Focus on the Funk: Journeys...
2-day conference: 20 May 2016: 9.00am - 5.30pm & 21 May 2016: 10.00am - 6.30pm
Sponsors: Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck School of Law, BIMI & Serpentine Galleries
Organised by Dr Oscar Guardiola-Rivera and Kojo Koram

Journeys from the Caribbean and the Americas to Africa, the Middle East, and back … flights to the wreckage of post-colonial and modernist discourses, institutions, and territories … Journeys through self-colonised Europe, now evolving into the Global South. The South as a state of mind, rather than a place or a (more or less expanded) canon. Journeys with Frantz Fanon and Alicia Garza as pioneers in the ‘southing’ of the mind and situated fighters; with Lewis R. Gordon as jazz drummer, chief thinker of our time and author of "What Fanon Said"; to celebrate Paget Henry’s own journeys at his 70th birthday; and Gail Lewis for being Gail Lewis. Of Grammatology’s 40-year journey with Gayatri Spivak, but also her, her journey, life, and lifework as an exemplar and figure for those of us bent on decolonising Critical Theory and criticalizing the Decolonial.

We would like you to join us for a historical, visual, philosophical, musical and poetic journey through mondialisation and its forms of de-specification and institutional establishment.

Speakers include: Alicia Garza; Lewis R. Gordon (University of Connecticut); Paget Henry
(Brown University); Gail Lewis (Birkbeck, University of London); Nina Power (Roehampton University/Birkbeck, University of London); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Columbia University).

VIEW THE FULL PROGRAMME

Over three sessions on Friday 20 to Sunday 22 May, the conference will be followed by screenings of artists’ moving-image works, documentaries and video essays at the Birkbeck Cinema programmed in collaboration with Serpentine Galleries. This is a smaller venue than the conference so separate booking is essential. Tickets will be allocated on a first come, first served basis.

More information & booking for the screening session on 20 May.

More information & booking for the screening session on 21 May.

More information & booking for the screening session on 22 May.

Image courtesy of Emory Douglas.