Please join us for a workshop at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory with Joshua Chambers-Letson. We will consider and talk about material in his book After the Party. This workshop will feature an introduction by Fiona Ngô, faculty in Asian American Studies and Gender and Women Studies.
Presenting and thinking with material from the book After the Party, this workshop explores the life-sustaining and worldmaking powers of minoritarian performance. Presenting a section of a book written in the folds of queer of color life and death, Chambers-Letson invites participants to think with and about performance’s capacity to produce a communism of incommensurability that is geared towards the sustenance of black, brown, queer, and trans life. Grounding the conversation in the book’s provocation to manifest a minoritarian horizon of being with, the workshop considers the potentialities that cohere in the performance of a queer of color commons which aids the work of keeping our dead alive and with us as we struggle to survive a relentlessly precarious present.
Joshua Chambers-Letson is a writer and performance theorist working at the intersection of performance studies, critical race theory, political theory, and queer of color critique. An associate professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University he is the author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (NYU Press, 2018) and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America (NYU Press, 2013). Academic writing has appeared in edited volumes and journals including Social Text, Political Theory, Criticism, MELUS, TDR, and women & performance. Art writing has appeared in catalogues for Teching Hsieh’s exhibition at the 2017 Venice Bienale and the Chrysler Museum/Grey Art Gallery’s Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera, as well as Dirty Looks, The Brooklyn Rail, ASAP/J, and the Walker Reader. With Ann Pellegrini and Tavia Nyong’o he is a series co-editor of the Sexual Cultures series at NYU Press.
Presented by Krannert Art Museum, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and the Department of Latina/Latino Studies.
This workshop is related to the KAM premiere presentation of Erica Gressman: Limbs on September 13.
Space is limited, lunch will be provided.
RSVP to alpowell@illinois.edu by Sept 7 and to receive a digital copy of the book workshop reading.
