In this final episode of the first season of the minor constellations podcast, we talk to Professor Elahe Haschemi Yekani about her joint transdisciplinary project Revisualising Intersectionality, a collaboration with Magdalena Nowicka and Tiara Roxanne, which was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, and the book of which is March 2022 with Palgrave Macmillan. The conversation centres on her chapter titled “The Ends of Visibility” in which she interrogates the limits of identity categories in intersectional frameworks by specifically focusing on visuality. In doing so, she draws on discussions from postcolonial and decolonial theory to offer a critique of representation and intersectionality via readings from visual culture that offer, as she puts it, modes of “seeing and being” differently
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In conversation with:
Elahe Haschemi Yekani (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Elahe Haschemi Yekani is a Professor of English and American Literature and Culture with a focus on Postcolonial Studies at the Department of English and American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. A cultural studies scholar, she has worked on topics like the Anglophone novel, Black Atlantic and Diasporic Writing, Gender/Masculinity Studies and Queer Theory, and Popular and Visual Culture. She is the author of Familial Feeling and The Privilege of Crisis. Her current book project is Revisualising Intersectionality, written with Magdalena Nowicka and Tiara Roxanne, published March 2022 with Palgrave Macmillan.
You can find more information and a full list of publications at Prof Haschemi’s webpage here.
References
- Haschemi Yekani, Elahe and Magdalena Nowicka with Tiara Roxanne. Revisualising Intersectionality. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. You can find a link to the book here.
- Adusei-Poku, Nana. Enter and Exit the New Negro – Von unsichtbaren Sichtbarkeiten. Feministische Studien 30 (2): 212-227, 2012. DOI:10.1515/fs-2012-0206
- Adusei-Poku, Nana. Taking Stakes in the Unknown. Tracing Post-Black Art. Bielefeld: transcript, 2021
- Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989 , Article 8. 1989.1 (1989): 139-167.
- —. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241-1299.
- Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1-14.
- —. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W.W. Norton, 2019.
- Haschemi Yekani, Elahe. Familial Feeling: Entangled Tonalities in Early Black Atlantic Writing and the Rise of the British Novel. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-58641-6
- Muñoz, José Esteban. The Sense of Brown. Ethnicity, Affect and Performance. Eds. Tavia Nyong’o and Joshua Chambers-Letson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
- Nash, Jennifer C. Black Feminism Reimagined after Intersectionality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
- Gossett, Reina [Tourmaline], Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, eds. Trap Door. Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017.
- Bradford, Mark. “Enter and exit the new negro” https://studiomuseum.org/node/60831