English Visiting Speaker Seminar: Associate Professor Henghameh Saroukhani, Durham University Black British Writing and the Autotheoretical Impulse

“Anyone who speaks about himself,” Roland Barthes once argued, “gets lost.” This talk examines the politics of writing, and losing, the self, particularly in the aftermath of Empire, in the context of postcolonial theory, and in recent black British non-fictional texts.

For Barthes, in his well-known writing on myths, the displacement of the self functions as a form of critique against the seemingly authentic and immobile structures of mythologies. In Stuart Hall and Hazel Carby's writing, this sensibility of displacement, of being lost, translates into an articulation of the interminable afterlife of Empire on the colonial critic's body. Hall and Carby's writing, Associate Professor at Durham University, Henghameh Saroukhani, suggests, are situated amongst a growing body of autotheoretical work that fuses the categories of life writing, literary criticism, philosophy, history and politics as a means to focus on the phenomenology of theory and a distinctive, anti-imperial theorisation of the self.

As one example of this thriving somatic praxis, Professor Saroukhani turns comparatively to Stuart Hall's Familiar Stranger (2017) and Hazel Carby's Imperial Intimacies (2019), two texts that extend a genealogy of writing à la Barthes, but are more precisely part of an ever-burgeoning canon of writing predicated on the entanglement of the critic's life and body. Alongside thinkers such as Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe, Hall and Carby's theorisation of black diasporic life offers a somatic discourse of writing the ‘lost' racialised self that captures the continuing violence of coloniality experienced by the textual ‘I'. Hall and Carby's evasive, yet deeply embodied prose operates as a form of narratological disavowal that illustrates the violent voids and ends of imperial domination.

Henghameh Saroukhani is Associate Professor in Black British Literature at Durham University. She has published widely in the field of black British and black Atlantic literatures and cultures. She is co-editor of a commemorative special issue on Andrea Levy (ARIEL 2022), and another on the Windrush scandal (Wasafiri 2023). She is completing a book on political solidarity and contemporary black British writing, an archival project on the longer history of the Windrush scandal (funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship) and, as editor, the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Twenty-First-Century Black and Asian British Novel.