Seminar Four:
Cultural Production and the Crisis of Consciousness
Speaker:
Dr Sarah Jilani is a lecturer in English at City St George's, University of London, and a widely published culture journalist.
In this seminar Dr Sarah Jilani will explore the enduring impact of the unfinished project of decolonisation on political consciousness. Drawing on thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, the session will ask how today's media landscapes fill the void left by the failure to transform mass consciousness at a global scale.
We will consider the role of storytelling in countering the psychic effects – fear, nostalgia, inferiority, emasculation, misdirected anger – of interconnected crises, focusing especially on African and Arab examples of "consciousness-raising" film and literature. How can cultural production help foster political consciousness in our era of obfuscating, inflammatory and othering messaging?
The talk will be followed by a Q&A session.