Forskningsseminarium: "Thinking the Unthought of Blackness: Black Queer Studies Across the Expressive Arts"

Datum: 16 oktober 2025, kl. 15.15–17.00
Plats: Engelska parken, 16-0043
Typ: Seminarium
Föreläsare: Aretha Phiri Rhodes University, Sydafrika och Rocío Cobo-Piñero Universidad de Sevilla, Spanien
Arrangör: Engelska institutionen
Kontaktperson: Ashleigh Harris

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‘Thinking the Unthought of Blackness’ is a collaborative research project run by Associate Professor Aretha Phiri from Rhodes University, South Africa. Situated primarily in Black Studies/blackness scholarship, the project addresses the challenge of a narrow interpretive scope and frame through its comparative, transnational exploration of blackness as queer. Operating at the interface between black and queer studies, the project seeks to complicate, expand and finally ground, the theoretical paradigm of Black Queer Studies in the creative, interdisciplinary practices of literature, film, multi-media and visual art.

Join us for two presentations by researchers on the project

Aretha Phiri, Rhodes University, South Africa: "Un/settling Blackness: Who were/are we before we were/are Black?"

Rocío Cobo-Piñero, University of Seville, Spain: "Transfuturism: Alternative Futures and Black Atlantic Utopias"

The discussion will be moderated by Ashleigh Harris, African Literary Metadata Project, Department of English.

Aretha Phiri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University. Her research examines the interactions of race, ethnicity, culture, gender and sexualities in comparative, transnational and transatlantic considerations of identity and subjectivity, with a focus on African American, American and contemporary diasporic African literature. She has been a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), SA, the Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR), the Centre for the Study of International Slavery (CSIS) in the UK, the National Humanities Center (NHC) in North Carolina as well as a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress (LoC) in the US. She has published in various accredited journals and is the sole editor of the volume African Philosophical and Literary Possibilities: Re-reading the Canon (Lexington Books, 2020) and Reframing the Black Atlantic: African, Diasporic, Queer and Feminist Perspectives (Routledge, 2024) Aretha sits on the Editorial Boards of the journals English in Africa and Safundi.

Rocío Cobo-Piñero is Associate Professor in the Department of English and North American Literature, University of Seville, Spain. Her research focuses on trans and queer representations in contemporary Afrodiasporic writing, visual art and music. She is a researcher in the project Trans-formations: Queer Practices of Use and Embodiment in post 9/11 Narratives in English, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Universities (2024-2028). She has been an invited visiting scholar in different international institutions such as the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender (Columbia University), The School of African and Asian Studies (SOAS, University of London), The Centre for Migration and Policy (Oxford University), and the Institute for Black Atlantic Research (University of Central Lancashire). Her publications include ‘African Philosophical and Literary Possibilities: Re-reading the Canon’ (Lexington, 2020); Black US and Spain: Shared Memories in the 20th Century (Routledge, 2020) and ‘Afropolitan Literature as World Literature’ (Bloomsbury, 2019). Cobo-Piñero is the author of the book Sounds of the Diaspora: Blues and Jazz in Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones (Arcibel, 2015.).