6
OCT
15:00
Two Lectures on Charles Mills and James Baldwin
October 6, 2026 at 15:00 to October 8, 2026 at 15:00
Gosposka Hall / Institute of Philosophy Meeting Room
Organizer: Institute of Philosophy ZRC SAZU
On October 6 and 8, the Institute of Philosophy will host two lectures by Dilek Huseyinzadegan, Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Emory University in Atlanta, USA.
The first lecture, titled Between Baldwin and Me: Dragons and Queer Life in Istanbul, held in collaboration with City of Women, will take place at 3 PM in Gosposka Hall (Gosposka ulica 16).
The lecture will take the form of an autobiographical, photographic and essayistic philosophical-political presentation focusing on the so-called Turkish decade (1961–1971) of the American writer and political activist James Baldwin, as well as on the speaker's own experience of growing up as a queer person in Istanbul. Its starting point will be Baldwin's famous essay Here Be Dragons: Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood (1985), in which he opens up questions of gender and sexuality, race, class, and normativity on the one hand, and the possibility of life beyond socially prescribed identities on the other. The presentation is part of a forthcoming book, conceived as an encyclopedic collection of essays on love and loss.
The second lecture, titled On Charles Mills and "The Racial Contract" Today, will take place at 1 PM in the Meeting Room of the Institute of Philosophy (Novi trg 2, second floor).
The presentation will examine Charles Mills’s contribution to social contract theory in his monumental 1997 book, The Racial Contract, i.e., the argument that an epistemological, moral, and a political racial contract underwrites all social contracts. He begins by claiming that “Global white supremacy is the political system that has made the modern world what it is today.” Mills uses the concept of “contract” in his work because contractarianism is the lingua franca of political theory and a way to enter conversations with left liberalism. We will analyze the strategic advantages and disadvantages of this conceptual framework today, considering concrete historical examples from the U.S.A. and Turkey. The lecturer will also invite the audience to think out loud with her about the meaning of a racial contract in Slovenia.
Dilek Huseyinzadegan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Emory University in Atlanta, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Immanuel Kant, modern philosophy, and political theory. Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, she has lived and worked in the U.S.A for the past two decades. Her current research interests include Enlightenment history, contemporary uses and abuses of the philosophy of Kant, and an interdisciplinary humanities project on James Baldwin’s “Turkish Decade” (1961-1971). She is the author of Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics (Northwestern UP, 2019), a contributing translator of essay collection entitled The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison (Pluto Press, 2022, Ed. Kışanak), and numerous articles on Kant, Hegel, Adorno, Spivak, race, gender, and feminism, which appeared in journals such as the Kantian Review, Hegel Jahrbuch, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, Radical Philosophy Review, and Critical Philosophy of Race.