9) Hemispheric Blackness: Afro-Diasporic Politics and Performance Across the Americas
Conveners
E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Northwestern University
Description/Rationale of Issues to be Addressed
This work group seeks to convene artists, activists, and scholars focused on the performance of black politics across the Americas. We are especially interested in artistic and activist projects that engage with the circulation of black aesthetics and politics across national borders while engaging local contexts and issues. Central to our query is pursuing ways in which a hemispheric Americas framework might relate to other Afro-diasporic geographic and cultural imaginaries such as (pan-Africanism, negritude, creolité, Garveyism). The work group will adopt a workshop approach to both artistic and scholarly materials through creative archive sharing and performance mapping exercises. Artists, activists, and scholars engaging state/police violence, gender and sexuality, labor, and environment are especially encouraged to apply.
Description/Rationale of Format
- Day 1 – The Geography of Black Politics
- Workshop session: preliminary maps.
- Day 2 – Hemispheric Maps and Black Imaginaries
- Seminar format: “hemispheric” and the geographies of black politics.
- Day 3 – Embodying Maps, Storying Blackness
- Workshop session: Embodied/performative articulations of “hemispheric” thinking relative to the particularities of black performance.
- Day 4 –Archives
- Archive sharing: Each participant will be given an opportunity to present a 5-minute piece of media documentation, narrative account, or live performance of their practice focused on how it engages, challenges, or expands the assumed geographies of black politics and hemispheric frameworks of analysis.
- Day 5 – Conclusions and Performative Responses
Materials Needed for Application
Brief statement of interest in the theme and introduction of artistic, scholarly, or activist work (no longer than 500 words); sample of work (link to web-based documentation or pdf file of visual/printed materials); and cv or resume.
Languages Spoken/ Understood by Conveners
English, Spanish, Spanglish
Convener Biographies
E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies and Director of Graduate Studies in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. He is author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003), which received the Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theatre Studies from the American Society for Theatre Research, and Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South--An Oral History (2008), which was selected as a Stonewall Book Award Honor Book, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Round Table of the American Library Association. He is co-editor of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (2005), solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays (2014), and Blacktino Queer Performance (forthcoming 2016). He is currently working on an edited volume, No Tea No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies, and an oral history, Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women. He has toured nationally and internationally as a performance artist and received the 2014 Rene Castillo Otto Award for Political Theatre.
Ramón H. Rivera-Servera is Associate Professor and Chair of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. He is author of Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance , Sexuality, Politics (2012) which won awards from the Latin American Studies Association, Lambda Literary Foundation, Congress on Research in Dance, Society of Dance History Scholars, and the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists. He is co-editor of Performance in the Borderlands (2010), solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays (2014), The Goodman’s Latino Theatre Festival (2014), and Blacktino Queer Performance (forthcoming 2016). He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Exhibiting Performance: Race, Museum Cultures, and the Live Event.