Please join Tozzer Library as we present our 2024 Pride Talk with Chrystel Oloukoi on Tuesday, June 25.

Chrystel Oloukoï is an artist, film critic and curator, broadly interested in experimental cinema, queer cinema and Black continental and diasporic cinema. Their work engages imaginations of the night, as well as the afterlives of colonial technologies of temporal discipline. They have completed a PhD in African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and are headed to the University of Washington next, as an Assistant Professor.

From Chrystel: My dissertation project, Black Nocturnal: Insurgent Ecologies of the Night in Lagos examines nighttime as one of the most embattled terrains of life in Lagos from roughly the 1880s to the present. I grapple with the colonial origins and afterlives of a singular obsession with the night in mechanisms of punishment and repression in Lagos, whereby disciplining the night became intrinsic to the forms of sovereignty deployed by the state. For the purpose of this talk, I want to sit with the idea of odd bedfellows, gesturing at how mechanisms of control and discipline at night bring together, in uneasy proximity and sometimes overlap, queer revelers and a larger array of nightwalkers. As a speculative exercise, this talk foregrounds the kinds of solidarities that emerge from the repression queer revelers, and nightwalkers of very different walks of life in general, face in the city at night.