Previous Smuts Lecture Series

If needs be: South Africa's freedom struggles and the cult of death, Professor Jacob Dlamini (Princeton) October 2022

In October 2022 Professor Jacob Dlamini delivered three lectures on the following themes: 

Lecture 1: Dying for Freedom

Lecture 2: Defying death

Lecture 3: A dignified corpse 

Slum Acts in Three Scenes, Professor Veena Das (Johns Hopkins) October 2019

In October 2019 Professor Veena Das delivered three lectures:

Lecture 1: Inordinate Knowledge and Self Making

Lecture 2: The Dispersed Body of the Police: Cascading Scales

Lecture 3: Detecting the Human: Under Which Skies Do We Theorize? 

The Uninhabitable: Afterlives of the Urban South, AbdouMaliq Simone (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity) November 2017

In November 2017 the inaugural After the Postcolonial Lecture Series was hosted by the Smuts Memorial Fund in association with Polity. AbdouMaliq Simone (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity) delivered three lectures titled The Uninhabitable: Afterlives of the Urban South.

These lectures are available for viewing using the following links:

Lecture 1: Ensembles of the Uninhabitable

Lecture 2: Looking out for the Dark: Navigating contemporary complexities in Jakarta and Hyderabad

Lecture 3: On the Way Home without a World – the Case of Delhi​