Northwestern University, Department of Performance Studies
Graduate Student Conference 2024
The Aesthetics of Race: Affects and Embodiments in Performance
Full Conference Schedule
Friday, May 3rd
Breakfast
8:15 AM – 8:45 AM, SLIPPAGE Lab
Open to all
Welcome Speech by Nadine George-Graves (Chair of the Department of Performance Studies, and Naomi Willie Pollard Professor of Theatre and Performance)
8:45 AM – 9:00 AM, SLIPPAGE Lab
Introductions by: Joshua Chambers-Letson
Keynote | Strategic (Un)availabilities by Tina Post (Associate Professor of English and Theater and Performance Studies, University of Chicago)
9:00 AM – 10:15 AM, SLIPPAGE Lab
Faculty Moderator: Thomas F. DeFrantz
Introductions by: Michael Landez
Panel | Differential Intimacies
10:30 AM – 12.00 PM, SLIPPAGE Lab
Faculty Respondent: Nitasha Sharma
Graduate Student Moderator: Olabanke Oyinkansola Goriola
Panelists:
Ryan Nhu (Northwestern University)
The Manic Mundane: Desiring after Loving
Alice Zhao (Brown University)
Werking Excess, Raving Underground: The Transmutations of the Los Angeles Brown Undercommons
Viola Bao (Northwestern University)
Communities of Parting: Korean Adoptee Narratives of Return and Family Abolition
Panel | Enigmatic Affects: The Surreal, the Absurd, and the Untranslatable
12.00PM – 1.30PM, SLIPPAGE Lab
Faculty Respondent: Miriam Petty
Graduate Student Moderator: Johanna Middleton
Panelists:
Lauren D. Johnson (Northwestern University)
American Fiction and Its Reception: Conflicting and Expansive Aesthetics of an Incomprehensible Black Humor
Sinclair Spratley (Columbia University)
“After a Dream Like That…”: The Surreal Racial Space of Ulysses Jenkins’s Two Zone Transfer (1979)
Basil Dababneh (University of Chicago)
Performing Silliness: Blackness, Hypervisibility, and the Unbearable in The Eric André Show
Break
1:30 PM – 2.30 PM
Lunch*
1:30 PM – 2.30 PM, Krause Studio
*For conference participants, including keynotes, panelists, faculty respondents, and student moderators
Keynote | Black Women in Pictures: The Image, its Necropolitical Imagination, Seeing and Selfhood by Kandis Williams (Multidisciplinary Artist and Founder of Cassandra Press)
2:30 PM – 3:45 PM, SLIPPAGE Lab
Graduate Student Moderator: Clara Lee
Panel | At the Threshold of Visibility: The Aesthetics of Fugitivity, Unruliness and Concealment
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM, SLIPPAGE Lab
Faculty Respondent: Joshua Chambers-Letson
Graduate Student Moderator: Daisy Donají Matias
Panelists:
Toni Kunst (Northwestern University)
Fugitive Possibilities: (Non)performance in Black Art
K Yin (Brown University)
Object/Abject Yellow Flesh: Dominique Fung and Afong Moy in Relation
Wenke Coco Huang (University of Chicago)
The Kinesthesia of Secrecy in Hisako’s House: Dance to Reveal/Conceal the Japanese American Incarceration
Saturday, May 4th
Breakfast*
9:30 AM – 10:00 AM, Krause Studio
*For workshop participants
Workshop* | As one: A Movement and Self Care Workshop by Brendan Fernandes (Assistant Professor of ART, THEORY, PRACTICE)
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM, Krause Studio
Graduate Student Facilitator: Olabanke Oyinkansola Goriola
Opening Remarks by Thomas F. DeFrantz (Professor of Theatre and Performance, and Artistic Director of SLIPPAGE)
11:30 AM – 11:45 AM , SLIPPAGE Lab
Panel | Black (Trans) Feminist Aesthetics
11:45 AM – 1:15 PM , SLIPPAGE Lab
Faculty Respondent: Marquis Bey
Graduate Student Moderator: Archita Arun
Panelists:
Kahlil Oatis (Northwestern University)
A Sight Unseen: The Aesthetics of Albinism & Vitiligo in Modeling
Mustafa Siddiqui (Northwestern University)
“I Saw Things I Imagined”: Rememory as Black Trans Feminist Technology in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, and Solange’s When I Get Home
Kayla Boyden (Northwestern University)
Wild Femininity: Representations of the Black femme in Toni Morrison’s Jazz
Break
1:15 PM – 2:15 PM
Lunch*
1:15 PM – 2:15 PM, Krause Studio
*For conference participants, including keynotes, panelists, faculty respondents, and student moderators
Book Talk | Queens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti’s Music Rebellion (2024) by Dotun Ayobade (Assistant Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies)
2:15 PM – 3:15 PM , SLIPPAGE Lab
Graduate Student Moderator: Maulikraj Shrimali
Panel | Racial Matter(ing) and Materialisms
3:15 PM – 4.30 PM , SLIPPAGE Lab
Faculty Respondent: Michelle Huang
Graduate Student Moderator: Clara Lee
Panelists:
Jen Chen-su Huang (New York University)
Cross/Twist/Loop: The Movement of Lace and Other Entanglements
Madeleine Le Cesne (Northwestern University)
[untitled]
Panel | Unbounded: Embodied Archives and Somatic Repertoires
4:30 PM – 6:00 PM , SLIPPAGE Lab
Faculty Respondent: Marcela Fuentes
Graduate Student Moderator: Camila Simonin
Panelists:
Gabriel Guzmán (Northwestern University)
Recuerdos Fronterizos: Listening and Visualizing Trans-Border Latinx Aesthetics
Orlando Ochoa, Jr. (New York University)
Border Notes on Rust and the Metabolic
Isabel Padilla Carlo (Cornell University)
“Si Tu No Sabe Kokobalé” and The Reclamation of Collective Memory as a Praxis of Liberation
Closing Remarks by the Conference Organizing Committee
6:00 PM – 6:15 PM, SLIPPAGE Lab
Conference Organizing Committee: Archita Arun, Daisy Donají Matias, Clara Lee (Chair), Olabanke Oyinkansola Goriola
