The Mellon Global Visiting Professor in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY GC), I am teaching Roadworks: Processional Performance and Diaspora for the Fall semester.
The course charts the revival of processional performance, a millennium-old mass medium, to the transformation of forms of mass address in the aftermath of the dual pandemic of the global coronavirus outbreak and the racially motivated police violence in America. Readings include theories of diaspora, dispossession, processions of the dispossessed, the non-object among others. A wide variety of artists and settings are studied, contrasting Euro-American and African diasporic – especially Caribbean – performances as well as processional forms of protest around Black Lives Matter.