SEMINAR: Performing African Diasporas January 31, 2006

Performing African Diasporas - International Graduate Summer Seminar
This third year of the seminar will focus on black performativity and cultural production from the perspective of aesthetics, poetics, and representation in four weekly modules. The relationship between cultural production, performance, and representation, on the one hand, and the production of black subjectivity and cognitively inscribed popular conceptions of blackness on the other, will be examined. Popular culture and the deployment of literary, visual, auditory, and other forms of sensory technologies will be explored and interrogated, historicized and framed within the practices of conjunctural and comparative analysis. These deployments will be examined in the production and contestation of blackness and black subjectivity; in the reinforcement and contestation of black inferiority; in the production and contestation of racialized discourses of difference; in the production of ideologies of racialized inferiority, superiority, and equality; and in politics of rebellion, opposition, reversal, transformation and reinforcement. Ambiguity, contradiction, conflict, and opposition will be issues that form part of the examination of African diasporic performativities and cultural production.

Jean Muteba Rahier
Coordinating Faculty
Interrogating the African Diaspora
Florida International University
3000 N.E. 151st Street
North Miami, FL 33181

Ph. (305) 919-5457
Fax (305) 919-5896
Email: [email protected]
Visit the website at http://www.fiu.edu/~interad