PCI Screening/talk: Tabita Rezaire - Decolonial trinity: technologies of the spiritual, erotic and politic

In this PCI screening/talk on October 5 we have the great honor and privilege to have with us the artist Tabita Rezaire, who will introduce, show and discuss her video work for an hour, followed by a 30 minutes Q&A session. We end with drinks.

The session is titled Decolonial trinity: technologies of the spiritual, erotic and politic.

This event is co-organized by Koen Leurs and Domitilla Olivieri from the Graduate Gender Programme / Netherlands Research School ofGender Studies with Michiel De Lange from the New Media & Digital culture Program, under heading of the the Postcolonial Studies Initiative and Co.laborations, the Expertise Centre of Utrecht University's Department of Media and Culture, and in dialogue with the Impakt festival.

Kindly RSVP to this Facebook event to let us know you are coming.

Practical information:

Thursday October 5, 17.00-18.30.

Location:

theaterzaal, Parnassos

Kruisstraat 201

3581 GK Utrecht

https://www.uu.nl/en/parnassos/contact

Biography

Tabita Rezaire (b.1989, Paris) is a French - of Guyanese and Danish descent - video artist, health-tech-politics practitioner and Kemetic/ Kundalini Yoga teacher based in Johannesburg. She holds a Bachelor in Economics (Paris) and a Master in Artist Moving Image from Central Saint Martins College (London). Rezaire’s practices unearth the possibilities of decolonial healing through the politics of technology. Navigating architectures of power - online and offline - her work tackles the pervasive matrix of coloniality and its affects on identity, technology, sexuality, health and spirituality. Through screen interfaces, her digital healing activism offers substitute readings to dominant narratives decentering occidental authority, while her energy streams remind us to resist, (re)connect, and remember.

Rezaire is a founding member of the artist group NTU, half of the duo Malaxa, and mother of the energy house SENEB. In 2017, she presented her first solo show Exotic Trade at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. Artsy declared her among the ‘emerging artists to watch for in 2017’, Artnet among the ‘international Black artists of 2016’, and True Africa amid the ‘top opinion makers of the African continent in 2015’. Rezaire has shown her work internationally – V&A London, National Gallery of Denmark, Berlin Biennale, Tate Modern London, Museum of Modern Art Paris, MoCADA NY, The Broad LA and presented her work on numerous panels – Het Nieuwe Institut Rotterdam, Royal Academy The Hague, Kunsthalle Bern, National Gallery Harare, Cairotronica Cairo, Fakugezi Digital Art Africa Johannesburg. She has curated screenings at the Institute of Contemporary Art London, led spiritual technology workshops worldwide and has her writing published by Intellect books.

 In 2016, Tabita was a resident at the Utrecht Impakt festival, see http://impakt.nl/headquarters/resident-artist-tabita-rezaire/

Rezaire lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. See http://tabitarezaire.com/info.html

PCI Film Series 2016/2017

The Postcolonial Studies Initiative is happy to announce its 7th film series with a selection of films, shown monthly, that draw on a variety of different contexts in our postcolonial world. The series is organized annually and invites all interested in our European postcolonial present and the representation of its political, cultural and aesthetic realities and challenges.

This year the focus will be on the relation between documentary filmmaking and postcolonial theory, and their deep entanglement in the critique of realism and representation of the other. We want to explore, through visual representations and cinematographic narratives, how postcolonial realities are analyzed and re-imagined in contemporary film.

Each film will be introduced briefly by scholars connected to the PCI and international guests and filmmakers. The series will take place every third Tuesday of the month, starting with September until May.

The first four editions

20 September         The Lost Ones. Long Journey Home (2011, USA, 42 min)
Introduced by Prof. Susan Rose (Dickinson College, USA)

11 October               Brincando El Charco. Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, USA, 55 min)
Small City, Big Change (2013, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, USA, 10 min)
Introduced by Frances Negrón-Muntaner (Columbia University, USA)
With a Q&A session

15 November           Lift (2001, Marc Isaacs, UK, 25 min)
Calais, the Last Border (2003, Marc Isaacs, UK, 60 min)
Introduced by Dr Domitilla Olivieri (Gender Studies, UU)

13 December           The Nine Muses (John Akomfrah, Ghana, 2011, 90 min)
Introduced by Jamila Mascat (Gender Studies, UU)

Practical information

Location                    Drift, 21 room 0.32
Time                           19.15-21.30

First edition: The Lost Ones. Long Journey Home 
Introduced by Susan Rose (Dickinson College, USA)

 

The Lost Ones: Long Journey Home is a documentary film that weaves together Native American oral histories and historical, archival research as it pieces together the story of two Lipan Apache children captured along the Texas-Mexican border in 1877.

After the massacre of their village known, as Remolino or the "Day of Screams," the children rode from fort to fort with the U.S. Calvary for three years before being taken to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (CIIS) in Pennsylvania – thousands of miles from their home. Carlisle, established in 1879 at the end of the “Indian wars,” served as the model for off-reservation boarding schools across the United States and Canada. Its goal was to “civilize” and assimilate Indian children to Euro-American culture: “education for extinction.” The children’s ties with their family were completely severed; the only legacy the children left was Kesetta's three-year-old son who became the youngest child ever to be enrolled at CIIS. While the family remembered the Lost Ones every year, they never knew what had happened to the children or where they were buried until two centuries later.

This documentary reveals the mystery of how on the 132th anniversary of Remolino, Lipan Apache descendants from California, Texas, and New Mexico came to Carlisle to offer blessings so the children could be sent home. The film demonstrates the power of collective memory, the impact of intergenerational trauma, and the ways in which photographs can be used as a form of both erasure and reclamation.

Practical information
Date: 20 September
Time: 19.15 - 21.30
Location: Drift 21, room 0.32

PCI Annual lecture (Spring) - May 30, 2011

Speaker:

Prof. Iain Chambers (Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, Oriental University, Naples, Italy)

Date: May 30

Time: 15.00-18.00

Location: Drift 21, Sweelinckzaal

Title: The Mediterranean and maritime criticism

Responses: dr. Monica Jansen (UU, DMT Italian Studies) and 

Prof. Emile Wennekes (UU, MCW, Musicology) 

Dr. Barbara Titus, Assistant Professor of Musicology, UU

Abstract

Thinking the Mediterranean in a multifold complexity of ‘overlapping territories and intertwined histories’ (Edward Said) encourages a critical journey that abandons the securities of territorial homelands for the open and less guaranteed routes of intercultural travel. Taking the sea as a composite archive and site of historical and cultural crossings, this talk, further encouraged by the critical affectivities of contemporary literatures, music and the visual arts, will propose some historical and cultural perspectives on a postcolonial Mediterranean.

Bio

Iain Chambers is presently Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at the Oriental University in Naples where he has been Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies, and presently coordinates the PhD programme in ‘Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone world'. Iain Chambers is internationally known for his interdisciplinary and intercultural work on music, popular and metropolitan cultures. More recently he has transmuted this line of research into a series of postcolonial analyses of the formation of the modern Mediterranean.

Professor Chambers has a degree in History and American Studies from Keele University, and subsequently acquired an MA at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. He has lived in Naples since 1976, and has held visiting professorships at Hunter College (CUNY) in 1990, the University of Oslo in 1992, in Emphasis in Critical Theory, University of California, Irvine in 1995, and at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2008. He has also been a Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz in 1994; been invited as Visiting Scholar at the Getty Institute, Los Angeles for the year 1996-7; and been a Humanities Research Institute Fellow at the University of California, Irvine in 1997.

He is author of Urban Rhythms: pop music and popular culture (Palgrave Macmillan,1985), Popular Culture: The metropolitan experience (Routledge,1986), Border dialogues: Journeys in postmodernity (Routledge, 1990), Migrancy, culture, identity (Routledge, 1994), Hendrix, hip hop e l'interruzione del pensiero (with Paul Gilroy) (Costa & Nolan, 1995), Culture after humanism (Routledge, 2001); and most recently, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Duke University Press, 2008). He is also editor with Lidia Curti of The Post-colonial question: Common skies, divided horizons (Routledge, 1996) and the volume Esercizi di Potere. Gramsci, Said e il postcoloniale (Meltemi, 2006). Several of these titles have been translated into various languages, including Italian, Spanish, German, Japanese and Turkish. In addition Professor Chambers has served on the editorial boards of Formations, Popular Music, Cultural Studies, Communal Plural, New Formations, Postcolonial Studies, and Third Text.

PCI successfully launched on September 15 2010

The occasion was marked by a public lecture by Prof. Paul Gilroy, entitled: "From Double Consciousness to Public diplomacy: the end of the black Atlantic?". The lecture revisited Prof. Gilroy’s seminal work on the Black Atlantic and put it into the context of recent developments within postcolonial studies, specifically on the issue of European postcolonialism.

The lecture was followed by responses from the fellows of the PCI, Prof. Paulo de Medeiros, Sandra Ponzanesi, Birgit Kaiser and Emanuelle Radar who replied to Gilroy's talk attending to the mission of the PCI. This consists in investigating issues concerning postcolonial Europe drawing from different expertises and disciplinary backgrounds by exploring different historical and geopolitical constellations within Europe with a focus on current affairs and political events.

Click here for more pictures taken during the event. 

September 15: launch of the Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI), Utrecht University

The Centre for the Humanities and the organizers of the Postcolonial Studies Initiative, Prof. Paulo de Medeiros and Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi, cordially invite you to the official launch of the Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI) 15 September 2010, 16:00-18:00.

The occasion will be marked by a public lecture by Prof. Paul Gilroy. The lecture will revisit Prof. Gilroy’s seminal work on the Black Atlantic and put it into the context of recent developments within postcolonial studies, specifically on the issue of European postcolonialism.

The lecture will be followed by responses from the fellows of the PCI, Prof. Paulo de Medeiros, Sandra Ponzanesi, Birgit Kaiser and Emanuelle Radar.

The Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI) at Utrecht University is intended as a platform for research into postcolonial issues, specifically focused on their application within Europe. The PCI organizes activities such as lectures, film series, masterclasses and seminars, striving for greater interaction with society at large. As such it brings together a number of researchers from diverse areas and disciplines, both from Utrecht University and from other universities in the Netherlands as well as from other international partner universities.

We hope you will join us 15. September 2010, 16:00-18:00 in the Sweelinckzaal, Drift 21, Utrecht.

Yours sincerely, Centre for the Humanities and the Postcolonial Studies Initiative