PostRacial Transmodernities: Afro-European Relations, Mediterranean Trajectories & Intercultural Reciprocities

Stéphane Baquey is a poetry critic and an Associate Professor in Modern Literature at Aix-Marseille Université. He is the author of the preface to Kiril Kadiiski’s Poèmes (2006), published jointly by L’Esprit des Péninsules and Kliment Oxhridski University of Sofia, (to be reissued by Belles Lettres). For the last five years, his research has known a new inflection towards the poetics of the place telling from an ecopoetics perspective.

Raluca Bibiri is an Associate Professor of Film and Women's Studies at the Center of Excellence in Image Studies, University of Bucharest. She has authored two books on the concept of femininity in philosophy, psychoanalysis, culture, and the arts. Her ongoing research projects focus on intersectional posthumanist methodologies exploring social exclusion and institutionalized forms of knowledge and power. She is actively involved in the exchange between academia and society as a documentary filmmaker, reflecting on the instrumentality of the historical archives for the production of new forms of knowledge about the past, through a wider, more inclusive perspective.

Anne Reynes-Delobel is an Associate Professor of American Literature at Aix-Marseille Université. She has published widely on American modernisms and the international avant-gardes, and more specifically on their transatlantic circulation in the interwar period. She is the current president of The Kay Boyle Society (an ALA and SSAWAA affiliate) and a co-founder of the Banjo Society-ClaudeMcKay (AMU). She also participates in the CIVIS project on PostRacial Trans-Modernities and the BIP project CARE.

Stamatina Dimakopoulou teaches US literature and culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has been a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at New York University and has guest-lectured at Paris-Nanterre. She has published transatlantic avant-gardes across literature and the visual arts. She is a founding member and co-editor of Synthesis, an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies. She has co-founded Transitive Modernities and participates in the CIVIS projects, CARE, and PostRacial Trans-Modernities. With Vassilis Vlastaras (Athens School of Fine Arts), she co-organised practice-based workshops to be followed by an exhibition at Atoposcvc. Currently working on a manuscript on home/lessness.

Saliou Dione is an Associate Professor, a Lecturer and Researcher at Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, in Senegal, where he teaches African and Postcolonial Studies. He holds a Doctorate in African and Postcolonial Studies, a Postgraduate Diploma in American Literature and Civilization, and a Bachelor's Degree in British Literature and Civilization. His main areas of academic interest and research include society, culture, conflict, ethnicity, theories, international relations, politics, economy, language, discourse, health, Pan-Africanism, the Diaspora, postcolonialism, African literature (oral and written literatures), gender, sexuality(ies), migration, race issues, and development issues. He has published a wide range of articles covering these issues. Dr. Dione has been a Senior Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (USA), hosted by the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Rutgers-based Center for African Studies in the United States of America. As a Senior Fulbright Fellow and as part of the Fulbright Outreach Lecturing Fund Award, Dr. Dione has delivered lectures at Coastal Carolina University, at Horry Georgetown Technical College, in South Carolina (USA), at Ohio Wesleyan University and Denison University, in Ohio (USA), and at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in New Jersey (USA), and presented conference papers at Howard University, in Washington D.C. (USA), at the City College of New York and Colombia University, in New York (USA), at Tübingen University (Germany), among others. Dr Saliou DIONE has been also a CODESRIA Gender Fellow at the CODESRIA Gender Institute for gender and African Sexuality(ies).Dr Saliou DIONE is currently the Head of the English Department and the Director of the African and Postcolonial Studies Laboratory at Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, in Senegal.

Fataneh Farahani is a Professor in Ethnology at the department of Ethnology, History of Religion and Gender Studies, at Stockholm University. Her main field of study is migration and displacement. In placing gender and sexuality at the centre of her research, she has engaged with issues of forced migration, citizenship, otherness, subjectivity, agency and marginality within different Western multicultural contexts. Her  work builds on critical cultural theories and methodologies that conceptualize the intersection of the discourses through which (un)desirable femininities and masculinities are constructed in different diasporic spaces. By examining the interanimations between social differences through empirical materials, she stretches the theorization of migration experiences and positioning in new directions. Through multi-sited ethnographies, her work has illuminated the contribution of ethnological methodologies to forced and transnational migrations. 

Stephen Forcer is a Professor of French at the University of Glasgow. His publications include Modernist Song: The Poetry of Tristan Tzara (Legenda 2006) and Dada as Text, Thought and Theory (Legenda 2015), which was shortlisted for the 20016 Gapper Book Prize. In 2020-2021 he was a co-investigator on an AHRC research grant into the use of comedy and other performing arts in tackling sexual and gender-based violence, supported by NGOs in Sierra Leone and South Africa. He also participates in the CIVIS project on PostRacial Trans-Modernities.

Astrid Franke is a Professor of American Literature and Culture at University of Tübingen. She is the author of Keys to Controversies: Stereotypes in Modern American Novels (1999) and Pursue the Illusion: Problems of Public Poetry in America (2010) as well as articles on popular culture, poetry, and injustice, and the contemporary American novel. She is a principal investigator in the interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Center Threatened Orders with a project on the resilience of the racial order in the US. She also participates in the CIVIS project on PostRacial Trans-Modernities.

Mina Karavanta is Associate Professor of Literary Theory, Cultural Studies and Anglophone Literature in the Faculty of English Studies of the School of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She holds degrees in English Language and Literature from the National and University of Athens (BA), and in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton (MA and Ph.D). She specializes in postcolonial studies, gender and race studies and comparative literature and has published articles in international academic journals such as boundary 2, Callaloo, Feminist Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic, Symplokē, Journal Of Contemporary Theory. Her work has also appeared in transnational edited volumes. She has co-edited Interculturality and Gender, with Joan Anim- Addo & Giovanna Covi, (London: Mango Press, 2009); Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid, with Nina Morgan (London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008) and “Posthumanisms,” a special issue of Symploke, with Nathan Snaza. She is a founding member and co-editor with Stamatina Dimakopoulou of the peer- reviewed electronic journal Synthesis that promotes transcultural and interdisciplinary research and features international Editorial and Academic Boards. https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/synthesis. She has launched the CIVIS project, PostRacial Trans-Modernities, and participates in the BIP project CARE.

Danai Mupotsa is senior lecturer in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. She holds a BA in Africana Studies and Women’s Studies (Luther College), a B. Soc. Sc. (Hons, First Class, UCT) in Gender and Transformation, an M. Soc. Sci in Gender Studies (UCT), and a PhD in African Literature and Cultural Studies (PhD). She specialises in gender and sexualities, black intellectual traditions and histories, intimacy and affect and feminist pedagogies. Danai is a member of the editorial collective of Agenda Feminist Media, and recently co-edited the Agenda special issue “Covid-19: The Intimacies of Pandemics” (2021) with Moshibudi Motimele. Danai has edited several other volumes, including a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies titled “Time Out of Joint: The Queer and the Customary in Africa” with Neville Hoad and Kirk Fiereck. Danai was part of the research team working in collaboration with Urgent Action Fund - Africa that recently published IDS Working Paper 576 (2022), Contextualising Healing Justice as a Feminist Organising Framework in Africa. In 2018, she published her first collection of poetry entitled feeling and ugly. The Portuguese translation, feio e ugly was published in 2020 by Editora Trinta Zero (Maputo). Danai has performed on several poetry stages, including the Poeta’s D’Alma Festival Internacional de Poesia e Artes Performativas in Maputo in 2018, and the Poetry Africa Festival hosted by the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2021. Danai is a Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equality.

Invited Speakers

Joan Anim-Addo, is Emeritus Professor and Director of the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies (Goldsmiths, University of London). She is a poet, librettist and scholar. Her writing includes Janie, Cricketing Lady (poetry); Imoinda (libretto); Longest Journey: A History of Black Lewisham and Touching the Body: History, Language and African- Caribbean Women’s Writing. She is Associate Editor of Callaloo, Journal of Diaspora Arts and Letters and a Senior Fellow, HEA. She is a member of the editorial board of Transition Magazine (Harvard). Her recent publications include the co- authored This is the Canon: Decolonize your Bookshelf in 50 Books (Greenfinch 2021).

Stephanos Stephanides is a poet, essayist and memoirist, translator, ethnographer, and documentary filmmaker and former Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Cyprus. He began his academic career teaching literature at the University of Guyana for six years, where he developed a deep interest in Caribbean Creole and Indian diasporic communities, and thereafter a lifelong engagement with India. He was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cyprus until 2017. Selections of his poetry have been published in more than twelve languages. He is a Writing Fellow of the International Writers Program of the University of Iowa. He was awarded first prize for poetry from the American Anthropological Association, 1988, and first prize for video poetry for his film Poets in No Man’s Land at the Nicosia International Film Festival. He has served as judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (2000, 2010, 2022). He is a Fellow of the English Association, and Cavaliere of the Republic of Italy. Representative publications include Translating Kali’s Feast: the Goddess in Indo- Caribbean Ritual and Fiction (2000), Blue Moon in Rajasthan and other poems (2005), and most recently The Wind Under My Lips/«Ο Άνεμος κάτω απ’ τα χείλη μου», a bilingual anthology with Greek translation by Despina Pirketti (Rodakio: Athens, 2018).