EACW Students' Choice Event: Dr. Suryia Nayak (Salford): 'Having a Dinner Party with Audre Lorde'
| Dates: | 31 March 2025 |
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| Times: | 16:30 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Workshop |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| How much: | Free |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Adults, Current University students, General public, Post 16 |
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Students in the Department of English, American Studies and Creative Writing have voted to invite Dr. Suryia Nayak to speak in the Department.
Monday 31st March, 4.30 - 6pm
Venue: G20, Mansfield Cooper
Followed by a drinks reception
My workshop offers a method of talking with Audre Lorde rather than a talking about Audre Lorde. As an academic and activist, I often construct conversations with Lorde, about complex issues and ideas. For example, in creating feminist Black women-only services and spaces, Lorde’s words helped me grapple with the issue that ‘black feminism is not white feminism in blackface’. In my work I use (and recommend) the practice of imagining that I am hosting a dinner party where I put text and theory in conversation across diverse temporal and spatial spectrums that juxtapose a range of visions, standpoints and theoretical approaches - imagine Audre Lorde, bell hooks, The Combahee River Collective, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jacques Derrida, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Toni Morrison and Frantz Fanon chatting together! Drawing on a literary tradition of dialogue, conversation and interviews, as mirrored in Lorde’s work, my imaginary dinner party method straddles the fictional and non-fictional in the sense that the actual words /texts of the scholars cited are juxtaposed within a fictional frame. A kind of intertexuality in action, playing with concepts such as the speech act, speaking position and intersectionality that deliberately transgresses theoretical borders.
Dr. Suryia Nayak is an academic, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and group analyst. Suryia has over 40 years’ experience of grassroot intersectional activism to end racialised misogyny, including rape, forced migration, trafficking, modern slavery and female genital mutilation. Suryia insists on the application of Black feminist theory and text to the psychological and political impact of oppression.
Just so we can keep track of numbers, please sign up to attend here: https://forms.office.com/e/T96y10dQra
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
G20
Mansfield Cooper Building
Manchester
