#7 'Strangers' with Dr Jay Prosser




For our seventh session, we will be joined by Dr Jay Prosser for a special session on 'Strangers.' The session is intended to develop and complicate our thinking on strangers in Ahmed's work.

Dr Prosser is Reader in Humanities at the University of Leeds. He recommends that attendees read the following chapters from Tabish Khair's The New Xenophobia (2016) and Toni Morrison's The Origin of Others (2017) alongside a blog post from Ahmed on 'Making Strangers'.

A PDF of the Toni Morrison text is available here, and A PDF of the Tabish Khair text is available here.

Sara Ahmed's blog post, 'Making Strangers' is accessible here.

Back in October, for our first session of the academic year, we explored the figure of 'the stranger' in Ahmed's work through a reading of her essay, 'Embodying Strangers,' and Audré Lorde's essay 'Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger*'. We considered how the stranger is produced by the subject (and vice versa) in an economy of touch: this is to say, “‘my body’ is possible in its particularity only through encountering other bodies, ‘your body’, ‘her body’ and so on" (47). Key to Ahmed's conception of strangers is also that the sense that the stranger is a priori produced as strange: “the figure of the ‘stranger’ is produced, not as that which we fail to recognise, but as that which we have already recognised as ‘a stranger’ […] we flesh out the beyond, and give it a face and form” (3). With Dr Jay Prosser, we will chart the correspondences between Ahmed, Khair, and Morrison's thinking. We will also discuss their value in conceptualising contemporary forms of strangeness and otherness.

All welcome!

Details: Tuesday 20th February, 5-6:30pm, LHRI, Room 1.


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