Dr. José Esteban Muñoz is Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Performance Studies Tisch School of the Arts New York University His book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) examines queer and racial minority issues from a performance studies perspective. His second book, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity, was published by NYU Press in 2009. He has also co-edited Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996) and Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (1997).
SUMMER COURSE + Public Lecture + Graduate Student Dialogue Session
For info on these, contact Carmen Radut, CCFI, ccfi@interchange.ubc.ca
(date and time not yet available on session for Graduate Students, stay tuned)
Two- week Course
CCFI 572A (3 credits)
July 12 – July 23, 2010
10:30 am – 1:30 pm, Mondays through Fridays
Utopian Futures in the Present:
Temporalities/Intimacies/Belongings
Professor José Esteban Muñoz, New York University
This seminar focuses on various theories of the temporal and their relation to various performance practices. Our work in this course will be structured around a series of questions. How do we know time? How does one move through, with and in time? What might the relation be between the temporal and the spatial? How do they mutually constitute each other? How do we experience and describe being through the phenomenon of time? What is the place of event? How might we discuss particular time that is affixed to subjects whose historical trajectories are marked by the violence of colonial encounter and the moment of the neo-colonial? How do lived embodiments of race, gender difference, sexual alterity, and variations of bodily capacity structure time and timing of particular collectivities? What of the discourse of history and the various ways it attempts to render time? Excerpts from the history of philosophy and critical theory will be read alongside of durational and other time based performances. Course readings will include Bachelard, Bergson Badiou, Bloch, Chakravarty, Freeman, Freud, Grosz, Halberstam, Heathfeild, Heidegger, Husserl, Lefebvre, Marx, Spivak.
We will also study the performances of recent manifestos by The Invisible Committee and the “Communiqué from an Absent Future: The Terminus of Student Life”.
July 20, 2pm
PUBLIC LECTURE
Wise Latinas: Sonia Sotomayor and Mario Montez
U.S. Supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the court was met with great skepticism by the North American right wing. This was in no small part due to her use of the self-description “wise Latina” when describing her qualifications as a jurist. It would seem that term Latina and its linkage to a term most usually associated with more “universal” subjects was precisely the site of provocation for her conservative enemies. We are left to conclude that wise is a word reserved for subjects who claim a more “objectivist” mode of knowledge. This paper focuses on what I want consider the performance of “otherwiseness”. By otherwiseness I mean to render the production and performance of knowledge that does not confirm to the meanings assigned to both the designations “wise” and “other”. I sketch another, more subterranean route to the production of knowledge. To do this I cast an odd Puerto Rican predecessor to Justice Sotomayor: underground screen legend and Andy
Warhol Superstar Mario Montez. The paper mediates upon Montez’s embodied production and performance of knowledge during select moments during his work with both filmmakers Jack Smith and Andy Warhol. I turn to Montez drag performance of the 1960’s as important moments that allows us to imagine latinidad otherwise. The cinematic moments I consider display Montez’s performance of an affective particularity that displaces much of the coerciveness around identity that structures North American understandings of latinidad and queerness. This paper draws a crooked line between Montez and Sotomayor and names a mode of knowledge production, otherwisness, that gives us a richer account of feeling and being brown in America.