{"id":47,"date":"2023-03-30T11:52:38","date_gmt":"2023-03-30T15:52:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/?page_id=47"},"modified":"2023-06-12T12:07:35","modified_gmt":"2023-06-12T16:07:35","slug":"teju-cole","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/past-conversations\/teju-cole\/","title":{"rendered":"2021 &#8211; Teju Cole: Known and Strange Things"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/artsandideas\/files\/2023\/03\/Teju-Cole-Public-Event-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Promotional Poster for BU\u2019s Conversations in the Arts and Ideas event titled \u201cTeju Cole: Known and Strange Things.\u201d The event occurred virtually on March 23, 2021 at 6pm. The event was free and open to the public but a registration was required. The poster includes a picture of Teju Cole and an event description that reads: \u201cTeju Cole was born in the US in 1975 to Nigerian parents and was raised in Lagos. His essay collection, Known and Strange Things, was shortlisted for two awards and was named a book of the year by The Guardian, Financial Times, and Time magazine.\u201d The event was sponsored by the BU Center for the Humanities, Kilachand Honors College, Office of the Provost, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, BU Arts Initiative, and CAS Core Curriculum.\" width=\"1984\" height=\"2560\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-55 size-full\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/files\/2023\/03\/Teju-Cole-Public-Event-scaled.jpg 1984w, https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/files\/2023\/03\/Teju-Cole-Public-Event-493x636.jpg 493w, https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/files\/2023\/03\/Teju-Cole-Public-Event-794x1024.jpg 794w, https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/files\/2023\/03\/Teju-Cole-Public-Event-768x991.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/files\/2023\/03\/Teju-Cole-Public-Event-1190x1536.jpg 1190w, https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/files\/2023\/03\/Teju-Cole-Public-Event-1587x2048.jpg 1587w, https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/files\/2023\/03\/Teju-Cole-Public-Event-465x600.jpg 465w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1984px) 100vw, 1984px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Renowned novelist, essayist, cultural critic, and photographer Teju Cole was the featured guest of the 2020\/2021 Conversations in the Arts &amp; Ideas series, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, Kilachand Honors College, the Office of the Provost, the Arts &amp; Sciences Dean\u2019s Office, the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, the BU Arts Initiative, and the College of Arts &amp; Sciences Core Curriculum.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cKnown and Strange Things: An Evening with Teju Cole\u201d staged a wide-ranging public conversation between Cole and Crystal Williams, a poet and BU\u2019s vice president and associate provost for community &amp; inclusion.<\/p>\n<p>In a discussion centered on Cole\u2019s conception of the term \u201caccompaniment,\u201d Cole and Williams foregrounded the social contexts that shape creative production and make it possible. Being accompanied, in Cole\u2019s view, means acknowledging one\u2019s debt to others and the dependence of intellectual and creative practices on the work of predecessors. Cole advocated a capacious approach to aesthetic production, invoking a \u201cforest of voices\u201d as the source of any individually authored work.<\/p>\n<p>Cole also addressed the strategic uses of polemical language in contemporary movements against racist oppression, encouraging multiple modes of critique as necessary to dismantling systems that subjugate people on the basis of identity.<\/p>\n<p>The next morning, Cole met with students from Core and Kilachand who had studied his work and had prepared questions for him. In response to student concerns about our \u201cbroken\u201d social and political order, Cole asserted that \u201cthe world will never be fixed,\u201d but affirmed that \u201cwe have roles in repair.\u201d In discussing the subject of canonization, he suggested that categories such as \u201cgreatness\u201d tend to \u201cflatten the conversation and shut it down,\u201d instead of promoting understanding of \u201chow canons are formed.\u201d In sum, Cole challenged the BU community to think deeply about artistic production, reception, and context.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Renowned novelist, essayist, cultural critic, and photographer Teju Cole was the featured guest of the 2020\/2021 Conversations in the Arts &amp; Ideas series, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, Kilachand Honors College, the Office of the Provost, the Arts &amp; Sciences Dean\u2019s Office, the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, the BU Arts Initiative, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17544,"featured_media":0,"parent":15,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/landing.php","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/47"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17544"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":174,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/47\/revisions\/174"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/15"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artsandideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}