Feminist Afrofuturist World-Making through Live Performance: The 2019 Delacorte Much Ado About Nothing in New York and the 2020 Justice for Black Lives Rally in Athens, GA

This Friday, Nov 13, at 12:40, Dr. Sujata Iyengar will present "Feminist Afrofuturist World-Making through Live Performance: The 2019 Delacorte Much Ado About Nothing in New York and the 2020 Justice for Black Lives Rally in Athens" as part of the IWS Virtual Friday Speaker Series.

Sujata Iyengar, Professor of English, writes about Shakespeare, early modern race, feminist aesthetics, book arts, and innovative pedagogy. Recent publications include "Ecologies of the Shakespearean Artists’ Book,” in the Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (2020); "Hamlet and Representations of Diasporic Blackness,” (2016) co-authored with Lesley Feracho for Cahiers Elisabéthains 98 (2019); and "Beds, Handkerchiefs, and Moving Objects in Othello", in Variable Objects: Shakespeare and Speculative Appropriation, ed. Louise Geddes and Valerie Fazel (Edinburgh, 2020). She is currently teaching Elizabethan Poetry and Shakespeare 1, and she thanks her Shakespeare students for their sensitive readings of the music within this production.

This talk considers the performative space of protest, rally, and spoken word within the 2019 Delacorte Theatre’s rapturously-received all-Black production of Much Ado About Nothing, and the real-life performed activist space of the Justice for Black Lives Rally in Athens, Georgia, in 2020. Her analysis will suggest that the radical alterity of Shakespeare’s language in the present can also partake of Afrofuturist world-building through performances that offer new "infracontexts" for Shakespearean texts and that create for us alternative worlds in real time and space on stage (whether live and co-present, recorded, or live-streamed).

Contact TLHAT@uga.edu for Zoom link and info.

This event is hosted by the UGA Institute for Women's Studies.