Stephanos Stephanides | Cosmopoetics and the Untimely Space of the Mediterranean |
Channel: Astronomy Winter School
Date: 2020-06-26

Stephanos Stephanides would like to reclaim the radical potential of cosmopolitanism as first taught by Mediterranean antiquity, pitting the boundless ‘cosmos’ against the boundaries of the ‘polis’. In the process of reclamation, he will explore the notion of cosmopoetics as a generative force of mediation and border-crossing, bringing the ‘very long duration’ to act on the event and the text.In the production of untimely spaces, cosmopoetics has the effect of discrepant encounters and intimate estrangement, reordering temporal and spatial visions, and ways of being in the world
within social time. Drawing on notions of time-space compression with reference to Lefevbre, Braudel, Bakhtin, Deleuze and Guattari among others, he will discuss osmotic and translational moments in a range of authors including Ovid, Ibn Arabi, Orhan Pamuk, Constantinos Cavafy, Giorgos Seferis, Derek Walcott, and Edouard Glissant.

Stephanos Stephanides is a Cypriot-born poet, essayist and memoirist, translator, ethnographer, and documentary filmmaker. He began his academic career teaching literature at the University of Guyana for six years, where he developed a deep interest in Caribbean Creole and Indian diasporic communities, and thereafter a lifelong engagement with India. He was
Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cyprus until 2017. He was a judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (2000, 2010). He is Fellow of the English Association (UK) and Cavaliere of the Republic of Italy. Representative publications include Translating Kali’s Feast: the Goddess in Indo-Caribbean Ritual and Fiction (2000), Blue Moon in Rajasthan and other poems (2005), and The Wind Under My Lips (2018).


Interview Link: https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/hyderabad/2020/apr/17/i-am-a-courtesan-of-the-2131607.html