[URBANTH-L]Graduate Summer Workshop: Performing African Diasporas

[Angela Jancius]

Performing African Diasporas
International Graduate Summer Seminar

This third year of the seminar will focus on black performativity and
cultural production from the perspective of aesthetics, poetics, and
representation in four weekly modules. The relationship between cultural
production, performance, and representation, on the one hand, and the
production of black subjectivity and cognitively inscribed popular
conceptions of blackness on the other, will be examined. Popular culture and
the deployment of literary, visual, auditory, and other forms of sensory
technologies will be explored and interrogated, historicized and framed
within the practices of conjunctural and comparative analysis. These
deployments will be examined in the production and contestation of blackness
and black subjectivity; in the reinforcement and contestation of black
inferiority; in the production and contestation of racialized discourses of
difference; in the production of ideologies of racialized inferiority,
superiority, and equality; and in politics of rebellion, opposition,
reversal, transformation and reinforcement. Ambiguity, contradiction,
conflict, and opposition will be issues that form part of the examination of
African diasporic performativities and cultural production.

Program:
We expect the admitted seminar participants to arrive in Miami on Wednesday,
July 5th, 2006. Two introductory sessions, during which theorizing about
Diaspora will be discussed, will take place on Thursday, July 6th and
Friday, July 7th. The conference that will mark the end of the seminar will
take place on Monday, August 7th, 2006. This will give more time to the
enrolled seminar participants to prepare a "final" draft of their paper,
which will be presented during the conference.

Module One (July 10-14), Performance as Method
E. Patrick Johnson, Northwestern University

Module Two (July 17-21), Festivities and Celebrations: Aesthetics, Poetics
and Politics
Carolyn Cooper, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

Module Three (July 24-28), Visualizing Blackness: Corporeality,
Collectivity, and Subjectivity
Achille Mbembe, Wits Institute for Social & Economic Research, Johannesburg,
South Africa

Module Four (July 31 - August 4), Popular Culture: The Marketing of
Blackness
May Joseph, Pratt Institute


Jean Muteba Rahier
Coordinating Faculty
Interrogating the African Diaspora
Florida International University
3000 N.E. 151st Street
North Miami, FL 33181

Ph. (305) 919-5457
Fax (305) 919-5896

Email: interad at fiu.edu
Visit the website at http://www.fiu.edu/interad