In this talk, Hershini Young examines performances by South African artist, Mohau Modisakeng, and Ghanian artist, Serge Clottey, as a way of asking questions about changing African rituals of mourning in the face of large-scale death and global capitalism.
Focusing on the gendered role of textiles in mourning practices, she asks what it means in the time of fast fashion to inherit your deceased mother’s clothing or your murdered son’s bloody sweater. How can performances around textiles belonging to the dead rework rituals of mourning in ways that accommodate a “poetics of compounding loss” and imagine new ways of living?
About the presenter:
Hershini Young is the author of Haunting Capital: Memory, Text and the Black Diasporic Body (2005), Illegible Will: Coercive Spectacles of Labor in South Africa and the Diaspora (2017) and Spasming, Stuttering and Other Ways to Get off: Differential Embodiment and Alternate Moving Practices in African Diasporic Performances (forthcoming NYU). She is a Professor in African and African Diasporic Studies Department at UT Texas, Austin where she teaches classes on queerness, disability and black performance.
This is a free, online event but you need to register to receive a zoom link. If you have any questions or would like more information, please email Prof Roberta Mock: roberta.mock@plymouth.ac.uk