In Black Boxes, Anjuli Raza Kolb will read from her new book Epidemic Empire and will discuss protected information, the aesthetics of censorship, cartographies of disease and debility, the symbolism of the Kaaba, and the putative ontological black box of the Muslim mind. In conversation with Jasbir Puar (author of Terrorist Assemblages and The Right to Maim) Anjuli will build upon new work by poets, scholars, detainees, and other artists to move toward a theory of lyric articulation and dysfluency in devotional poetics: Muslim, secular, and otherwise.
Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb is associate professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is a scholar of colonial and postcolonial literature and theory with particular research interests in the history of science and intellectual history, poetry and poetics, gender and sexuality studies, political theory and independence movements, the gothic and horror, and comparative literary studies. Her book, Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror 1817-2020 is out now from the University of Chicago Press, and her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many venues.
Jasbir K. Puar is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of the award-winning books The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017); and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), which is also translated into Spanish and French, with a Greek translation forthcoming, and re-issued as an expanded version for its 10th anniversary (2017). Her scholarly and mainstream writings have been translated into more than 15 languages. She is on the advisory board of numerous organizations, including USACBI and Disability Under Siege, a project focusing on disability in conflict zones. She is the 2019 Kessler awardee, given by the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies (CLAGS) to scholars and activists whose work has significantly impacted queer research and organizing.
Enthusiastic readers and listeners are encouraged to engage more deeply with Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb's work by purchasing her latest book, Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, which is available through the publisher, University of Chicago Press. Enthusiastic readers are invited to think more with Jasbir K. Puar by reading her interview with Humanity Journal.