From Field to Stage to Screen: Aesthetic Methodologies in the Making of Sweet Tea

A LECTURE BY E. PATRICK JOHNSON

E. Patrick Johnson, African American Studies, Northwestern University. Drawing on his research on black queers of the South, Johnson will discuss how he adapted oral history narratives and field research to a stage play and then to a documentary film. The lecture will also engage questions of ethics, advocacy and aesthetics.

E. Patrick Johnson has published widely in the areas of race, class, gender, sexuality, and performance. He is the founder and director of the Black Arts Initiative at Northwestern. He is also a Project& artist, a nonprofit arts organization engaged in art for social change and impact. Johnson is a prolific performer and scholar, and an inspiring teacher, whose research and artistry has greatly impacted African American studies, performance studies, and sexuality studies. He is the author of two award-winning books, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity, and Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History. He is the editor of Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis by Dwight Conquergood (Michigan UP, 2013) and co-editor (with Mae G. Henderson) of Black Queer Studies—A Critical Anthology and (with Ramon Rivera-Servera) of solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays and Blacktino Queer Performance (Duke UP, forthcoming). He is currently at work on the companion text to Sweet Tea, entitled, Honeypot: Southern Black Women Who Love Women and an edited collection of new writings in black queer studies tentatively titled, No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies.

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