Graduate Colloquium: Sarah Jane Cervenak

Friday, September 15

4:00PM – 5:30PM

Lyman 211

Abstract:

What is at stake in the protest form of the die-in in the Movement for Black Lives? How might it suggest another iteration of the political, and, more nearly of political assembly, that moves at the limits of aesthetic and performative inquiry? In this talk, I consider the die-ins of Erica Garner in relation to larger questions around their performativity, Black feminist reimaginings of vitality and creativity, and the notion of gathering as ecological innovation. Broadly, my talk pressures logics attempting to speak to the scope and nature of Black (political and protest) gathering/s themselves. With respect to the die-ins conducted by Erica Garner following the police killing of her father, Eric, I wonder whether political performativity can or should account for the gathering that commences somewhere in the entanglements of flesh and night air, in vestibules of wishing and waiting, and as forms of togetherness that fugitively amble as unknowable themselves.

Bio:

Sarah Jane Cervenak is an associate professor, jointly appointed in the Women’s and Gender Studies and African American and African Diaspora Studies programs at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her areas of research and teaching are feminist theory, Black studies, performance studies, visual culture and philosophy. Her current book project, tentatively titled Black Gathering: Arts of Ungiven Life queries the Black radical, feminist potential of gathering in post-1970s Black literary and visual arts. In addition to her single and co-authored articles, with J. Kameron Carter, that have appeared in journals such as Feminist Studies, Women and Performance and New Centennial Review, she is the author of Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Duke University Press, September 2014).