Producing the Body: The Body as Performance of Power, Violence, and Possibility

What is the relationship between bodies, violence, and liberation? When Black and brown bodies have historically been sites of colonial and gendered violence, what does it mean to center the body as a site of knowledge production? This course draws upon the emergent performance and aesthetic practices as disruptions of colonial violence; and their relationship to racialized, gendered, and sexual power dynamics. This course will deeply consider what it means to be (in)human, erotic reconfigurations of being, and fugitive practice. We will draw from frameworks in performance studies, Black feminism, women of color feminism, and queer theory to understand the body as a living archive of memory, violence, and liberation. Such attention to performance and aesthetic practices entail not only histories of conquest and genocide, but the creative and life-bearing practices that transcend these conditions of captivity and loss.