“So how does the South Asian community participate in Reparations?” Theater maker, producer, and organizer Meropi Peponides takes on the subject of reparations, often discussed in black and white terms, from a South Asian positionality, recounting personal and collective histories along the way, from her own start working with the Watts Village Theatre Company to the racialized effects of immigration politicies like the 1965 Hart Celler Act. She offers concrete steps towards building South Asian-Black solidarities. This piece was commissioned and co-published by the performance venue JACK, located in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, as an extension of their series Reparations365, in collaboration with Digital Humanities Fellow Jaime Shearn Coan.
Poet, writer, and performer Pamela Sneed shares thoughts on her experience visiting Daisy Atterbury's writing class at Queens College as part of AiR Project: Artists in Residence, Artists in Resistance. In this post, she touches on Annie Lennox and Grace Jones, her own recent memoir Sweet Dreams, identifying with characters in popular films, and finding self-esteem as a Black lesbian.
In this post, artist Jimena Lucero discusses the legacies of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, the ongoing urgency of trans POC liberation, and the process of portraying Rivera in a staged reading of Casey Llewellyn's play O, Earth!
In this third report-back on the VHS Archives Working Group, Rhea Tepp, a Queens College graduate student in Media Studies, zinemaker/organizer, and performer, narrates her entry into the VHS Archives Working Group as a person in precarious relationship to both academia and institutional archives. By turns narrating family history, synthesizing presentations made by Helena Shaskevich and Kat Roberts, and commenting on the format of the working group, Repp ultimately considers the value in coming together to exchange personal archives.
Gillian Sneed reflects on the event "Inside the Box: A Conversation on Research in Exhibition-Making Institutions," in which Penelope Curtis, Director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, and Keith Wilson, Director of the Center for the Humanities, took part in conversation on Curtis's approach to curating at various institutions including the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Tate Britain, and the Henry Moore Institute.
E. Ethelbert Miller shares his thoughts on June Jordan's 1981 essay "For the Sake of People’s Poetry Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us"--reflecting on literary families, what it is to be a "New World poet," and how to turn the face of history. This talk was delivered at the panel "For the Sake of People’s Poetry: A Discussion of Jordan’s Essay about Inclusivity and Accessibility" as part of the conference A Tribute to June Jordan.
Grisel Y. Acosta gives an account of the process of working together with a group of CUNY faculty to write and stage short plays about their experiences as caregivers as part of a collaboration between Working Theater's TheaterWorks! program and The Labor of Care Archive Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.
This two-part piece was commissioned and co-published by the performance venue JACK, located in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, as an extension of their series Reparations365, in collaboration with Digital Humanities Fellow Jaime Shearn Coan, who served as the editor. Benedict Nguyen introduces their piece as follows: I try to write about a lot of things: gentrification and space, the power and capacity to choose where to be (in dance and in the world), reparations and who’s owed what, and how to reorganize institutions and non-profit boards, workers cooperatives, and more. In Part I, I start by throwing myself under the bus to connect the evolving gentrification in the South Bronx and dialogues on equity and changing institutions in dance. In Part II, I try to imagine some specific-ish solutions to these questions to reconsider institutional structures more democratically. There are specific examples and ideas and some pop culture references and more. Thanks for reading this super-maximalist thought experiment.
On May 10, the Doctoral Theatre Students’ Association presents its 2018 conference, Objects of Study: Methods and Materiality in Theatre and Performance Studies, bringing together working groups of visiting scholars, graduate students, and independent artist-scholars to explore the multiple potential meanings of “object” within theatre and performance studies. In this second part of a two-part blog post, two of the conference organizersSarah Lucie, and Amir Farjoun, both students in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Performance—reflect on some of the questions about materiality and knowledge that arise in their field, and the particular challenges theatre and performance studies might offer to object-oriented thought. Click here to read Part 1 reflections and thoughts by conference organizer Eylül FidanAkıncı.
On May 10, the Doctoral Theatre Students’ Association presents its 2018 conference, Objects of Study: Methods and Materiality in Theatre and Performance Studies, bringing together working groups of visiting scholars, graduate students, and independent artist-scholars to explore the multiple potential meanings of “object” within theatre and performance studies. In this two-part blog post, three of the conference organizers—Eylül FidanAkıncı, Sarah Lucie, and Amir Farjoun, all students in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Performance—reflect on some of the questions about materiality and knowledge that arise in their field, and the particular challenges theatre and performance studies might offer to object-oriented thought.
This two-part piece was commissioned and co-published by the performance venue JACK, located in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, as an extension of their Reparations365 project, in collaboration with Digital Humanities Fellow Jaime Shearn Coan, who served as the editor. Benedict Nguyen introduces their piece as follows: I try to write about a lot of things: gentrification and space, the power and capacity to choose where to be (in dance and in the world), reparations and who’s owed what, and how to reorganize institutions and non-profit boards, workers cooperatives, and more. In Part I, I start by throwing myself under the bus to connect the evolving gentrification in the South Bronx and dialogues on equity and changing institutions in dance. In Part II, I try to imagine some specific-ish solutions to these questions to reconsider institutional structures more democratically. There are specific examples and ideas and some pop culture references and more. Thanks for reading this super-maximalist thought experiment.
In this reflection on a recent meeting of the VHS Archives Working Group, Juan Fernández discusses archives and memory and “intellectual feelings," which he describes as "a need to better understand past lived experiences and a desire to gain a deeper understanding of a missing/moving image." Identifying absences in the documentation of queer Latina/o/x social spaces in Los Angeles, including backyard T-parties and nightclubs that have since shut down, he is working to develop alternate routes of gathering minoritarian social histories that are capacious enough to include personal desire, memory and nostalgia.
Lost & Found Managing Editor Stephon Lawrence and poet Layla Benitez-James discuss Benitez-James' new chapbook “God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode But He Had to Make Sure” as well as her thoughts around the compulsion to collect, turning over ideas of desire, and the entangled holiness between a portrait of Jimi Hendrix and the Virgen de Guadalupe.
In memoriam of the extraordinary artist James Luna, we are sharing his keynote performative lecture at the "Scales of Visibility in Global Indigenous Art" conference from October 2016.
A selection of readings from the new issue of WSQ in preparation for "Slam Precarious Work" on the current state of precarious labor, imperatives to love your job, the social and racial hierarchies of domestic labor, and how women workers organizing in NYC's Chinatown have connected the conditions of their paid work with their unpaid care work.
Danielle Rouse discusses the event [email protected], which consisted of a series of performances, readings, and discussion that considered how standardized uses of English have been used to oppress while those oppressed have creatively transformed the language.
Archivist Rachel Mattson raises questions about how digitization and online distribution change the stakes of preserving videotape archives of queer histories. Exploring two distinct instances, raised among the VHS Archives working group, Mattson considers the nuances of how context, medium, and identity transform the ethics of using this archival material.
Digital Publics Fellow Kasey Zapatka outlines his project "Housing Literacy" and provides an overview of NYC rent regulation and tenants' rights, along with the history and current context of rent regulation in New York City.
Digital Publics Fellow Diane Yoong describes the process of beginning their project searching for and recovering the histories of queer Asian (American)s, who have generally been excluded from histories and normative representations of queer people. They also discuss a number of other archival initiatives and interventions taking place in and around the Center for the Humanities.
Cory Tamler discusses her experience reading an archival copy of Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto, annotated by Solanas herself. In this post, Tamler reads how the act of annotation might be a textual performance of becoming for Solanas—who negotiates the text’s unique publishing history and its consequences for her legacy in both the literal and figurative margins.
Iris Cushing reflects on her experience as part of the Collaborative Research Seminar on Archives and Special Collections, reading The Floating Bear, a bi-monthly, mimeographed newsletter started in 1961 by Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones. Cushing attends to the material, social, and conceptual conditions under which the newsletter circulated—its "field" and "range—considering the Bear's network of influences, the labor required to produce it, and the artistic freedom afforded by it.
GC PhD student Maya Harakawa reflects on her fellowship co-running the online magazine Triple Canopy's Publication Intensive, a two-week summer program devoted to considering forms of publication that bring together networked forms of production and circulation with the rich legacies of print culture and artistic practices rooted in print.
