Biodiplomatic and Biocolonial Fictions: Speculations on Immunity, Debility, and Humanity
| Dates: | 15 May 2025 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Talk |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Speaker: | Sam Okoth Opondo |
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The fictions, theories, and practices of diplomacy exceed statecraft and the geopolitical imagination. They are often predicated on culture-specific forms of ‘mancraft’, handicraft, or the crafts of dealing with human and more-than-human beings. Through a reading of Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City, a cyberpunk speculative fiction novel set in Johannesburg, alongside Boris Kunz’s science fiction film Paradise (2023), this lecture explores the biodiplomatic and biocolonial fictions that make it possible for some people to be granted privileges and immunities while others are debilitated, converted, or eliminated in the name of progress, as a punitive measure, or as a result of physical and metaphysical hierarchies of being. The ‘what if?’ question that guides these biodiplomatic and biocolonial speculations on life , death, and survivability, enable us to embrace a hyperbolic ethics while carrying out a critique of what Hadji Bakara calls ‘consulate time’ and ‘citizen time’ and their desire to become a kind of ‘planetary time.’
This talk will be delivered by Dr. Sam Okoth Opondo (Vassar), who is this year's CIDRAL Visiting Fellow.
Speaker
Sam Okoth Opondo
Organisation: Vassar College
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A112
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
