Book Launch | Performance Space New York Spring Gala

“Black Apocalypse”: Afrofuturism at the End of the World, Conversation and Book Launch

Author Tavia Nyong’o will read excerpts from Black Apocalypse, and engage in conversation with artist and choreographer Jonathan González. A Q&A with refreshments will follow.

Science fiction imagines aliens and global crises as world-unifying events, both a threat and promise for the future. Black Apocalypse is an introduction to the past and present of black engagement with speculative futures. From Octavia Butler to W.E.B. Du Bois to Sun Ra, Tavia Nyong’o shows that the end of the world is crucial to afrofuturism and reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore their similarities.

Interweaving black trans, queer, and feminist theories, Nyong’o examines the social, technological, and existential threats facing our species and reflects on shifting anxieties and hopes for the future. Exploring the apocalypse in movies, art, literature, and music, this book considers the endless afterlives of slavery and inequality and revives the radical black imagination to envision the future of blackness. Black Apocalypse argues that black aesthetics take us to the edge of this world and into the next.

Tavia Nyong’o is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. He is a professor of performance studies at Yale University and a curator at the Park Avenue Armory.

Jonathan González is an artist and choreographer whose research investigates the aesthetics, ethics, and social histories embedded in performance.

Book Launch – One Thing Follows Another and “Live Choreography” Performance

Choreographers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer’s work made a profound impact on the dance scene starting in the 1960s, and the reverberations continue to this day. This event celebrates their legacy with the publication of Valerie Witte and Sarah Rosenthal’s essay collection One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. The evening will feature readings from the book; a “live choreography” performance by Sally Silvers with dancers Benedict Nguyễn and Jimena Paz; and a panel discussion with the authors, performers, and choreographers Kyle Marshall and Donna Uchizono. Hosted by Performance Space New York and New York Live Arts.

DUETS: Kia LaBeija and Julie Tolentino in Conversation

To celebrate the publication DUETS: Kia LaBeija & Julie Tolentino In Conversation, Kia LaBeija and Julie Tolentino will be in dialogue with Vivian Crockett, with readings from the book’s essays authored by Lia Gangitano and David Velasco.

For the DUETS publication, Kia LaBeija and Julie Tolentino come together for an intergenerational dialogue that illuminates their histories as artists and their relationships to HIV/AIDS spanning more than twenty years. From different perspectives, they discuss their shared practices as artists, performance makers, dancers, poets, and activists. With additional contributions by Lia Gangitano and David Velasco.

DUETS is a series of publications that pairs artists, activists, writers, and thinkers in dialogues about their creative practices and current social issues around HIV/AIDS.

DUETS: Kia LaBeija & Julie Tolentino In Conversation is available for purchase online at the Visual AIDS store, and will also be available at the event.

Credits

Photo: Eleven, from the second installment of the ongoing series 24. Image courtesy of Kia LaBeija (cropped into heart).

Story Telling for Earthly Survival

Organized by Fabrizio Terranova, featuring Kim TallBear and a special live stream appearance by Donna Haraway.

Since her groundbreaking A Cyborg Manifesto (1984) Donna Haraway has been the preeminent scholar on rethinking relations between humans and technology as well as humans and animals. Her joyful and life-affirming multispecies feminism rejects any form of human exceptionalism and instead recognizes the entanglement and interrelatedness of all life forms. Neither giving in to apocalyptic end of the world scenarios nor the temptation of a magical technology fix, Haraway addresses the big ecological challenges of our time by mobilizing new practices of making kin across species and inventing new stories that allow us to imagine a more livable future.

The afternoon commences with a screening of Fabrizio Terranova’s feature-length film, Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2016), an intimate portrait of Haraway as a captivating thinker and enthusiastic storyteller. It is followed by a book launch of her latest publication, Making Kin Not Population (2018), an anthology of essays calling for new practices of making kin beyond biological family structures in the face of unsustainable overpopulation.