2019

Lines of Flight: Grace Jones, LSD, and Black Radical Praxis

Uri McMillan

Lines of Flight: Grace Jones, LSD, and Black Radical Praxis Associate Professor Uri McMillan (UCLA) Tuesday, November 26th, 2019 5 pm Lecture | 300 Wheeler Hall UC Berkeley 12 pm | Workshop for graduate students at 650 Barrows Hall UC Berkeley RSVP to cssc@berkeley.edu to attend workshop This paper centers on artist-performer Grace Jones. Specifically, it explores her acid use in the late 1960s, as an alternative form of consciousness, knowledge-production, and a sublime act of becoming. Combining performance studies, black diaspora studies, and feminist theory, this paper asks that we consider this moment as emblematic of defiant, albeit quiet, forms of refusal that put pressure on what ultimately counts as black radical praxis as well as aesthetic inspiration.

Co-sponsored by the departments of Gender and Women’s Studies, English, Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, and African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies.

Sparking Joy, Serving Mess: Performing the Drag of Asian/American History

Vivian Huang

11/22 12 pm lecture @ Dwinelle 370

4 pm workshop with graduate students @ Barrows 650

RSVP to cssc@berkeley.edu to attend workshop

How is U.S. national identity shored up by Japanese/American heterogender performatives of affective cheer? This talk brings together two sites of performance: tidying expert and bestselling author Marie Kondo’s feminized cuteness in the Netflix original show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (2019) and the short film of Bay Area-based artist-scholar Tina Takemoto, Looking for Jiro (2011), in which the artist and scholar performs homo-erotic mess hall labor as gay World War II internee Jiro Onuma. Huang considers the role of Japanese/American gender performance in managing the affective economies of the United States in times of war and the intervention that “queer mess” offers. How does the figure of the Japanese person function as an economic laborer whose affective work is to walk the line of cold foreign threat and warm queer neoliberalism, and how do ongoing practices of wartime incarceration emerge in popular consciousness?Dr. Vivian Huang is assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Williams College. Her work studies the strategic redeployments of inscrutability in contemporary Asian American performance across media.

Co-sponsored by the Departments of English, Ethnic Studies, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies.

504 and Beyond: Disability Politics and the Black Panther Party

Sami Schalk

In solidarity with the AFSCME strike that day, this event has been relocated to Mudrakers Cafe and the time changed to 4:30 pm to give everyone time to arrive from campus.

4:30 pm Lecture with Dr. Sami Schalk, Mudrakers Cafe

How did the Black Panther Party engage with disability politics in their activism and revolutionary agenda? Sami Schalk will explore their involvement in the 1977 504 sit-in and use their work to make larger arguments about how black activists articulate and enact disability politics differently than the mainstream, white disability rights movement.

Sami Schalk is an assistant professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture. Schalk’s first book, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, & Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Duke UP 2018), explores how black women writers use non-realist genres to reimagine the possibilities and limits of bodyminds, challenging our understanding of the meanings of disability, race, and gender. Schalk’s next project focuses on disability politics in black activism in the post-Civil Rights era. She identifies as a fat, black, queer, femme, non-disabled cis-gendered woman. She can be found on Twitter as @drsamischalk and on her website, samischalk.com.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, the Department of English, and the Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies.

Snacks will be provided.

Note that in solidarity with the AFSCME strike 11/13, this event has been moved off-campus. For details or questions contact cssc@berkeley.edu or view event details at cssc.berkeley.edu.

*Access notes: Mudrakers Cafe is wheelchair accessible; however, the bathroom is downstairs and therefore not accessible.

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