Keywords Lecture – ‘Absolutely Postcolonial’

Lecture series with guest speakers, Autumn 2010 – Spring 2011

In the first of a lecture series evaluating keywords in art, culture and society, the philosopher Peter Hallward repositions the term ‘postcolonial’ in relation to the work of writers such as Frantz Fanon Mohammed Dib and Edouard Glissant. Moving away from how this term has been developed by theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak and its association in common parlance with ideas around context and specificity, Hallward proposes ‘the postcolonial’ as a decidedly singular, absolute and non relational category.

Isobel Whitelegg, who has read Hallward’s text on ‘the postcolonial’ in relation to her research into art practice from Latin America, will give a response to this presentation and lead questions from the audience.

Keywords takes its title from Raymond Williams’ seminal book ‘Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society’ first published in 1976, which looks at how the meaning of words change as the context in which they are used changes about them.

Speakers: Peter Hallward, Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University and Isobel Whitelegg, Research Officer and AHRC Fellow, Camberwell College of Arts.

Watch a clip of this talk on the Rivington Place YouTube Channel