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Embodying Histories: Unsettling Archives: Critical Fabulation and Historically Informed Performance
Event details
About the speakers
Ben Spatz & Dr Webster B. McDonald
Ben Spatz (they/he) is Assistant Professor in Creative Practice in the Department of Film and Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. They are an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner focussing on critical approaches to embodied and artistic research, and experiments in diasporic and decolonial jewishness. Ben has written several books and founded the videographic Journal of Embodied Research.
Dr Webster B. McDonald is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Kansas. He is an artist-scholar-educator who theorizes a “BlackQueer” Jamaican postcolonial subjectivity to unsettle normative cultural formations, including colonialism, anti-Blackness, and hegemonic masculinity. McDonald’s artistic and theory-infused work includes Critical Decolonial Monodrama Performance (CDMP) and the staging of archival documents. He has published essays in Caribbean intellectual traditions and Black queer theory. His current book project, Archival Weight: Sexuality, Citizenship, and the Performance of Black and Queer Life in Jamaica, considers “archival weight” as both metaphor and material reality—that is, the weight of history bearing down on the body, embedded in the state, and circulating in/through cultural formations.