Please join us for
Joshua Chambers-Letson
Northwestern University
HOW IT WOULD FEEL TO BE FREE: TOWARDS A THEORY OF MINORITARIAN PERFORMANCE
Classics 110
Monday, May 1, 4:30-6pm
Abstract:
Performance studies has long accounted for more than just what performance is, and can be; it theorizes the question of what performance does. Mobilizing the thought of Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman alongside Karl Marx and Jean-Luc Nancy, this talk positions minoritarian performance theory as that which is major about performance studies, exploring the way people of color employ performance in the realm of both the aesthetic and the everyday in the fugitive flight towards freedom and the ongoing fight to sustain black and brown, queer and trans life. Organized around Billie Taylor’s and Nina Simone’s staging of the song, “I Wish I Knew How It Feels to be Free,” it thinks through the relationship between black performance theory and what we might describe as a theory of minoritarian performance, asking less what minoritarian performance is and instead what it makes possible in the world, if not how it makes new worlds possible.
Bio:
Joshua Chambers-Letson is assistant professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University where he also holds an appointment in the Program in Asian American Studies and Theatre. He is the author of A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America (NYU Press, 2013), winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), and is completing a book titled After the Party: Performance and Queer of Color Life (forthcoming NYU Press, 2018). He has published essays in journals that include Social Text, Political Theory, Criticism, Cultural Studies, MELUS, Journal of Asian American Studies, Women & Performance, and TDR. Along with Ann Pellegrini and Tavia Nyong’o he is a series co-editor of the Sexual Cultures series at NYU Press.
Light refreshments will be served.
Persons needing accommodations to participate fully should contact the coordinator at sharvarisastry@uchicago.edu