Black Boundlessness: Aesthetics, Performance and Ethics Under Duress
This talk presents an overview of my forthcoming book entitled Black Boundlessness: Aesthetics, Performance and Ethics Under Duress which theorizes that Black life is simultaneously capacious, complex and contradictory precipitating Black artists and everyday people to respond to the myriad manifestations of antiblackness—namely, gratuitous violence, socioeconomic marginalization and spatial exclusion—by establishing freedom practices that enable the cultivation of a meaningful life despite ongoing annihilation. Black Boundlessness investigates freedom practices including multiplicity, transmutation/shapeshifting and critical nonmonogamy to reveal how artists such as such as Moses Sumney and Yves Tumor and writers including Audre Lorde and Taiye Selasi in addition to quotidian Black people engage performance, aesthetics and ethics in visionary ways which hold the potential to propel Black people into a space of boundless possibility.
About the Speaker
Julian Kevon Kamilah Glover (she/they) is a scholar and artist who graduated with honors from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, holds an MPA from Indiana University and earned a PhD in Black Studies from Northwestern University. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Genders, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and the Department of Dance & Choreography at Virginia Commonwealth University where their research focuses on Black/brown queer cultural formations, performance, ethnography, embodied knowledge, performance theory and Black futurity. They were awarded a Franke Fellowship at Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, a Humanities Research Center fellowship (VCU) and their work appears in journals including American Quarterly, Feminist Formations, South Atlantic Quarterly, Souls, GLQ and Text & Performance Quarterly. Among their numerous awards, she was inducted into the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society at Yale University and is a longtime member of the ballroom scene. They have also worked with the Grammy award winning Swedish singer Robyn and appeared in the music video for the title track of her 2018 album Honey. A classically trained cellist, their creative work is multidisciplinary and engages sonic, visual, affective, written and kinesthetic registers with the aim of bringing viewers into critical dialogue with themselves towards psychic, spiritual and interpersonal transformation.