"After the Party: A Manifesto of Queer of Color Life": a Decolonizing Vision Series talk with Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson

Presenting material from the new book After the Party, Chambers-Letson (M.A. '04, Ph.D. '09) presents a eulogy and a manifesto that stakes out the life-sustaining and worldmaking powers of minoritarian performance. Written in the folds between queer of color life and death, the author brings the work of José Muñoz and Karl Marx to bear on a set of performances by Nao Bustamante and Siouxsie and the Banshees. The talk describes performance’s capacity produce a communism of incommensurability geared towards the sustenance of black, brown, queer, and trans life—a queer of color commons that aids the work of keeping our dead alive and with us as we struggle to survive a relentlessly precarious present.

Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Performance Studies, Northwestern University

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality;
Department of Performance Studies