Stillness and (Social) Movement
Taking our cue from activist organizing around statues and other monuments that has been at the center of movements for social justice here in the US and around the world, we invite your reflections on what it means to move, to be moved, and to be still, and how these can become resources for feminist and antiracist reflection and organizing. As some statues are torn down and disappear before our very eyes, some quietly deteriorate unseen and unheralded, raising questions about posterity, and about the extent to which movements for justice depend on visual representation: what, then, of the resources of opacity and abstraction? Recent protests convened nightly vibrate with energy as statues are made to move differently, countering a terrible decades-long visual sovereignty. In this way removal also prompts reflection on the ways in which subaltern creativity has long been fueled by ingesting rather than excising the objectionable element. Finally, how do these public forms convene us (publicly or otherwise) as mourners, as defenders of the republic, as newly independent, as agents of reparative justice?
Statues invite reflection in multiple directions:
theorizations of stillness and quiet, but also of multiple registers of waiting: hope, resignation, the pause before starting up again;
theorizations of memory, commemoration, repudiation and amnesia (recall that many Confederate statues in the US were installed at the moment of the Civil Rights Act);
of aesthetic debates around accretions of color, pigmentation, and classical integrity
of repatriation and the ethics of museum collection.
Roundtable Participants:
Harvey Young, Dean, College of Fine Arts, Boston University
Harvey Young is Dean of the College of Fine Arts, Professor of Theatre Arts and Professor of English at Boston University. His research on the performance and experience of race has been widely published in academic journals, profiled in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education. As a commentator on popular culture, he has appeared on CNN, 20/20, and Good Morning America as well as within the pages of the New York Times, Boston Globe, Vanity Fair and People. He is the author/editor of eight books, including Embodying Black Experience.
María Regina Firmino-Castillo, Assistant Professor, Critical Dance Studies, Co-Director of Indigenous Choreographers Gathering, University of California, Riverside
María Regina Firmino-Castillo is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, writer, and educator. Born in Guatemala and raised in Miami, she works across national and colonial borders. Her research and writing critically engage dance and performance studies, anthropology, decoloniality, ontology, and “new” materialisms. Firmino-Castillo’s current book project, tentatively titled Choreographies of Catastrophe, is a multi-sited work that investigates how bodies are sites of ontological violence in the context of genocidal coloniality and its complex and transnational reverberations across the hemisphere. Through the work of artists in Guatemala, México and the United States, the book also attends to ways that those affected by the multiplicitous catastrophes of coloniality deploy insurgent corporeal strategies not only to survive, but also to enact otherwise bodies, worlds, and lives despite ongoing necropolitical control and violence. Firmino-Castillo is also co-editing an anthology on critical Indigenous dance studies with Jacqueline Shea Murphy (UCR) and Karyn Recollet (University of Toronto).
Shoniqua Roach, Assistant Professor in African and African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Brandeis University
Shoniqua Roach (PhD, Northwestern) is assistant professor of African and African American Studies & Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. Her research and teaching focuses on Black Feminist Theory, Queer/Sexuality Studies, and Black popular and quotidian performance. Her peer-reviewed work appears or is forthcoming in outlets such as Feminist Theory, The Black Scholar, Signs: journal of women in culture and society, Journal of American Culture, differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, Feminist Formations, antipode: a radical journal of geography, and Feminist Studies. She is currently at work on her book manuscript, Black Dwelling: Home-Making and Erotic Freedom, which offers an intellectual and cultural history of the ways in which Black homes have been tragic sites of state invasion, as well as paradigmatic entry-points for Black women artists, activists, and intellectuals to imagine, rehearse, and enact Black freedom. She sits on the editorial board of Signs: a journal of Women in Culture and Society.
Suraj Yengde, Fellow, Shorenstein Center, Post-Doc, Harvard Kennedy School
Suraj Yengde is one of India's leading public intellectuals and a noted scholar of caste. He is the author of the bestseller Caste Matters and co-editor of award winning anthology The Radical in Ambedkar. Suraj is currently a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and an inaugural postdoctoral fellow at the Initiative for Institutional Anti-racism and Accountability (IARA) at Harvard University. Suraj has been nominated for India's highest literary award "Sahitya Akademi" and is a recipient of the "Dr. Ambedkar Social Justice Award" (Canada, 2019) and the "Rohit Vemula Memorial Scholar Award" (2018). Suraj is an academic activist and a noted public intellectual in the transnational movement of Dalit rights. He is actively involved in building solidarity between Dalit, Black, Roma, Indigenous, Buraku and Refugee people’s in the Fourth World project of marginalized peoples. Suraj has worked with leading international organizations in Geneva, London, and New York. Suraj is also an activist in the transnational movement of Dalit rights. He is a co-convener of Dalit-Black Lives Matter symposium and the Dalit and Black Power Movement. He runs a monthly Ambedkar Lecture Series at Harvard. He is an associate editor of Southern Journal of Contemporary History, and former associate editor of CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion published by Brandeis University Library. Suraj also holds a research associate position with the department of African and African American Studies, and a non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He is also a convenor of the Dalit Film Festival
Tina Campt, Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
Tina Campt is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art. She is the author of three books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004),Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (2012), and Listening to Images (2017). Herforthcoming book, A Black Gaze, will be published by MIT Press in 2021.
Moderator: Faith Smith is an Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Brandeis University. Her research engages aesthetic strategies of writers and artists contending with the legacies of slavery and indentureship, feminist engagements with the state in the wake of globalization, and the resonance of archival histories of intimacy and loss in the present. She is completing "Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century," a reading of the imperial present just before the First World War. Another project, “Dread Intimacies,” examines sovereignty, intimacy and violence in twenty-first-century fiction and visual culture.
ABOUT FEMINISMS UNBOUND
This Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) initiative, Feminisms Unbound, is an annual event series featuring debates that focus on feminist concerns, theories, and practices in this contemporary moment. This series is intended to foster conversations and community among Boston-area feminist intellectuals and activists. The series, in its open configuration, endeavors to allow the greatest measure of engagement across multiple disciplinary trajectories, and a full array of feminist investments.
The event organizers, who are also visiting scholars with the GCWS this year, are Elora Chowdhury (Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston), Faith Smith (Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Brandeis University), and Kareem Khubchandani (Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor in theDepartment of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University). have programmed the events in this series.