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IRW Distinguished Lecture Series - Rujeko Hockley, "Camille Billops: Dissident Aesthete"

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Thursday, November 19, 2026
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett Building, Douglass Campus 

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

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Thursday, February 25, 2027
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Humanities Seminar Room, Rutgers Academic Building, College Avenue Campus

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

 

IRW Distinguished Lecture Series - Naminata Diabate, "Desiring Pleasure: Bodily Sovereignty, Clitoraid’s 'Pleasure Hospital,' and the Politics of Aesthetic Dissent"

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Thursday, March 11, 2027
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett Building, Douglass Campus
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.