In the Press of History – seminar

Maurits van Bever Donker (from the University of the Western Cape, in South Africa) will be offering a seminar paper titled, “In the Press of History".

In 1994 South African sculptor Johannes Segogela produced a series of “scenes” to mark the transition from apartheid to postapartheid. One of these scenes, titled “The History Press”, stages questions around the nature of history, its production, its “uses and abuses”. Playing with concepts of time, placing us within the press of time, pressing us, the scene begins to open towards the question of the “for us” that shapes both time and history.

In this paper, Maurits van Bever Donker works through these problematics, asking after the work of history, its connection to concepts of futurity and utopia, on the one hand, and the possibilities of non-anthropomorphic time that, nonetheless, is turned towards us, towards and for an understanding of the human.

The seminar is co-hosted by the Centre for Cultural Studies in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, the Leeds University Centre for African Studies and Critical Life in the School of English.

About the speaker

Maurits van Bever Donker is Associate Professor and Research Manager at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. His research specialisation is in Black Consciousness Philosophy and Négritude, and examines the modes through which these global postcolonial and decolonial discourses re-script our understandings of political philosophy and the world.

Of particular interest is how the philosophy of Black Consciousness constitutes a notion of the subject through the aesthetic. He also researches and teaches across Postcolonial Theory and Aesthetics, African Philosophy and Literatures, and Contemporary South African and African History.

His monograph, Texturing Difference, is available through Polity Press in the series Critical South.

More information

For more details about the seminar, please email Ross Truscott at R.Truscott@leeds.ac.uk.

Feature image

Photo courtesy of Maurits van Bever Donker.