Speaker: Abdul R.
JanMohamed, Professor, English Department, University of California, Berkeley.
Topic: Toward a Political
Economy of Death OR The Threat/Fear of Death as the Fundamental Mode of
Coercion
Date: Wednesday 30
September 2015
Time: 3:00 – 4:30
Venue: Humanities Seminar
Room
Born and raised in Kenya
and educated in the US (Univ. of Hawaii, BA; Brandeis Univ., PhD), Abdul
JanMohamed has taught in the English Department at UC, Berkeley since
1983. His publications include Manichean
Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa; The Nature and
Context of Minority Discourse (co-edited with David Lloyd); The
Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology Of Death; Reconsidering
Social Identification: Race, Gender, Class, and Caste (edited with Prafulla
Kar) and many articles. He was the founding editor (along with Donna
Przybylowicz) of Cultural Critique, a journal initially designed to provide a
venue for the theorization of postcolonial and American minority literary and
cultural discourses and for contemporary cultural theory. In 2014 Professor JanMohamed was the
recipient of the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean
Philosophical Association.
He is currently working
on a book, provisionally entitled, Thick Love: The Reproduction of Life and
Death in Neo-Slave Narratives, about Black feminist neo-slave and Jim Crow
narratives that focus on the “birthing” of the “death-bound-subject.”
