The History of Consciousness department is pleased to announce the next speaker in their Spring 2025 Speaker Series, Sophia Azeb, who will deliver her talk entitled “Black Anticolonialism and Radical Relation” on Monday, May 12th at 1pm in Humanities Building 1, Room 420.

This talk explores the radical anticolonial subjectivities forged across what Richard Iton suggests as “diasporic breathing room,” or – in my own interpretation – the ungeographic sensibilities that Black study offers transnational and translational theories of decolonisation. Focusing on the productive tensions emergent from 20th century Black anticolonial practice – particularly the unmapping tendencies of Frantz Fanon – this talk attends to the cultural, political, and affective matrix of anticolonial possibilities and limits emergent from across the African diaspora. This emphasis on how Black anticolonial practice draws upon the unsettled spatial orientation of the diaspora, which informs Black anticolonial epistemologies, does not presume that racial identity itself is fixed, or that meanings made from identity and experience constitute an anticolonial politic in and of itself. Rather, the ever shifting, “undecidable blackness” that instructs and shapes particular anticolonial pursuits towards the horizon of decolonisation make legible a set of radical subjectivities that embolden anticolonial sociality beyond the “authenticating geography” of the nation-state.

Sophia Azeb is an assistant professor of Black studies in the Department of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UCSC. Her book, tentatively titled “Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab,” follows the circuits of transnational and translational blackness charted by African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Afro-Arab peoples across 20th century North and West Africa and Europe.