Join us for the 24th Annual SBAI International Graduate Research Conference “On the Voice: Identity, Difference, Expression” on Friday, March 31, 2017.
This conference asks: “what is voice and in what ways does it shape our identity?”, and will discuss the nature of voice in relation to issues of gender, sexuality, race, disability, and will featuring SBAI’s annual Susan B. Anthony Keynote lecture at 1:45pm.
Our 2017 Susan B. Anthony Lecture will be delivered by Tavia Nyong’o, Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater Studies at Yale University.
The lecture is titled: “Decrypting Blackness: Assotto Saint with Gilles Deleuze”. Amidst current controversies over the re-circulation of images of black suffering and death in social media and in the public sphere, the activist and aesthetic strategies of black gay men during the first wave of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s increasingly stand out as a potent historical lesson. These strategies of activist art in poetry, music, video and film, performance, and protest anticipated contemporary polemics around social death and structural antagonism, while offering an alternative queer lineage and futurity for the necropolitics that dominates our contemporary moment. Through a contrapuntal reading of the black queer visual and video strategies of Assotto Saint (1957-1994) and Marlon Riggs (1957—1994) on the one hand, and a strand of “dark” Deleuzean theorizing, on the other, this talk will propose a model of “decrypting blackness” that attends the radical force of negativity that is immanent to all forms of black social practice.
PANELS:
****MEDIATING VOICES 9:05–10:15****
“Puppet Voices: Transforming Everyday Relationality in Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Anomalisa'”
Amy Skjerseth (University of Chicago)
“Speak for Yourself: Representation in Ethnography and Art”
Gwendolyn Shaw (CUNY)
Moderator: Santiago Morice, English, University of Rochester
****FIGURING THE VOICE 10:30–11:50****
“A Point of Resistance: Discourse and Voice in Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home'”
Caitlyn Parker (Radford University)
“Gender on West African Stages: The Embodiment of Female Voices in New Theater”
Heather Denyer (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
“Disability, Voice, and Autobiographical Exclusion in J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Foe'”
Valerie O’Brien (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Moderator: Harry Gu, Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester
****KEYNOTE LECTURE 1:45-3:15****
****VOICING HISTORY 3:25–4:45****
“Beyond Choice to Reproductive Justice: Abortion Narratives as Objects of Feminist Attachment”
Emily O’Brien (Miami University Ohio)
“The ‘Elsewhere’ of Women’s Writing: Critical Responses to the Discourses of Female Conduct in Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar'”
Kelley Nickell (Radford University)
“The Modern Odalisque: Portraiture, Identity, and Art Collecting ”
Tobah Aukland-Peck (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
“Since I Have Turned Authorness: Print Culture and Personal Narrative in Mrs. J. W. Likins’s ‘Six Years Experience as a Book Agent in California'”
Adam Q. Stauffer (University of Rochester)
Moderator: R.E. Fulton, History, University of Rochester
Sponsored by: the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Department of Art and Art History, University of Rochester Film and Media Studies Program, Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Rochester, University of Rochester – AS&E Graduate Student Association, Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies, University of Rochester Philosophy Department, Musicology Department, Eastman School of Music
