[SydPhil] 2022 Alan Saunders Lecture by Bryan Mukandi - Tuesday 5th July 3.30pm AEST (live streamed)

[Australasian Association of Philosophy AAP]

*2022 Alan Saunders Lecture*

*Lecture by Bryan Mukandi with host David Rutledge, ABC Radio National*

*Live streamed, Tuesday 5th July 3.30-5.00pm AEST*

On the topic: "Normal and the White Fantastic: When will things go back to
normal?”

*In the Australia of economic uncertainty, social restrictions and a sense
of precarity brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of a return
to normal has become so pervasive that when not stated explicitly, it forms
part of that white noise on which we rarely focus. The desired return
arguably now functions as the true north around which the nation gets its
bearings. Were Australia a moving vessel, ‘normal’ would be the heading
towards which the bulk of collective action is being directed. In this
lecture, I want to examine this pursuit of ‘normal’, which I propose to
term ‘the white fantastic’.*

*The concept of ‘the white fantastic’ is drawn from Richard Iton’s
meditation on post-civil rights cultural politics, In Search of the Black
Fantastic; and Charles Mills’ indictment of the settler colonial state as a
‘racial fantasyland’. Beginning with Aristophanes’ The Birds and Plato’s
Republic, thinking through Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow and
Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, I plan to examine the function and workings
of fantasy within the Australian polity. Rather than advocating for a view
of political maturity that puts aside fantasy, I take seriously Tsenay
Serequeberhan’s suggestion that the ‘antidote is always located in the
poison’. Rather than when things will return to normal, I propose that we
question what a republic founded on different flights of fantasy, on a more
just fantastic, might look like.*

The Alan Saunders Lecture is a free, live streamed, ticketed event. For
more information and to register, visit:
https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/ibu9C5QPXJi0OWBZkUzVPVV?domain=aap.org.au
<https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/oJseC6XQ4LfoxG5rLU6UzUS?domain=aap.org.au>

The Lecture will be recorded by the ABC and broadcast on ABC Radio National.

The lecture will be held alongside the 2022 AAP Conference. Conference
registrants do not need to register separately for the event.

-- 
Australasian Association of Philosophy
www.aap.org.au
ABN 29 152 892 272
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