Dagmawi Woubshet- English, University of Pennsylvania

"Last Work, Late Style: Reflections on James Baldwin’s 'The Welcome Table'" 

The story of James Baldwin the playwright, indeed James Baldwin the literary artist, begins at nine or ten as a tween author of a dramatic work and a young boy whose personal inclination and fits of passion were allied to the theater. How fitting that the last major piece of writing the author completed just months before his death, The Welcome Table, is also a work of dramatic literature. From circa 1934, when his first play was performed, to 1987, when he finished his last monograph, theater, although we seldom narrate the arc of Baldwin’s vocation in this way, is a binding thread. Indeed, if we look closely at his published and unpublished body of work, from his first public creative undertaking to his last, it becomes clear that for Baldwin drama was an abiding artistic form, the theater an essential life-force. In the first half of the lecture, then, I will focus on James Baldwin the playwright and in the second half on The Welcome Table. Baldwin’s last work is set in “an ancient rambling stone house, in the south of France,” one identical to his own home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. And it is titled after the bamboo-shaded farmhouse table in his garden—a space of gathering, fellowship, and nourishment that he christened “The Welcome Table”—the name he chose to give his last major work perhaps as a metonym for the house that houses the play, a metaphor for the gathering ground that is the theater, a gesture of gratitude to the house that received and rescued him and enabled his late career. At the center of The Welcome Table is Edith Heming, “actress-singer/star.” Her Provençal home is a much sought-after destination—as reflected by the cast of characters—for artists and revolutionaries, journalists and itinerants, family, friends and lovers who come to commune with this celebrated figure, or to attend her legendary parties, or to find some measure of peace. Building over the course of a single day and culminating in a festive birthday party, The Welcome Table foregrounds Edith’s interior (intimate, personal and communal) world, while exploring themes of gender, race, sexuality, desire, nationality, age, fame, and exile with new theatrical forms and a style characteristic of the author’s late works.

Dagmawi Woubshet is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Associate Term Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. A scholar of literature and visual culture, he works at the intersections of Black and LGBTQIA+ studies. He is the author of The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS; and co-editor of Ethiopia: Modern Nation, Ancient Roots and Ethiopia: Literature, Art, Culture. His essays have appeared in Callaloo, Transition, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and The Atlantic. He is currently completing Noways Tired: James Baldwin and the Art of Late Style and New Flower: Lyric Essays. Woubshet is the recipient of fellowships from Civitella Ranieri (Italy), the Africa Institute in Sharjah (UAE), and the Modern Art Museum in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), where he curated Julie Mehretu: The Addis Show.

IRW Distinguished Lecture Series 2026-2027 | Dissident Aesthetics and the Remaking of Life

Naminata Diabate - Comparative Literature, Cornell University

"Desiring Pleasure: Bodily Sovereignty, Clitoraid’s 'Pleasure Hospital,' and the Politics of Aesthetic Dissent"

This lecture highlights the contested terrain surrounding Clitoraid, the American-based organization that built a “pleasure hospital” in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, to perform clitoral reconstruction surgery for survivors of female genital surgeries. Framed against this year’s inquiry into dissident aesthetics and the remaking of life, I argue that women’s pursuit of reconstructive surgery constitutes an embodied claim to pleasure, wholeness, and self-authorship—an aesthetic and political refusal of the erasures inscribed on their bodies by patriarchal and other societal regimes of control. Yet this claim to bodily sovereignty unfolds within a fraught geopolitical and cultural field: Clitoraid’s origins in the Raëlian movement, its language of reconstruction as liberatory spectacle, and its friction with Burkinabè state authorities and local NGOs raise urgent questions about who narrates healing, whose aesthetics of dissent are legible as emancipatory, and how transnational humanitarian intervention can itself reproduce hierarchies of expertise, race, and cultural authority even as it enables individual women’s desires for restored sensation and dignity.

Drawing on public statements, media coverage, and scholarship on FGM/C through the optic of feminist theory, corporeality, and subjectivity, I showcase the “pleasure hospital” as a site where competing aesthetics of dissent collide: the individual survivor's insistence on pleasure as a right and a form of self-remaking; the Burkinabè government’s assertion of sovereignty over national health infrastructure and cultural narrative; and Clitoraid’s performative branding of rescue and revelation. Rather than adjudicate among these positions, I ask what it means to theorize desire, pleasure, repair, and dignity as simultaneously personal, political, and aesthetic acts—and what dissonances arise when grassroots bodily agency is mediated by a putatively foreign organization whose methods and motives remain locally contested. In doing so, the lecture contributes to broader conversations about how flourishing life is imagined, funded, and fought over across asymmetries of power-effects, and about the limits and possibilities of solidarity as it travels across borders.

IRW Distinguished Lecture Series 2026-2027 Dissident Aesthetics and the Remaking of Life

Rujeko Hockley - Arnhold Associate Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art 

"Camille Billops: Dissident Aesthete"

Camille Billops (1933–2019) was a New York legend. A self-determined Black woman and a storyteller, she devoted herself to speaking the unspoken through film, printmaking, teaching, ceramics, archival work, and community building. This lecture proposes Billops as a case study in dissident aesthetics, conducted at the scale of a life. The weekly salons Billops and her husband and collaborator James Hatch hosted at their SoHo loft from the 1970s onward, their publication Artist and Influence, and the oral histories, exhibition flyers, performance programs, audio recordings, and books they collected, were not adjacent to her practice as an artist; they were the practice. Against the erasures of a mainstream art world that frequently excluded artists of color and rarely noted their contributions, Billops and Hatch built an undeniable record and a road map for the future, itself an act of dissent. "Every creative, cultural, and racial experience has to do with my work. I sift and look and taste," Billops wrote. This lecture takes that syncretic method as its subject, offering a blueprint for a life in art in which art-making, truth-telling, and world-building are the same gesture.

IRW Distinguished Lecture Series 2026-2027 | Dissident Aesthetics and the Remaking of Life

Samah Selim - Modern Arabic Literature, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University

"Feminist Internationalism in Translation: Inji Aflatoun and the Women's International Democratic Federation"

In November 1945, 850 women from around the world travelled to Paris across war-ravaged lands to attend the founding congress of the Women's International Democratic Federation. One of these women was Inji Aflatoun (1924-1989), a young communist and women's rights activist who would soon become one of Egypt's most important surrealist painters. Delegates to the congress representing organizations from forty countries met in the Palais de la Mutualité for five days in the last week of November to denounce fascism and discuss the struggle of women around the world for equality and freedom.

Aflatoun’s report on the congress, Eighty Million Women Stand with Us--initially banned by the Egyptian authorities--translated postwar European anti-fascist feminism into anticolonial liberation politics. Defining fascism as "the lowest form of imperialism" allowed Aflatoun to clear space for an ‘unthinkable’ local feminism while creating the conditions for a new language of feminist internationalism that embraced the colonized world. My talk will explore the broader Cold War history in which Aflatoun's forgotten report is embedded and consider it as an example of how translation enables and preserves radical solidarities across time and space despite state repression and cultural erasure

Professor Selim’s research fields are in modern Arabic literature and literary/intellectual history, and translation studies. She is interested in comparative histories of the novel, and the politics of translation practice in colonial and postcolonial contexts. She is also an award-winning literary translator. She is the recipient of the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation (2009), the University of Arkansas Translation of Arabic Literature Award (2012) and the National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant (2018). Her most recent book, Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nadha in Egypt explores the cultural and literary politics surrounding the translation of the novel into Arabic at the beginning of the twentieth century. She is currently working on a book about the early twentieth century Lebanese author Niqula Haddad (1878-1954), and a translation of the collected works of Egyptian feminist and Surrealist painter Inji Aflatoun (1924-1989). Professor Selim has taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Aix-en-Provence and the American University in Cairo. She co-directs the literature module of the Berlin-based postdoctoral research program, Europe in the Middle East; the Middle East in Europe. She is a founding member of the Cairo-based Turjoman Translators Collective and a member of the Executive Committee of the Rutgers Translation Studies Initiative.

IRW Distinguished Lecture Series 2026-2027 | Dissident Aesthetics and the Remaking of Life