D. Vance Smith, Professor of English, Princeton University

Kantorowicz’s African Bodies: Anthropology, Sovereignty, Homophobia

Wednesday 10/08, 12-1pm, Commons 221/222

Attendees can gather for refeshments starting at 11:30am

Abstract: Ernst Kantorowicz helped shaped the way we think of political theology, the charisma of the leader, sovereignty, kingship in Shakespeare, even corporations. He is often regarded as a quintessential European, and not always in a good way: Goring and Hitler both liked his first book (which horrified Kantorowicz). Yet in important ways Africa influenced him personally and intellectually—and vice versa. Ethnography’s complicity in colonialism owed much to the way Kantorowicz helped ethnographers think about power—and to construct modern power in post-independent nations. The phenomenon of the “president for life” and his sacralized body is rooted in this legacy beginning with Kanto—and in the way African leaders use homophobia as an instrument of power.

Bio: Professor of English at Princeton University, Dr. D. Vance Smith is a scholar whose work focuses on African and decolonial literature and theory, the history of anthropology, ecocriticism, and medieval philosophy and literature, and their intersections. His 2020 book Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England (University of Chicago Press, 2002) is the third book in a series examining the medieval limit experience—the philosophy and literature of beginnings, middles, and ends. The first, The Book of the Incipit, concerns beginnings, and the second, Arts of Possession, examines the concept of dwelling in medieval romance and economic theory and practice. His most recent book, Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in November. Atlas’s Bones is an intellectual history about 1) the classical and medieval production of knowledges in Africa, and 2) the imposition of medieval structures of knowledge and governance on African colonies.