ICM New Conversations Series
BEGÜM ADALET (Cornell University)
INSURGENT MOOD
Tuesday, November 7, 2023, 4:45 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.
Toboggan Lodge, 38 Forest Home Drive
Reception to follow
A zoom link is provided for the extenuating circumstances of those who cannot attend in person, but the quality of the image and sound cannot be guaranteed
https://cornell.zoom.us/j/91985014392?pwd=bGNoMFhDOEdiUURyRlFVbHBjZWFpZz09
Meeting ID: 919 8501 4392
Passcode: 1107
DESCRIPTION
Insurgent Mood: In 1959, playwright Lorraine Hansberry described her award-winning play, A Raisin in the Sun, which is often interpreted as a domestic family drama, as in fact “tied to an international movement and affirmative moment" in which “the colonial peoples, the African peoples, the Asian peoples, are in an insurgent mood.” This talk reconstructs and reinterprets this “insurgent mood” that Hansberry, along with a broader network of authors, artists, and activists, including Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, and others, documented and sought to summon. This was a collectively experienced disposition and shared affective quality towards the world and others who resisted the forces of colonialism, racism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. In sketching the contours of this insurgent mood in its moments of circulation and migration, this project shows how it was actively made and disseminated across collective spaces, material sites, and infrastructures.
BIO
Begüm Adalet is a political theorist and Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Cornell with research and teaching interests in anti-colonial thought, U.S. empire, the Cold War, and the Middle East. She is the author of Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey (Stanford UP, 2018). She is currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled, Insurgent Mood: Black Radical Internationalism from the United States to the Middle East.
