José Esteban Muñoz Memorial Lecture delivered by Tavia Nyong’o

The NYU Department of Performance Studies cordially invites you to a special evening celebrating the life and enduring legacy of our beloved colleague, José Esteban Muñoz. This year, we are actively seeking donations to help establish the José Esteban Muñoz Memorial Scholarship fund, ensuring his vision continues to inspire future generations. 

The event is free and open to the public, but please note that seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. To reserve your seat and contribute to the José Esteban Muñoz Memorial Scholarship, make your donation today. If you’re unable to join us, but would like to make a gift, you can make your contribution on the same link below. Every contribution helps us empower future scholars! 

Note: Zoom registration will close at 12:00pm on Monday, September 29th and guaranteed reserved seating will close at 12:00pm on Tuesday, September 30th. Walk-ins are welcome though seats are not guaranteed. Donations can be made on site. 

Support Tiers:

• $25 Donation: Guarantees your reserved seat.
• $25 Donation: Provides access to the Zoom link. 
• $75 Donation: Guarantees your reserved seat and includes a special José Esteban Muñoz x PS tote bag.
• $150 Donation: Guarantees your reserved seat, includes the tote bag and a copy of The Sense of Brown.

Date: Tuesday, September 30th, 2025

Time: 6:30PM

Location: Jurow Lecture Hall, Room 101, 100 Washington Square East

“Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of the moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” –José Esteban Muñoz

The José Esteban Muñoz Memorial Scholarship was established, in 2023, to nurture the kinds of worldmaking dreams and actions to which our beloved colleague was committed. This scholarship aims to nurture future scholars committed to the creation and/or study of queer-of-color performance, helping us imagine new ways of being in the world. The scholarship is open to all interested MA students, regardless of racial or gender identity or sexual orientation. We are actively raising funds for this scholarship support. Learn how you can contribute to shaping new worlds through the Muñoz Scholarship.

Featuring Tavia Nyong’o: “Minority Report”

We are thrilled to welcome Tavia Nyong’o (Yale University) back to the Department to deliver this year’s lecture. Professor Nyong’o, author of three critically acclaimed books and co-editor of Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown (Duke University Press, 2020) with Joshua Chambers-Letson, will present his lecture titled “Minority Report.” Learn more about Professor Nyong’o and his lecture by scrolling down. Supporting this lecture directly supports future scholars who will carry forward José’s transformative legacy.

Minority Report

When we say 'people of color' are actually the global majority, what happens to the politics of being a minority? The racial reckoning of 2020 brought widespread adoption of the term "peoples of the global majority"—a powerful shift that challenges US and European assumptions about who counts as "normal." This reframing offers hope for moving beyond what scholars call the "social death" imposed by racialized rightlessness, imagining a planetary inheritance rooted in abundance rather than exclusion. But this demographic reversal raises new questions. If numbers determine power, where does that leave the politics of the “minoritarian”—those ways of being and knowing that exist at the margins regardless of population size? What about queer lives and practices that can't be counted in a census? Is demography really destiny? Through close attention to contemporary aesthetic production, this talk asks how minoritarian critique might persist and transform as the center of gravity shifts away from the West.

Tavia Nyong’o is a Professor of Theater & Performance Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Professor of African-American Studies at Yale University. He was previously acting Chair and Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. His current research and teaching interests span black queer cultural and performance studies, contemporary art and aesthetic theory, speculative genres, afrofuturism, and black sound studies. Nyong’o’s first book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009) won the Errol Hill award for the best book in black theater and performance studies. In it he showed how ‘race mixing’ had been alternately presented as the solution to anti-black racism and a threat to white supremacy in the nineteenth century, arguments sustained by locating ‘amalgamation’ in some distant past or future. Black performance, he argued, with its insistent relationship to the ‘now,’ consistently disrupted those fantasies. His second book, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018) won the Barnard Hewitt award for best book in theater and performance studies. Departing from millennial debates over post-blackness and afro-pessimism, Nyong’o argued that the drama of black life exceeds the social conditions that seek to negate it. Taking up a broad spectrum of performance and performative aesthetics, Afro-Fabulations locates the intersection of blackness and queerness in speculative modes of social life. He is currently embarking on a study of critical negativity in the twenty-first century.

Nyong’o also writes for contemporary art and culture publications such as Artforum, Texte Zur Kunst, Cabinet, n+1, NPR, and the LA Review of Books. In 2019, he curated “Dark as the Door to a Dream” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, as part of the Studium Generale Rietveld Academie. In 2017, he curated “The Critical Matter of Performance” at the New Museum for Contemporary Art, with Johanna Burton and Julia Bryant-Wilson.

A long-standing member of the editorial collective of Social Text, Nyong’o has served as both print editor and web editor of the journal for many years. He is also on the editorial boards of TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies, Theatre, and Contemporary Theatre Review. He edits the Sexual Cultures book series at NYU Press with Ann Pellegrini and Joshua Chambers-Letson.

Nyong’o has received fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Society for Theatre Research, Ford Foundation, Jacob K. Javits Foundation, and the British Marshall Foundation.