This lecture will cover the concepts of colonialism, coloniality, and decoloniality and their respective contexts, with a special focus on the notion of decolonial optics in visual art and poetry. A portion of the lecture will be dedicated to ornamental writing, Orhan Pamuk, and the post-Empire melancholy syndrome.

Yegana Jabbarova is a Russian poet, Associate Professor in the Department of Russian as a Foreign Language at Ural Federal University, and holds a PhD in Philology. She is the author of the poetry collections Bosphorus (2015) and Romberg’s Position (2017), and her work explores decolonial and ornamental writing. Her poems have appeared in Translit, Znamya, Ural, Novaya Yunost, Novy Mir, Plavuchiy Most, and other journals. She is the winner of the “Poetic Debut” award from Novaya Yunost magazine (2016) and was shortlisted for the Arkady Dragomoshchenko Prize (2019).

The lecture is organized by Fem Workshop Almaty with the support of the Prince Claus Fund.