About this event
LearningAutonomy, Multiplicity, and the Courage of Truth with Ahmed Veriava
Event Details
Thursday, November 12, 2026, 3:30 – 5pm
Room 100,
Jackman Humanities Building
170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5R 2M8
Speakers
Ahmed Veriava
Description
The Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies invites you to attend this lecture led by Ahmed Veriava, as part of our 2026–27 Speaker Series.
In the 1970s, two radically different political movements — Black Consciousness in South Africa and Autonomia in Italy — became objects of juridical scrutiny. Although the charges brought against militants emerged from distinct legal and political histories, the prosecutions shared a striking logic: both converted the intellectual production of collective struggle into evidence of conspiracy, subversion, and concealed coordination. This lecture takes those trials as an entry point into a broader inquiry about the transnational life of political concepts and the ways states seek to render dispersed and autonomous forms of collective action legible through the grammar of criminality. Rather than treating South Africa and Italy as equivalent sites, the lecture asks what becomes visible when Black Consciousness and Autonomia are read relationally across uneven geographies of race, coloniality, class, and state power. It foregrounds the circulation, translation, and rearticulation of political ideas across borders while attending to the limits of conceptual mobility: autonomy does not mean the same thing everywhere, and multiplicity is constituted through historically specific relations of domination and struggle. Transnationalism thus appears not simply as movement across national space, but as a method for tracing how political vocabularies, forms of association, and practices of refusal are produced through connection, disjuncture, and uneven historical encounter.