Global Blackness Summer School / Session 1, with Tavia Nyong’o

Imagine There’s No World: Queer Transections of Afrofuturism and Critical Fabulation
In this Global Blackness Summer School session, Tavia’s Nyongo investigates Black possibilities for critical fabulation in the shadow of the Sankofa bird. He asks: How are African diasporic subjects entangled with continental histories and futurities through “broken claims to connection” (Fred Moten)? What intervention can feminist, queer, and trans aesthetics make into this discourse?
About the Global Blackness Summer School ‘21
Race:Gender:Class at the University of Johannesburg (www.racegenderclass.org) is thrilled to announce the launch of its Global Blackness Summer School, which will run annually over November and December as an open-access programme. We use the term “global Blackness” to signal our interest in exploring the multiplicity of Black experiences, intellectual traditions and perspectives as well as modes of Black theory and practice. We ask: What are the geographies, theories and practices of Blackness with which we work? And how is Blackness instantiated in different spacetimes?
Our 2021 Global Blackness Summer School is organised around critical ideas and practices of Black Articulation Otherwise. Running from 15 November to 9 December, the programme will include a series of seminars, screenings, listenings, workshops and an exhibition, hosted by Donette Francis, Gabrielle Goliath, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Phumi Mtetwa & Tavia Nyong’o
Through this online and hybrid programme, we hope to cultivate a productive space for community, care and imagination. Join us as we seek to collectively refuse the ‘transparency’ of heteropatriarchal whiteness (and its attendant conditions of enclosure, illegibility and death), and look to the otherwise possibilities opened through speculative Black, queer and feminist aesthetic practices.