Name: Raymond F. West Memorial Lecture: Ananya Jahanara Kabir
Start: 2025-04-07T16:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-04-07T18:00:00-07:00
Location: 424 Santa Teresa Street, Stanford, CA, United States, California 94305

Raymond F. West Memorial Lecture: Ananya Jahanara Kabir

"Rock-a My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham": The Alegropolitics of the Now
This lecture takes its cue from the Judaeo-Christian belief in a comfortable resting place for the righteous dead, translated into English as “the Bosom of Abraham” following its New Testament attestation in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16.22). During my doctoral research, I encountered this phrase within biblical and apocryphal material formative for early medieval imaginings about the soul’s fate between death and Judgement Day, anterior to the emergence of the doctrine of Purgatory. Closely linked to the elaboration of what I termed “the interim Paradise,” the Bosom of Abraham returned unexpectedly to my life many years later through the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s iconic Revelations. Here, the African American spiritual which gives my lecture a title is the soundtrack’s crescendo within a jubilant, flamboyant, danced reclamation of the once-enslaved body.
I will use this tenacity and multivalence of “the Bosom of Abraham” to bring together two contexts that, on the face of it, could not seem more separated in time, space, and politics: early medieval Christianity, and the power of Black Joy. I do so through the concept of “alegropolitics,” a theoretical tool I have developed within my work on Afro-Atlantic dance and creolization as embodied resistance. The lecture will thus also chart my intellectual journey from puzzling out the Interim Paradise to learning through dance that opens out the “interim” into an all-encompassing “now.” Furthermore, it will elaborate on what I mean by the “Alegropolitics of the now” through a range of performance genres that bridge the Black Atlantic and the Indian Ocean world. The universal desire to glimpse the hereafter as a place of redemption and repair may well be, I will suggest in conclusion, the flip side of dwelling, moving, and rocking in the moment.
—Ananya Jahanara Kabir

About the Speaker
Ananya Jahanara Kabir FBA is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London. Her research spans creolization across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, critical philology, and the relationship between literary texts, embodied cultural expression, and memory work. Professor Kabir is the author of Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2002), Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (2009), and Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971, and Modern South Asia (2013). With Deanne Williams, she co-edited Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages (2005), one of the first collaborative projects to bring postcolonial theory to medieval studies. During 2013–18, she directed the ERC Advanced Grant-funded project "Modern Moves," which explored the global popularity of African-heritage social dance; her monograph-in-progress, Alegropolitics, draws on that research. She is a fellow of the British Academy, has been awarded India’s Infosys Prize in the Humanities and Germany’s Humboldt Research Prize, and is on the editorial team of the new Cambridge University Press journal, Public Humanities.