Former Fellow Mark Anthony Cayanan will give a talk on:
Notes on Irrelevance
The Queer Lyric and Questions of Community
According to The Cultural Center of the Philippines Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, a persistent problem of the Filipino writer is “how to gain the acceptance and acclaim of the bigger audience (and jury) of readers among the people, who are after all the ultimate arbiters of the success or failure of the literary product.” Rather than overcoming this seeming complication, this talk relies on the peripheral status of queerness and of poetry in cultural discourse to think through and toward a poetics of irrelevance, one that reorients schemas of knowledge tethered to, among others, the slippages between auditor and audience in lyric poetry, the translocation of contexts in exophonic literature, and the boundaries of privacy and sociality in queer life. Cayanan will read samples of their creative projects and consider how they may enact (or fall short of enacting) a writing practice mindful of the potentialities of the occluded and, consequently, of occlusion.
11 June 2025
18:00
In English
Asian and African Studies of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Invalidenstraße 118, Room 1171
10115 Berlin
