MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | AUDIENCE(S)
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 10 | 6 p.m. | DANIEL FAMILY COMMONS | USDAN UNIVERSITY CENTER
Katherine Brewer Ball
Wesleyan University
What can be learned from thinking escape and escapism together? Much cultural analysis is rightfully invested in progress, resistance, and revolution as the primary methods for enacting social change. This talk switches the focus to non-pragmatic models of political and aesthetic engagement such as defection, exit, refusal, and withdrawal. Reading Tony Kushner’s 2010 The Henry Box Brown Play—which stages Brown’s 1849 fugitive tale of disappearance and escape in a cargo box, and his subsequent performance in The Mirror of Slavery—along with Glenn Ligon’s 1993 To Disembark, Ball explores the relation between escape and escapism, anarchy and abolition, property and illusion. What is the performative potential of escape in these contemporary art works? Furthermore, what forms of political engagement might they inspire?
