Tuesday Night Forum Series

Tuesday, 9/30

7:00 PM - 9:00 PM:  Seerat Hazi: Video Presentation and Talk
Framing The “Truth”—The Secular Poetry of Taufiq Rafat’s Pakistani Idiom
 
Seerat Hazir is an ad film maker living and working in Lahore, Pakistan. He has recently started experimental 
videography and has so far made two experimental music videos in collaboration with Dr Fawzia Afzal-Khan 
exploring the ways in which issues of gender, sexuality and religion are framed constructs, allowing the 
viewer to question and challenge their perceived status as “natural facts.” 
 
Hazi is currently working on an as-yet untitled documentary on his father, the late Taufiq Rafat, arguably 
the most important English language poet of Pakistan, whose work spans the early decades  of Pakistan, ending 
with Rafat’s death in 1998. The documentary aims to bring into public view, the life and works of an extremely 
private poet, an artist who always shied away from the spotlight and preferred to melt into the background which  
personal and political circumstances forced him to inhabit.  The lecture is based on videos and readings of 
Taufiq Rafat’s selected works including his renditions in English of the verses of Bulleh Shah, a 17th century 
Punjabi Sufi poet, the latter an iconoclast of religious dogma, much like Rafat himself was someone who broke 
with the literary conventions of his time, to coin a distinctively “Pakistani Idiom” in his English-language 
poetry. His efforts, like Bulleh Shah’s, are testament of the power and necessity of secular artistic thought 
to counter the extremist ideologies of our contemporary moment, not just in Pakistan but in the world at large.

- October 2008 -

Tuesday, 10/7
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM:  Book Release Event!  
Jayna Brown’s Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Duke University Press, 2008)
 
Jayna Brown is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Professor 
Brown researches performance in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Diaspora, with a focus on vernacular expressive 
forms and the body. She has published on African American race film and the Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. 
She has been awarded dissertation and postdoctoral Ford Foundation Fellowships as well as a Rockefeller Award 
for the Study of Black Culture at the Stanford Humanities Center. Her two current projects are a series of essays 
on race, technology and utopias in speculative fiction and global pop music, and another project on black women 
and post punk music in Britain. Her classes at UCR include: African American Women Intellectuals and Artists, 
Race and Performance and African American Literature.
 
Babylon Girls is a groundbreaking cultural history of the African American women who performed in variety shows—
chorus lines, burlesque revues, cabaret acts, and the like—between 1890 and 1945. Through a consideration of the 
gestures, costuming, vocal techniques, and stagecraft developed by African American singers and dancers, Jayna 
Brown explains how these women shaped the movement and style of an emerging urban popular culture. In an era of 
U.S. and British imperialism, these women challenged and played with constructions of race, gender, and the body 
as they moved across stages and geographic space. They pioneered dance movements including the cakewalk, the 
shimmy, and the Charleston—black dances by which the “New Woman” defined herself. These early-twentieth-century 
performers brought these dances with them as they toured across the United States and around the world, becoming 
cosmopolitan subjects more widely traveled than many of their audiences.
 
“Babylon Girls is a brilliant book. Consistently pushing multiple fields in new directions, Jayna Brown reveals 
the centrality of black female performance culture in the making of transatlantic modernity. Her incredibly 
valuable book demonstrates how African Americans moved in resilient and unpredictable ways—both geographically 
and performatively—during the early twentieth century.” —Daphne A. Brooks, author of Bodies in Dissent: 
Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910

- November 2008 -

Tuesday, 11/11
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM:  Sara Ahmed: Lecture 
On Being Directed: Promises, Happiness, Deviations 
Co-sponsored by the NYU Program in American Studies and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.  
 
Sara Ahmed is a Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Coldsmiths College, University of London.  
Sara Ahmed critically examines the family as a “happy object” that promises happiness in return for loyalty
to particular ways of being and feeling in the world.  Drawing on feminist and queer unhappy archives, she 
asks: what happens when bodies deviate from the paths of happiness, or refuse to be turned or turned on by 
its promise?  Ahmed’s books include The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) and Queer Phenomenology (2006).