutschen Untertiteln gezeigt.
Diskussionssprachen sind Deutsch, Englisch und Italienisch (mit Möglichkeiten asychroner Übersetzung)
Lecture with film clips (English) and discussion (English & German) at Schauburg Dortmund. Event begins at 16:00. For reservations and more information click here.
“In my presentation I will engage in a ›conversation‹ with the 2023 documentary film Între revoluții (Between Revolutions), directed by Vlad Petri and written together with Lavinia Braniște. The film offers a poetic reflection on the in/visibility of female queer desire that I understand as a form of archival poetry invested not in linear conceptions of liberation but in the queer temporality of the in-between. I am especially interested in the juxtaposition of the fictional letters and the documentary form. The audience is presented rare historical documentary footage from the late 1970s to early 1990s from Romania and Iran while the women and their same-sex desire is never visually depicted. In many ways the narrated story and the images we are presented with do not align: we never see the women but from their longing letters we are to glean that they were lovers. The film evokes queer desires and a form of East-East political entanglement that is often overlooked in histories of the Iranian diaspora. The ordinary drama of the separated lovers plays out eventually as a temporality between revolutions that acquires yet another contemporary dimension against the backdrop of the Woman Life Freedom uprising (Zan Zendegi Azadi) in Iran.” (Elahe Haschemi Yekani)
Thao Ho will present parts of her research with a paper entitled “Letters from Berlin to Saigon to Los Angeles: Poetics and Politics of Return and Place-Making” at MELUS Conference 2025.
Anne Potjans presents on “Race and Sexual Citizenship in Guy Nzingha St. Louis’s Gedichte einer Schönen Frau.” See here for more information on the event.
Screening in collaboration with Leipzig Art Residency (LIA), Cinema Con Nhà Nghèo (Cinema of the Peasants), A Sông and Nổ Cái Bùm Festival. More information here. The conversation will be about Quế’s film Healthy Water with Diseases and topics such as war trauma, colonial indochinese era, and landscapes.
This film program accompanies the exhibition Young Birds from Strange Mountains currently at Schwules Museum in Berlin. The title is borrowed from a poem by the Vietnamese gay-closeted poet Ngô Xuân Diệu (1916-1985), who was a correspondent member at Akademie der Künste in the GDR. The project features young queer arts from Southeast Asia and its diaspora with focus on community archives, spirituality/shamanism, pre-colonial knowledge, and activist movements. This program aims to spark discussion and reclaim knowledge that is often censored and erased by both nationalist and colonial politics.
21. February 2025 12:00
Black, indigenous, and queer of color presence is often misrepresented or forgotten in historical documentation. In this archive workshop which accompanies the exhibition Young Birds from Strange Mountains, we ask ourselves how our stories appear, who narrates them, and craft our own contributions to intervene in hegemonic narratives. Our goal is to question the line between private and public archives, and formats of archiving through the lens of Southeast Asian (diasporic) queer archiving. In doing so, we hope to create a dialogue between archival materials, individuals and creativity.
More information here
