A symposium organized by the Research Center for Material Culture (RCMC), Wereld Museum and Small Axe Journal

Dates: 9, 10 & 11 November

Time: 9:00 am to 18:00

Location: first 2 days at Framer Framed (Oranje-Vrijstaatkade 71, 1093KS Amsterdam) and day 3 at Tropenmuseum (Linnaeusstraat 2, 1092 CK Amsterdam)

Attendance is free. Registration is required via https://www.materialculture.nl/en/events/what-and-when-was-caribbean-modernism-symposium

Arguably, across a range of expression and identity, artistic as well as intellectual, modernism has been a shaping force in the twentieth-century Caribbean. If European high modernism partly nourished itself on its imperial connection (primitivism), so also did the vernacular modernisms of the colonial world find their voices by appropriating, indigenizing, creolizing, transforming the forms and languages of modernism. Founded as it was, as a geopolitical region, within modern structures of power—colonial slavery and indenture—the problem of modernity is native to the Caribbean. Not surprisingly, therefore, across the regional and diasporic Caribbean modernism contributed to the modes of radical artistic and intellectual response to colonial domination, dispossession, and oppression, providing some of the idioms and styles and infrastructures through which the politics and poetics and aesthetics of self-determination was articulated. In the last three decades or so, however, with the waning of postcolonial sovereignty and the rise of globalization, there is reason to doubt that modernism continues to be the subversive force that it was for so long taken to be. This is the arena of our project. Our aim is to understand the role of visual, literary, and intellectual modernism in the twentieth-century Caribbean, regional and diasporic, and as a corollary, to explore whether or to what extent modernism’s heretical energies continue to be a significant point of reference.

Speakers: David Scott, Faith Smith, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Wayne Modest, Thalia Ostendorf and Wigbertson Julian Isenia, among others.

On Sunday, 29 October, I will lead the Queer Gaze Tour through the exhibitions of the Amsterdam Museum as part of the Black Achievement Month. I will shed light on Amsterdam’s black queer & postcolonial history and its impact on the city.

Though the tour is now fully booked, it highlights a shared interest in exploring the lesser-known queer narratives and the various perspectives on the city. The language for this tour is Dutch.

[Note: This event is sold out.]

Date: Tuesday, October 31

Location: OBA

To register, send an e-mail to aanmelden@ihlia.nl with the subject heading

Richard Dyer is a British scholar whose writings on stardom, entertainment, and the representation of gender, sexuality and race have made a great impact in film and cultural studies. The Richard Dyer Reader, co-edited by Glyn Davis and Jaap Kooijman, covers more than five decades of Dyer’s writing, and includes rare archival essays as well as some new pieces. In his essay ‘Getting over the rainbow’ from 1981, translated in Dutch as ‘Een opfrissertje voor het morgenrood: Identiteit en plezier in een culturele flikkerpolitiek’, Dyer argues that the movement for LGBTQ+ rights should not be separated from other rights-based movements, such as feminism and anti-racism.

Please join us at OBA on 31 October, when a line-up of guest speakers will offer reflections on the complex entanglements of LGBTQ+ politics and battles for racial equality and emancipation, as well as on the ways in which pleasure and politics are bound together. Confirmed speakers for the event are Sudeep Dasgupta, Bibi Fadlalla, and Wigbertson Julian Isenia; there will also be a conversation between Richard Dyer and Eliza Steinbock.

This event is organized by IHLIA - LGBTI Heritage, together with ASCA (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis) and NICA (Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis). Copies of the book, published by BFI/Bloomsbury, will be available to purchase at the event.

Date: Friday, October 27

Time: 13:15

Location: Centraal Museum Utrecht, (Agnietenstraat 1)

The annual symposium of the Netherlands Research School for Gender Studies will feature a panel discussion examining recent national and global backlashes in the field of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Speakers include Alyosxa Tudor from SOAS, Constance Sommerey, the producer of the podcast series "Woke as Science" from the University of Maastricht (UM), and Wigbertson Julian Isenia from the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Read more.

This event is organized by CEDLA and is part of the Global Justice course

Date: Monday, October 9

Time: 15:00 – 17:00

Location: CEDLA in room 2.02 (second floor of the 'Gijsbert van Tienhoven' building, located at Roetersstraat 33)

"Offshore Attachments" reveals how the contested management of sex and race transformed the Caribbean into a crucial site in the global oil economy. By the mid-twentieth century, the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba housed the world’s largest oil refineries. To bolster this massive industrial experiment, oil corporations and political authorities offshored intimacy, circumventing laws regulating sex, reproduction, and the family in a bid to maximize profits and turn Caribbean subjects into citizens. Historian Chelsea Schields demonstrates how Caribbean people both embraced and challenged efforts to alter intimate behavior in service to the energy economy. Moving from Caribbean oil towns to European metropolises and examining such issues as sex work, contraception, kinship, and the constitution of desire, Schields narrates a surprising story of how racialized concern with sex shaped hydrocarbon industries as the age of oil met the end of empire.

Responding to the presentation will be Dr. Wigbertson Julian Isenia & Dr. Mikki Stelder

September 15, 17:30-19:00

Anthropologist Rahil Roodsaz investigates Iranian Dutch narratives of sexuality and belonging in her book Sexual Self-Fashioning: Iranian Dutch Narratives of Sexuality and Belonging. During this programme Roodsaz will present her new book, addressing the ways in which sexuality and gender have come to serve as measures for cultural belonging in discussions of the position of Muslim immigrants in multicultural Western societies. Roodsaz’ lecture marks the opening of the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender & Sexuality’s new academic year.

While the acceptance of assumed local norms such as sexual liberty and gender equality are seen as successful integration, rejecting them is regarded as a sign of failed citizenship. Focusing on premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage, Sexual Self-Fashioning: Iranian Dutch Narratives of Sexuality and Belonging provides an ethnographic account of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch. It argues that by embracing, rejecting, and questioning modernity in stories about sexuality, the Iranian Dutch actively engage in processes of self-fashioning.

About the speakers

Rahil Roodsaz is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She obtained her PhD in 2015 on sexual self-fashioning among the Iranian Dutch at the Institute for Gender Studies of the Radboud University Nijmegen. Her current research and teaching revolve around the political potential of love from feminist, queer, and decolonial perspectives.

Wigbertson Julian Isena (he/they) is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His research centers on gender, sexuality, and postcolonial contexts, particularly in the Dutch Caribbean, analyzing the intersection of gender rights, tourism, and neo-colonial relations with the Netherlands. His works have been published in journals and publications like “Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies,” “Feminist Review,” “Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism,” and his monograph titled The Question of Dutch Politics as a Matter of Theater appeared in 2017.

Julie McBrien is Associate Professor of Anthropology and director of the Amsterdam Research Center for Gender and Sexuality. Her current research investigates questions of nationalism, international development and the politics of the future by interrogating late-Soviet and post-Soviet era interventions into martial practices in Central Asia. She is author of From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) and editor of Muslim Marriage and Non-Marriage: Where Religion and Politics Meet Intimate Life (Leuven University Press, In press).

March 31, 18:30-20:40

After-talk including Dagmar Oudshoorn, director of Amnesty Netherlands and chair of the advisory committee of the dialogue group on the history of slavery. With the short film La Ultima Ascensión (Kevin Osepa, winner Gouden Kalf 2022, Best Short Film) and We Are All Equal (Catrien Ariëns).

Actor Kendrick Etmon will introduce La Ultima Ascensión, and We are All Equal will be introduced by director Catrien Ariëns.

A panel discussion with Lilian Gonçalves-Ho Kang You, Wigbertson Julian Isenia, and Ayra Kip will follow the screenings. Maurice Seleky is the moderator of the evening.

Language: Dutch

August 28 - September 2

What makes an archive “queer” or “trans”? What practices of archival reading are being developed in Queer and Transgender Studies?

How can queer, trans, sexual histories – from the archives of 1970s and 1980s sexual liberation movements, through archives of colonial sexual practices, to legal and medical archives productive of gender and sexual formations – help us navigate contemporary sexual politics?

If we understand modern gender and sexual categories as effects of colonialism, are their non-normative and transgressive forms, such as transgender and queer, anticolonial or also colonial? How do archives shine light onto these questions?

Sexuality as identity has been assumed (and archived) intersectionally alongside gender and race as sexual identities, but where does that put libidinal sexuality or unconscious desire which does not have discrete objects in the form of “identity”?

Twelve years after the first NOISE summer school devoted to lesbian and gay sexualities and Queer Studies in Europe, this year’s NOISE returns to the topic while engaging with key transformations in the study of sex, sexuality, and sexual politics. By now the field of Queer and Lesbian & Gay Studies has been reshaped by the emergence and consolidation of Transgender Studies and by an ongoing process of critical clarification (and transgression) of the boundaries between queer and trans. Is there any difference between Queer Studies and Transgender Studies? And how does each field engage with the study of sex and sexuality? Additionally, Queer and Transgender Studies have been increasingly rethinking their objects – gender, sex, sexuality – through the kaleidoscope of colonial histories and racial formations. In the past twenty years, queer and trans of color critiques and postcolonial/decolonial analyses have been moving, if precariously, from margin to center within the field. What are the effects of this shift on the theory and politics of sexuality?

These transformations have also been accompanied by a growing interest in complexifying the intellectual and political genealogies of Queer Studies and Transgender Studies. This has produced new engagements with archives of sex, sexuality, and sexual politics as well as queer and trans engagements with medical, colonial, and other archives haunted by sexual investments and productive of gender and sexual formations. The archive itself has emerged as a very heterogenous site of knowledge production – from traditional and “actually existing” archives to embodied, affective, and cultural archives. The fever to expand what the archive is, means, or constitutes parallels the many revisions in theorizing and field formation that now shape Queer and Transgender Studies. How might the desire to document, record, and archive queer, trans, sexual histories reveal the territorialization of academic fields and their identity investments? Do archiving and archival work restage the role played by processes of identification in administrating libidinal sexuality? If so, could archives shine new light on the ampersand (&) that simultaneously separates and collapses Queer and Transgender Studies?

This edition of the NOISE summer school will introduce students to key debates and interventions at the crossroads of these developments, paying particular attention to the relations between queer, trans, sexual archives, ongoing processes of field formation in Queer Studies and Transgender Studies, and contemporary sexual politics.

The themes addressed through the 6-day program will be:

Archives of solidarity, on the histories of the gay and lesbian Left;

AIDS as archive, critically reframing a key genealogical anchor point for Queer and Transgender Studies;

Archives of radical feminism, foregrounding their complex relations with lesbian, queer, trans formations;

Post/colonial archives, exploring what reading practices might allow us to access them as sites of sexual subject-formation and resources for contemporary sexual politics;

An/aesthetic archives, emphasizing the affective dimension running through the heterogeneous archival field, from medical to artistic archives.

Aims

Summer School participants will:

Be introduced to diverse feminist, queer, and trans intersectional theories, with a focus on memory, representation, and power;

Learn to develop and apply critical and affirmative analytical tools in order to address differences and to challenge dynamics of exclusion;

Mobilize critical theories and reflexive practices to investigate contemporary operations of power and develop transformative interventions.

Target audience

This advanced training course offers a diverse yet coherent program of study from an interdisciplinary perspective. The Summer School is meant for PhD and MA students. Separate seminars for these two groups will be provided in the afternoons.

Formula

Lectures in the morning

Separate PhD and MA-seminars in the afternoon

Plenary sessions

Social program

Students prepare before NOISE by reading and collecting material for assignments (approximately 40 hours of work). After the school has ended, participants who fulfilled all requirements (preparation of assignments and reading, active participation, and final essay) receive a NOISE Certificate of 5 EC.

All students are expected to participate in the entire program for the duration of six days.

Please check the website for more information, registration and regular updates.

Venue

The NOISE Summer School 2023 will be hosted by Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

Tuition Fees

The tuition fee is €500,-. This includes digital reading materials but excludes accommodation and subsistence costs (i.e., food, meals, drinks, etc.).

Teachers in the course

The NOISE Summer School is organized by the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG, Utrecht University). The 2023 edition is coordinated by Dr. Gianmaria Colpani (Utrecht University, NL) and Dr. Eva Hayward (Utrecht University, NL).

Several renowned international scholars of gender, queer, and transgender studies, postcolonial and critical race theories, visual and cultural studies, and LGBTQ+ history will be teaching at the Summer School. Confirmed teachers include: Dr. Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay (Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey), Dr. Wigbertson Julian Isenia (University of Amsterdam, NL), Dr. Eliza Steinbock (Maastricht University, NL), Dr. Emily Hobson (University of Nevada Reno, US), Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson (Johns Hopkins University, US), Dr. Germán Garrido (CUNY, US), Dr. Nat Raha (Glasgow School of Art, UK), Dr. Eva Hayward (Utrecht University, NL) and Dr. Gianmaria Colpani (Utrecht University, NL).

Registration and Deadline:

Deadline: April 30, 2023.

Please download the NOISE 2023 Application form and send it to: noise@uu.nl

For more information, please email: noise@uu.nl