The Isaiah Berlin Lecture was launched in 1990 to celebrate the 80th birthday of the College's Founding President, Sir Isaiah Berlin, made possible thanks to an endowment gift from the Rothschild Foundation. The lecture traditionally takes place each Trinity term and is in Berlin’s own field of study, the history of ideas. Past speakers include Professor Amartya Sen, Professor Roy Foster, Professor Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Ignatieff and Baroness Helena Kennedy.

The next Berlin Lecture will take place at 6pm on Thursday 19 May (Thursday in Week 4) with Professor Ato Quayson, Stanford University, who will be delivering a lecture entitled ‘Disputatiousness and Unruly Affective Economies: From the Greeks to Postcolonial Tragedy’ (abstract below).

We invite everyone to join us at the lecture in the Leonard Wolfson Auditorium where seating will be available with and without social distancing. Guest Night will follow in Hall, bookable via the Wolfson Gateway in the usual way.

The lecture will also be livestreamed on YouTube for those who cannot attend in person, link to follow on the website when the glitch with the event’s listing has been fixed. Those who attend in person are asked to consider wearing a face covering.

Abstract:

Disputatiousness and Unruly Affective Economies: From the Greeks to Postcolonial Tragedy

This lecture will pick up on an element of literary tragedy that was raised in Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature but was not fully elaborated, namely, the place of disputatiousness in the history of tragic form and how this might help us to understand tragedy in world literature.  The Greeks give us great examples of disputatiousness: Oedipus vrs. Tiresias, Clytemnestra vrs Agamemnon, Medea vrs Jason, and Antigone vrs Creon, among others.  But the determining mark of the Greek tragic characters was what might be described as their zero-sum wrath.  Their sense of rightness goes as far as courting possible self-destruction. 

My understanding of this mode of disputatiousness is different from what Hegel lays out in his discussion of tragedy in The Phenomenology of Spirit and Lectures on Aesthetics. Rather, I side with Jean Pierre-Vernant in reading Greek tragedy as illustrating the incomplete transition between religious and ethical discourses, such that concepts such as dikē (justice), nómos (law and custom), and ethos (the fundamental character or spirit of a culture) all come to do double service and are thus articulated by individual characters as the subjects of life-and-death disagreements. 

Disputatiousness takes on a different guise in Shakespeare, where the more disputatious plays such as Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus are not considered among his most profound.  Rather, in the big tragedies of Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra, historical disputatiousness is aligned to unruly affective economies.  It is the link between the two domains of history and affect that marks Shakespeare as modern and from which we can derive a model for understanding the characterological types and their socio-political conditions in postcolonial tragedy. 

The lecture will proffer a broad theory of postcolonial tragedy drawing examples from different literary traditions and cultures, but will specifically focus on the rural novels of Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God), Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and the work of JM Coetzee, among others.

As we watch with horror the crisis in Ukraine, we are holding a special Giving Day on 11–12 May to allow Wolfson to provide a home to refugee scholars fleeing the catastrophe in Ukraine or other conflict zones around the world.

We will devote any additional funds secured to:

• Scholarships to allow students to pursue research at Oxford, whatever their financial means.
• Research and travel awards, enabling students to share their work at conferences or do essential lab- or field-work.
• Hardship bursaries for students in unexpected financial distress.
• Assistance with nursery fees for students with children at Wolfson Nursery.
• Better sports, welfare, and wellbeing facilities to support students’ physical and mental health, and to foster Wolfson’s special esprit de corps.
• Enhanced library facilities, to ensure Wolfsonians have the latest resources they need.

The Giving Day will be a 36-hour fundraising challenge for the whole Wolfson community – alumni around the world, students, fellows and staff.

There will be special events in College on both days:

Wednesday 11 May

• Row-a-thon: 9am - 9pm
• Bake sale: 10am - until everything is gone
• Lunchtime talk by Dr Jan Feller and Professor Julie Curtis 'Language and Culture in Contemporary Ukraine': 1 - 2pm

Thursday 12 May

• Row-a-thon: 9am - 9pm
• 'The War in Ukraine: a foreign policy perspective': 6 - 7pm
• Last day of online auction: closes at 9pm
   

Learn more about the campaign here.

Filmmaker Elsa Gomis’s work explores visual forms which challenge dominant representations of marginalized populations. Working at the crossroads of migrations studies and art, Gomis’s research focuses on all dimensions of exile, from the political to the personal. My Exile is Yours presents four films exploring this theme.



Elsa Gomis is a filmmaker, Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the Oxford Department of Politics and International Relations, and Visiting Researcher at Maison Française, Oxford.



Marble Hall, Wolfson College, Linton Road, Oxford, OX2 6UD

free admission, open daily
 

Zbigniew Herbert is one of the best-known Polish poets and essayists of the 20th century. Brigitte Gautier is Herbert's translator into French. She will be in conversation with Karolina Watroba, and there will be readings of some of Herbert's poems and prose passages in the Polish original, and in English and French translation.