a book launch & roundtable with Licia Fiol-Matta, Gayatri Gopinath, Lisa Lowe, Ritty Lukose, Manijeh Moradian, & Tavia Nyong’o

November 15, Thursday, 6 to 8 pm

Licia Fiol-Matta, Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Literatures, New York University
Gayatri Gopinath, Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University
Lisa Lowe, English, Tufts University
Ritty Lukose, Gallatin, New York University
Manijeh Moradian,Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Barnard College
Tavia Nyong’o, Theater Studies, Yale University

Panelists will discuss Gopinath’s Unruly Visions (Duke UP, 2018), which brings queer studies to bear on studies of diaspora and visuality, tracing the interrelation of affect, archive, region, and aesthetics through an examination of a wide range of contemporary queer visual culture. Spanning film, fine art, poetry, and photography, the book stages unexpected encounters between work by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian, and Latinx artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Chitra Ganesh, Akram Zaatari, and Allan deSouza. Unruly Visions shows how their art functions as regional queer archives that express alternative understandings of time, space, and relationality.

The roundtable will be followed by brief comments by Gayatri Gopinath (NYU), and reception.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute; Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Contemporary Art Research Collective; Department of Social & Cultural Analysis; and South Asia @NYU.

Licia Fiol-Matta is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She received an AB from Princeton University and a PhD from Yale University, both in Comparative Literature. Prior to joining NYU she taught at Barnard College and the City University of New York. She is the author of A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (Minnesota) and The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music (Duke). Fiol-Matta is co-editor of the series New Directions in Latino American Cultures (Palgrave) and The Puerto Rico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (under contract, Duke). She is the recipient of grants from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Fiol-Matta writes on Latin American cultural studies, women’s and gender studies, and music.

Gayatri Gopinath is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke UP, 2005), and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke UP, 2018). She has published numerous essays on gender, sexuality, and queer diasporic cultural production in journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, Social Text, positions, and Diaspora.

Lisa Lowe is a scholar of race, colonialism, migration, and globalization, whose most recent book, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), examines the nexus of settler colonialism, transatlantic African slavery, and the East Indies and China trades in goods and people as the conditions for modern European liberalism and empire. She is Distinguished Professor of English and Humanities at Tufts University, and a member of the Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora there. Since 2001, Lowe has co-edited with Jack Halberstam, Perverse Modernities, the book series for Duke University Press, which includes Gayatri Gopinath’s first book, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (2005), as well as the new Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (2018).

Ritty Lukose is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Gender/Sexuality/Feminist Studies, and South Asian Studies at The Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. She is the author of Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India (Duke, 2009/Orient Longman, 2010) and co-editor of South Asian Feminisms (Duke, 2012/Zubaan 2012).

Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. She received her PhD in American Studies at NYU. From 2008 to 2011, she co-directed the Association of Iranian American Writers. Her book, Neither Washington, Nor Tehran: Iranian Internationalism in the United States, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Her essays and articles have appeared in the Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, Scholar & Feminist online, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Comparative Studies of South Asian, Africa, and the Middle East, Social Text online, jadaliyya.com, and Callaloo.

Tavia Nyong’o is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of American Studies at Yale. His new book, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life is forthcoming in November 2018 from NYU Press. He co-edits Social Text, the Sexual Cultures book series, and is an original Bully Blogger.

This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible. For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgsnyu@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.