In Conversation | The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora: On the Contents of Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s Trunk

Roderick Ferguson, William Robertson Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies, Yale University, will discuss the Nigerian-born photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, with Steven Nelson (Yale BA 1985), dean, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art.

About this program

In recognition of Worlds AIDS Day on December 1, 2023, this talk will examine the history of neoliberalism and neocolonialism in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States as well as the history of Black queer art and activism through a series of visits to a make-believe Black queer bookshop and gallery. While the visits are fictional, the objects in the bookshop and their histories are real. The trunk owned by the Nigerian-born British photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955–1989) will be a focus of this talk. Race, sexuality, spirituality, and the self are themes explored in Fani-Kayode's intriguing body of photographic works. 

About Roderick A. Ferguson

Roderick A. Ferguson is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2004). He is the co-editor, with Grace Hong, of the anthology Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (2011). He is also a co-editor, with Erica Edwards and Jeffrey Ogbar, of Keywords of African American Studies (2018). In 2020 he received the David R. Kessler Award from CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. 

About Steven Nelson

Steven Nelson (Yale BA 1985) is dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He has published widely on the arts, architecture, and urbanism of Africa and its diasporas and on queer studies. He is professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he served as director of the African Studies Center. Nelson also serves on the boards of trustees of the Bard Graduate Center and the Kress Foundation. He has held visiting appointments at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and has been appointed a fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians and of the Association of Art History (UK). Nelson earned a BA in studio art from Yale University and an AM and a PhD in art history from Harvard University.