Great Texts/Big Questions Lecture Series launches 19 May!
Mthunzikazi Mbungwana. Credit: Oz
The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) is proud to launch the 2022 Great Texts/Big Questions lecture series on Thursday 19 May at 5.30pm in Hiddingh Hall!
This year’s theme Love as ethic; love as action takes its departure from the writing of the late bell hooks, and in particular her proposal of an “ethic of love” as working against our “allegiance to systems of domination”.
The line-up features acclaimed and award-winning novelists, poets and academics, including: educator, writer, speaker and intersectional scholar, Landa Mabenge; writer and author of Those Who Live in Cages, Terry-Ann Adams; poet and author of the poetry collection Unam Wena, Mthunzikazi Mbungwana; Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape, Desiree Lewis who will be in conversation with poet and academic, Gabeba Baderoon; scholar, columnist and author, Jamil F. Khan; and writer and Head of the Department of English Literary Studies at UCT, Barbara Boswell.
Left to right: Landa Mabenge, credit: Jacob Lund Photography; Terry-Ann Adams.
Schedule:
- Thurs 19 May @17.30 Landa Mabenge, Intention-fuelled purpose: A love language
- Tues 24 May @17.30 Terry-Ann Adams, Love Thy Neighbour: An exploration of friendship and the importance of place in Those Who Live in Cages
- Thurs 26 May @17.30 Mthunzikazi Mbungwana, Things without names: Izinto ezingenamagama ziduka nomoya
- Tues 31 May @17.30 Desiree Lewis & Gabeba Baderoon, Surfacing Black Feminist Knowledge in South Africa
- Thurs 2 June @17.30 Jamil F. Khan, And sometimes, love kills us
- Tues 7 June @17.30 Barbara Boswell, On love and insubordination: The Ethics of Love in Pregs Govender’s Love and Courage: A Story of Insubordination
*All lectures will take place live, in person in Hiddingh Hall on UCT’s Hiddingh Campus, 31-37 Orange Street, Gardens.
Left to right: Gabeba Baderoon, credit: Victor Dlamini; Desiree Lewis; Barbara Boswell, credit: Yazeed Kamaldien.
Theme:
“Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed. As long as we refuse to address fully the place of love in struggles for liberation we will not be able to create a culture of conversion where there is a mass turning away from an ethic of domination.” ~ bell hooks, “Love as the practice of freedom”
Our vision for this series is to delve into the themes of love, self-love and intimacy, not within the reductive feel-good frame that social media would, at times, have us view them; but with robustness. Love not as abstraction but as ethic and action.
More pressingly still, our intention is to situate these conversations firmly within an African and South African context. In academia and popular literature alike, love and freedom are disproportionately discussed and theorised from a Euro-American perspective. How might we nuance and particularise these insights from the specificity of our lived reality and socio-economic landscape, where we are far (and ever further) from attaining the stability that allows love and self-love to thrive. In other words, how do we locate the human in the midst of turbulence? How do we think through trans identity, love, survival, queerness, intimacy, feminism, freedom, and selfhood within a state of perpetual precarity?
RSVP
Join us at 5.30pm every Tuesday and Thursday from 19 May – 7 June in Hiddingh Hall!
Refreshments will be served. COVID protocols will be strictly observed. Masks are mandatory.
Entry is free but RSVP is critical – email ica@uct.ac.za.
Jamil F. Khan. Credit: @bestfriends_za.