Join the ASA Women’s Caucus for the 2024 Women’s Caucus Luncheon and Lecture, Saturday, Dec. 14 at the ASA Annual Meeting. Tickets are currently available for this event through our online registration form. The Early Bird discount ends August 31 so be sure to purchase your ticket before prices go up!
Your ticket includes Saturday buffet lunch and a seat at this year’s lecture. If you wish to support an anonymous student ticket or purchase a ticket for a colleague or mentee, you can do so in the form. For questions or payment issues, please email the Secretariat. ASA is happy to send you a custom credit card invoice if you encounter any issues.
This year, we are delighted to have Naminata Diabate deliver the Women’s Caucus Lecture entitled, “Promising Pleasure and Eliciting Displeasure: On Girlhood, Personhood, and Perversity” in Chicago.
Naminata Diabate is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University and a member of the Advisory Board of The Africa Institute of the Global Studies University (GSU) in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. At Cornell, Diabate is a member of the core faculty in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS), and affiliated faculty in the Department of Literatures in English; Romance Studies; Africana Studies and Research Center (ASRC); Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies (LGBT); Performing and Media Arts (PMA); and Visual Studies.
A scholar of African and African diaspora studies and neoliberalism, biopolitics, sexuality, and gender studies with linguistic expertise in Malinké, French, English, Nouchi, Spanish, and Latin, her work seeks to redefine how we understand specific forms of embodied agency in the neoliberal present in global Africa. Diabate engages multiple cultural productions and oral traditions from Francophone and Anglophone Africa, black America, Afro-Hispanic America, and the French Antilles. Her most recent provocations on defiant disrobing, pleasure, freedom, and the impact of Internet media on queerness have appeared in a monograph, peer-reviewed journals, and collections of essays. Diabate’s book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (Duke 2020), was awarded the African Studies Association (ASA) 2021 Best Book Prize and the African Literature Association (ALA) 2022 First Book Award. She has delivered public lectures in Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Emirates, Kenya, Canada, Côte d’Ivoire, Germany, and elsewhere.
In addition to her interventions in academic channels, Diabate contributes regularly to several media outlets, including newspapers, women’s magazines, and podcasts. Recently, she wrote for the women’s magazine Voix/Voie de Femmes in Côte d’Ivoire and appeared in NBC News, BBC’s The Comb, the podcast Unladylike, PBS’s Academic Minute, The New Books in Women’s History podcast, and Sound Africa, among others.
Diabate’s forthcoming work will appear in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, New Visions in African and African Diaspora Studies, The Archive in African Literature 1800-2000, and TransAfrica: The Languages of Postqueerness. In 2023, she held the Ali Mazrui Senior Research Fellowship at the Africa Institute in the United Arab Emirates. Diabate just completed her book, “Pleasure and Displeasure in Global Africa” and is currently working on two projects: a monograph, “Digital Insurgencies and Bodies,” and an edited volume entitled “The Mansa Musa Syndrome.”
Recently, The Africa Report listed Naminata Diabate among the Top 10 African Scholars to Watch in 2024.
