Sunday, 27 May 2018
4 – 5 pm, Plenarsaal
LECTURE
Some Notes on Joy and Pain: Black Performance in/out of the Diaspora
Melissa Blanco Borelli (Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre & Dance University of London, UK)
This talk situates decolonial Latin American theories alongside American black feminist thought to think about the poetics and problems in discourses of pleasure, joy, and the after-lives of slavery. Using dance and performances that center the body as the site of meaning, affect, and feeling, Melissa Blanco Borelli does not propose to be either optimistic or pessimistic about blackness as a site for pleasure. Instead, she wants to interrogate how the poetics of blackness opens up spaces that may (or may not) produce comfort, collectivities, and affinities across space and time. By doing so, Borelli seeks to complicate the neoliberal narratives of #blackjoy which often elide the fraught histories of diasporic blackness.