Upcoming lecture with Visiting Scholar Dr. Chantal Zabus, professor of Comparative Postcolonial and Gender Studies at the University Sorbonne Paris Nord!

“Translects” (Zabus & Das, 2020) are transnational, transgender-inflected terms rooted in ancestral contexts. Hinging on ‘transing’ and ‘translating’, I examine the use of translects in ‘autofictions’ — South African Zandile Ngozi Nkabinde’s Black Bull, Ancestors and Me (2008), contrasted with South African Anastacia Thomson’s Always Anastacia (2015); Nigerian-born, US-based, Igbo-Tamil writer, Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018); and Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir (2021) — to reflect on a ‘post-queer’ and post-secular turn in approaching transgender identities and personhoods, which translate into various shades of postcolonial naming practices in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This lecture is sponsored by the Department of French & Italian; the Center for African Studies; the Global Studies Center; the Department of History; and the Gender, Sexality, and Women's Studies Program.