Performance and the Ownership of African Things

Mlondolozi Zondi • Wesleyan University

March 15th @ 6 P.M.
Zoom Conference: https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/98396636283

Colonial property relations remain in the present through performance’s capacity for surrogation. This presentation assesses the promises and limits of repatriation when African remains housed in Western cultural institutions are involved. Thinking together with interdisciplinary performance artist Nelisiwe Xaba, particularly her Sakhozi Says ‘Non’ to the Venus performance, Mlondi Zondi attends to the repatriation and burial of Sara Baartman’s bodily remains, which were in captivity at French museums for two centuries. What is the role of embodied performance in symbolic reparation, especially when archival evidence is unreliable? The presentation will highlight the contradictions of turning to performance to reverse colonial despotism, to fill in irretrievable gaps within the archive, and more particularly, the limits of emplotting Baartman into narratives of post-apartheid and postcolonial national citizenship.

Ephemera
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