Can libidinal energies contribute to political discourses in historical contexts where reconciliation is far from feasible? This presentation proposes an examination of the role of affective entanglement in the experience of borders and most importantly in the moments, the practices and the possibility of debordering in the divided island of Cyprus. Specifically, the seminar will focus on the theme of erotic love and defend it against the stereotypical views which dismiss it as a banal cliché. In response, this session explores the critical potential of erotic love for mobilising political change in the context of Cyprus as a bordered space.
Departing from the act of real and imaginary border-crossing, Prof. Evangelou traces the politicisation of the body as it renders itself the space in which imposed ethnic, religious, ideological, gender and sexual borders are both suffered and resisted. In other words, in speaking, feeling, desiring and resisting from the border, the body also speaks about the border. Drawing from Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gloria Anzaldúa and Laura Elisa Pérez, Prof. Evangelou’s seminar will look at the ways Neşe Yaşın’s poem “Unsent Letters” (1992) and Marios Psaras’s short film Thin Green Line (2017) establish a complex nexus between vulnerability and resistance mobilised by the body’s erotic energies. Their employment of erotic love as an agent for anti-border and reconciliatory politics complements Anzaldúa’s theorization of the borderland as a space of liminality which yields both vulnerability and possibility, a space where differences are not neutralised, but unfold in creative and hybrid syntheses.
Angelos Evangelou is an Assistant Prof. in Global Anglophone Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, having previously taught at the University of Cyprus and the University of Kent in Canterbury and in Paris. His current research interests revolve around the manifestations of the “limit”, the “border” and “bordered areas” in contemporary Anglophone Literature, Critical Theory and Comparative Cultural Studies. Specifically, he explores the crosscurrents between Border Theory, Border Studies and Postcolonial Studies, with special emphasis on the representation of the border in the Anglophone Literatures and Cinemas of Cyprus, Palestine, Israel, the UK, Ireland, Mexico and the US.
His publications include the monograph Philosophizing Madness from Nietzsche to Derrida (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), the edited volume Shifting Horizons and Crossing Borders: Thinking with Stephanos Stephanides (Brill, 2024) and articles in academic journals including: “‘In fact I am an animal’: Mental Illness, Vulnerability and the Problem of Empathy in Anna Kavan's Asylum Piece” (English Studies, 2021) and “Dogs and the Politics of Il|legal Border Crossing: Suad Amiry’s Sharon and My Mother-in-Law and Marios Piperides’s Smuggling Hendrix” (Comparative Literature Studies, 2023). He is a Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy, an Honorary Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent and the Secretary of HASE (The Hellenic Association for the Study of English).
Participation in this seminar is free and open to the public. Students are particularly encouraged to attend. A Q&A will follow on from the seminar presentation. Attendees are cordially invited to stay on for drinks and refreshments after the event. Seating is limited and bookings for this event are on a first-come-first-served basis.
Reservations should be done by email.
