![BLACK PORTRAITURE[S] VII: PLAY & PERFORMANCE](https://www.blackportraitures.info/bp7/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2022/02/bp7-logo-black.svg){kind=logo}
- Date: February 17, 2022
- Time: 11:30 am—1:00 pm
- Location: Classroom 421
Speakers
- Adama Delphine Fawundu, (artist, author, curator, professor) – Columbia University, co-founder of MFON Women Photographers of the African Diaspora
- Vernice Miller, Thespian - Actor/Director, Professor – John Jay College of Criminal Justice, founder & artistic director of A Laboratory for Actor Training and Experimental Theater Company (ALATetc)
Moderator/s
- Berette S. Macaulay – University of Washington, Black Cinema Collective, On the Boards
Among the many consequences of colonialism is that imperialists have consistently sought to erase Black cultural memory. This project is an exploration of nonverbal forms of coded communication within global Black spaces, specifically the formerly colonized sites of Jamaica and Sierra Leone and their connections to African American embodiments. The work revels in playful retentions across cultures despite linguistic erasures and geographic separations. Resistance to this type of erasure is a fundamental part of Black life and Black art legacies, which allows us to concurrently determine collective futures, while, as Stuart Hall insisted, animate our archives.
Finding ‘home’ in the body is a restorative work in (re)claiming memory. Through this, I seek new meaningful intersections between the pedestrian, the performance, and the aesthetic, exploring creative political praxis as it exists in everyday-speech and body language, archiving vocabularies of sound, facial expressions, and stances as gestures of connection and resonance.
Within traditional arts and cultural studies, figuring an existence with/out the borders of colonialism seem beyond our imaginative grasp, – until we consider a paraphrasing of Edouard Glissant’s assertion that the ‘West is a project, not a place’. What follows then, are projects of ‘worlding’ ways beyond constrained national mappings. The liminal spaces of the Americas and the Caribbean, push against these in nuanced, ordinary ways that artists are re(con)figuring in visual and performance discourses as an act of culture-making survivance, thrivance, and self-ownership.
My research engages rich performance practices of Black and Indigenous artists as diverse as Cecilia Vicuña, environmentalist artist/poet of “modern indigeneity” who asserts “language is migrant”; the direct advisories on Negritude and Pan-Africanism by cinema scholar Manthia Diawara; the elevations of African American pedestrian vocabularies by choreographer Camille A. Brown, to the exorcising embodiments of Nigerian American avant-garde performer Okwui Okpokwasili; Jamaican linguistic scholar Dr. Louis “Miss Lou” Bennett-Coverley, alongside Kei Miller and Daphne Pratt (Jamaican and Sierra Leonean poets who embrace the creole of Patwah and Krio over “proper” colonial speech); and the masquerade of Fela Kuti’s “Shakara (Oloje)”, to Trinidadian poet M. NourbeSe Phillip who interrogates language roots and land kinships.
In-person engagements halted by the pandemic lead me to improvise a virtual performance as a short film. Scenes show soundings, facial expressions, and gesture where characters subvert constructs of institutional authority, and the obstructions of the digital on Black cultural code, – which deepened the assertion that our non-verbal languages are resiliently resistant.