A Feminist Killjoy Through a Gauze Darkly. Keynote von Xine Yao, gefolgt von einem Gespräch mit Katrin Köppert

In the organizer's words:

Keynote, Talk
Safi Faye Hall

In English with simultaneous translation into German
Free admission

There is solidarity in recognizing our alienation from happiness, even if we do not inhabit the same place (as we do not). There can even be joy in killing joy. And kill joy, we must and we do.

Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 2010

Xine Yao's keynote begins with the card "The Queen of Swords" from the Rider-Waite Tarot, which she looks at from the perspective of Sara Ahmed's concept of the feminist killjoy. In the spirit of alienation, Yao frames the sadism attributed to the Queen of Swords as a critical negativity to be embraced: the alienated starting point for thinking about the relationships between political solidarity, reading practices and the politics of citation in times of rising global fascisms.

In his most recent work Spätfaschismus. Racism, Capitalism and Authoritarian Crisis Politics, Alberto Toscano argues that fascism should be understood as a process rather than a coherent political regime bound to specific times and geographies. In addition to the relevant European philosophical works, Toscano brings Black thinkers into play as theorists of fascism. In this lecture, Yao explores the far-reaching histories behind the specifically North American intellectual traditions in which objects become meaningful images within the cultural imagination. Watermelons and gauze are the two central symbols in this lecture, which draws on 19th century North American literature to discuss issues of injury and healing across various differences. The watermelon, once a symbol of black independence before it became a racist trope, is reinterpreted by drawing on the writings of Charles Chesnutt and August Wilson against its denigration. Yao also draws on gauze as a symbol of healing and beautification in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and connects this to W.E.B. Du Bois' theory of the Black experience. The talk explores the commonalities of gauze and watermelon as images of solidarity and asks what it means when non-Black thinkers cite Black theory. Drawing on popular culture, poetry and philosophy, Yao reflects on the orthogonal, appositional, simultaneous and oblique as ways of looking at the shifts between gazes, veils and gauze.

With: Katrin Köppert, Xine Yao