UC EVENTS

Speaker: Irfan Master

Date\Time: Thursday 20 August 2026, 12:30-13:30

Location: Building 1 Level A Room 1A21, University of Canberra (NB Room 1a21 is accessed from the foyer joining Building 1 and Mizzuna café); 

or Zoom: http://zoom.us/j/95029077504

Abstract

We reach for the word "archipelago" a lot these days, usually to mean something warm and vague: many things, loosely connected, getting along. This talk goes back to the Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant, who meant something sharper by it. For Glissant, thinking like an archipelago is a way of refusing the god's-eye view that lets one culture map, flatten and conquer another. It insists that we can be changed by each other without ever fully knowing each other, and that the sea between islands is not empty but full of memory. Beginning with a single word and ending with an unfinished sentence, the talk follows Glissant's idea across islands and oceans, and asks what it lets a writer actually make.

All are welcome!

Bio

Irfan Master is a writer and academic completing a practice-led PhD at the University of Canberra. He is the author of two novels published by Bloomsbury, A Beautiful Lie and Out of Heart, with short fiction, poetry in Comma Press, OFFAL and elsewhere. His current project, The Book of Nights, reimagines the frame of the Thousand and One Nights as a story about colonialism, memory and who gets to survive into the record. He writes about what endures, how it endures, and what it costs the person carrying it

The Culture and Creativity Seminar Series is hosted by the Centre for Cultural and Creative Research (CCCR), Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra. To discover upcoming seminars, please follow us on Facebook @uccccr, or Instagram and Twitter @uc_cccr. Alternatively, join our mailing list by emailing cccr@canberra.edu.au.

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