Healing the Ruptures of Coloniality: Race, Religion, and the Secular with Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike

Tuesday, May 9, 4–5:30 p.m.
LeRoux Conference Room (STCN 160)
Please join a public reception at 3:30 p.m.
RSVP here to watch the lecture online via Zoom

While colonialism is widely believed to have officially ended in the 20th century, ushering in a “postcolonial” era, and W.E.B. DuBois famously defined the “problem of the 20th century [to be] the problem of the color line,” this presentation will examine the ways in which this colonial color line has transformed and continues to thrive in the 21st century. Critically building on the work of Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, and in particular reference to the mutually-influencing categories of race and religion, this talk will explore the roots of this continuing colonial rupture, and strategies for moving beyond it in various domains.

Oludamini Ogunnaike is an associate professor of African religious thought at the University of Virginia, specializing in the intellectual and aesthetic dimensions of West and North African Sufism and Yoruba oriṣa traditions. He is author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (Penn State University Press, 2020), winner of the ASWAD’s (Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora) Outstanding First Book Prize, and Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: West African Madīḥ Poetry and its Precedents (Islamic Texts Society, 2020). He is currently working on two book projects, The Logic of the Birds: An Introduction to Sufi Poetry and Poetics and a book on Yoruba Mythology.

Ogunnaike received his PhD in African and African American studies and Religion at Harvard University and his AB in African Studies and Cognitive Neuroscience from Harvard College.