"The Colonial Aesthetic: Slavery and the Culture of Taste": A presentation by Simon Gikandi October 15, 2009

This talk presents work from Professor Gikandi's forthcoming book which makes the general claim that the emergence of the aesthetic as a central category of modern thought and identity was driven by anxieties about the restless, disordered, and "Gothic" order that existed on the margins of British society. This order was associated with the rural poor at home, African slaves abroad, and the cultural geography of colonialism. His primary concern in this talk will be the theoretical consequences of a radical juxtaposition of enslavement and the leading categories of modernity, including new notions of time and space, subjectivity, freedom, and the idea of the aesthetic.

Simon Gikandi is the Robert Schimmer Professor of English at Princeton University. He graduated with a first class degree in literature from the University of Nairobi, was a British Council Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, and got his Ph.D in English from Northwestern University. His major fields of research and teaching are the Anglophone Literatures and Cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Postcolonial Britain, the "Black" Atlantic and the African Diaspora. He also has a special interest in the relation between literature and the production of knowledge and the history of English as a field of study.

He is the recipient of numerous awards from organizations such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Founda tion, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. His many books include Reading the African Novel, Reading Chinua Achebe, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. He is the general editor of The Encyclopedia of African Literature and co-editor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/thursdayscalf09.php