What do we mean when we talk about ‘the elite’?

The ‘Elite’ as Delicate Beast

The word ‘elite’ is used often, especially in debates about justice, democracy, and global inequality, by people with very different political and ethical views, from Christian Democrats to Marxists. But who are we talking about, exactly? How do we account for the huge differences between, for example, the intellectual elite, the colonial elite, the nouveau riche and the postcolonial elite? And what happens when we pretend that all of these people belong to one single group called ‘the elite’? A conversation with novelist Roger Célestin, and many other critical thinkers.

The starting point of this event is Roger Célestin’s recent novel The Delicate Beast (2025, Bellevue Literary Press, recently listed among PopMatters’ Best Books of the Year). Célestin will join us to discuss the complex ties between cosmopolitan life, intellectual work, workingclass politics, postcolonial struggles, and new forms of colonial power.

This event connects to key questions in postcolonial studies, especially the long-standing concern with who gets to speak for whom, and how. We reflect on today’s wave of decolonial work and on the role of intellectuals, historians, artists, and critics in these debates. After an opening reading by Célestin, each speaker will make a 5-minute contribution, followed by a discussion.

This event is organized within the Research Priority Area Decolonial Futures. Together with ASCA and NICA, we contribute to Decolonial Futures’ ongoing roundtables and publications that revisit the social histories and critical theories shaping current discussions about voice, authority, and representation.

Speakers

Dr. Roger Celestin is professor emeritus of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut; he has also taught at Barnard College, Columbia University and MIT. He is the author of several scholarly books, including From Cannibals to Radicals: Figures and Limits of Exoticism and Universalism in Crisis: France from 1851 to the Present. The Delicate Beast is his first novel. He is founder and editor in chief of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies/SITES.

Dr. Alana Osbourne is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies at Radboud University. An anthropologist and filmmaker, her work engages sensorial anthropology, postcolonial studies, and Black geographies. She examines the material and affective legacies of coloniality, focusing on urban inequalities, race, memory, and the entanglements of museums, inorganic matter, and outer-space travel. Her ethnographic research includes Kingston, Jamaica and Brussels, Belgium. Osbourne also combines academic inquiry with film and theatre projects.

Dr. Niall Martin teaches in the department of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. His PhD research on the political and aesthetic function of noise was published as Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London (Bloomsbury, 2015). More recently he co-edited with Ilios Willemars The Replaceability Paradigm: From Dante to Deep Dream (DeGruyter, 2025) whose essays consider the ways that ideas of replaceability operate within a range of contemporary discourse, including organizing concerns about technology and race.

Rita Ouédraogo is an Amsterdam-based curator, art and culture consultant, researcher, and writer who has built a practice at the intersection of arts and research. Drawing on Black feminist pedagogies and memory work, she interrogates colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean, while challenging institutional power. Her work amplifies narratives of marginalized publics through archives, critical pedagogies, and collaborative methodologies that operate both within exhibition spaces and beyond them. She is co-founder curator of Buro Stedelijk, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s project space showcasing the city’s dynamic contemporary art scene. As chair of the Mondriaan Fund of the Netherlands and board member of Kanaal40, an online and offline (micro)pop platform, she shapes cultural policy and alternative networks.

Dr. Sanjukta Sunderason works at the interfaces of twentieth-century aesthetics, socialist thought, and histories of Afro-Asian decolonization. She is the author of Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2020) and co-editor (with Lotte Hoek, University of Edinburgh) of Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks, and Connected Histories (Bloomsbury, 2021). She teaches art history at the University of Amsterdam, and co-cordinates the university’s Research Priority Area, Decolonial Futures.

Dr. Carine Zaayman is Researcher and Research Coordinatorat the Research Center for Material Culture at the Wereldmuseum (Netherlands). She is the author of Seeing What Is Not There: Figuring the Anarchive (2026). As an artist, curator and scholar, she is committed to critical engagement with colonial archives and collections, specifically those holding strands of Khoekhoe pasts. Her work focuses on the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, particularly in the Cape, by bringing intangible and neglected histories into view. Her research aims to contribute to a radical reconsideration of colonial archives and museum collections, especially by assisting in finding ways to release their hold over our imaginations when we narrate the past, as well as how we might shape futures from it.

Dr. Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken (moderator) is University Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam’s Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) in Literary and Cultural Analysis and also maintains an affiliation with the City College of New York’s Center for Worker Education. She has engaged a double career, working in the cultural sector (French Embassy, Québec Government House, het Wereldmuseum) and academia. Most recently she has co-written: an article on filmmaker Maïwenn, and an article on Tracy Chapman. She serves as co-book review editor of the Journal of Haitian Studies, and serves on the jury of the Albertine Translation Fund