a Decolonizing Vision Series talk with Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson
October 29, Monday, 6:30 to 8 pm
CSGS, 285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor
Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Performance Studies, Northwestern University
Presenting material from the new book After the Party: A Manifesto of Queer of Color Life, Chambers-Letson presents a eulogy and a manifesto that stakes out the life-sustaining and worldmaking powers of minoritarian performance. Written in the folds between queer of color life and death, the author brings the work of José Muñoz and Karl Marx to bear on a set of performances by Nao Bustamante and Siouxsie and the Banshees. The talk describes performance’s capacity produce a communism of incommensurability geared towards the sustenance of black, brown, queer, and trans life—a queer of color commons that aids the work of keeping our dead alive and with us as we struggle to survive a relentlessly precarious present.
Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; and Department of Performance Studies.
Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson is associate professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University who researches and teaches courses in performance studies, critical race theory, political theory, and queer of color critique. 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). His 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.
This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible. For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgsnyu@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.
Facebook event page here.