Dexl Carmen

The Black Lives Matter Movement:

Performing Embodied Protest, Staging Spatial Choreographies

Starting as a form of hashtag activism in response to the shooting of
17-year-old African American teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the
acquittal of his murderer, the slogan “Black Lives Matter” has come to
designate the guiding principles of a global social and political
movement committed to the fight against police brutality, racial and
ethnic disparities in the US criminal justice system, the prison
industrial complex, and systemic racism.

Drawing on theoretical concepts, methodology, and critical lenses of
performance studies (e.g., McKenzy, Schechner, Taylor), we will use this
seminar to explore the repertoire of protest tactics employed by BLM
activists with a special focus on 1) their use and conception of the
body, 2), their performance of spatial choreographies and appropriation
of public space, 3) the role of collectivity, and 4) their embodiment of
collective memory and enactment of ritual. We will discuss the
significance of new tactics of resistance identified with the BLM
movement on the one hand and established action practices derived from
other activist movements (e.g., AIDS, anti-war, or environmental
activism) and longer traditions of protest (e.g., the Civil Rights and
Black Power Movements) on the other hand. Acknowledging the
transnational character of the movement, we will attend to the cultural
specificity of expressions of resistance and solidarity and, by
implication, their adaptation in different cultural contexts.

The
central aim of the seminar is to highlight the social, cultural,
political and epistemological impact of embodied protest.

The course examines selected
examples of American literature from pre-Columbian Native American
documents through nineteenth-century literary writing. Taught in seminar
format and based on reading, discussion, and active participation, the
course places literary texts in their historical and cultural contexts.
Readings include early exploration narratives and selected texts from
colonial America, samples of nineteenth-century short fiction, Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and selected poems by prominent authors, such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

Course requirements: oral presentation.
Credit requirement: a 3,500 to 4,500-word research paper in English.
Required
Texts: Baym, Nina et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American
Literature. 8th ed. Vols. A, B, and C. New York: Norton, 2012. Print.

Discussing selected exemplary texts, the
course reviews American literary and cultural history from precolonial
times through the immediate present. Participants are expected to have
acquired a solid and broad knowledge of American literary and cultural
history and theory in the course of their studies by attending both
mandatory and additional courses. The review course builds in particular
on the two Proseminare in American literature and the lecture course
American Literary History.

Course text: Baym, Nina, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2012. Print.

Figurations of posthuman bodies abound in – and beyond – the American
cultural imagination. This includes, most prominently, the cyborg, defined in
Donna Haraway's “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) as a transgressive creature that
signals a breaching of not only “the boundary between human and animal” (68)
but also “the boundary between animal/human (organism) and machine” (69) and,
by extension, “the boundary between physical and non-physical” (70). With
scholarship now distinguishing mostly between the strands of ‘transhumanist
posthumanism’ and ‘posthumanist posthumanism,’ the term of ‘the posthuman’ has
gained plural and conflicting meanings (see, e.g., Hayles, Braidotti,
Badmington) that we will extrapolate and discuss in the analysis of selected
examples drawn from the fields of dance, dance film, music videos, performance
art, and interactive art. This includes Merce Cunningham’s Hand Drawn Spaces
(1998), and Biped (1999), Boston Dynamics’ robot dance, and Stelarc’s
‘internet dance’ Ping Body (1996); ORA, a collaborative project
between choreographer José Navas and filmmaker Philippe Baylaucq; Janelle
Monáe’s Metropolis: The Chase Suite (2007) and The ArchAndroid
(2010); Rachel Rosenthal’s filename: FUTUREFAX (1992); and the
installation Genesis (1999) as well as the Time Capsule project
(1997) by Eduardo Kac. 

We
will explore how these artistic practices and embodied performances frame and
stage intersections of technology and bodies in different ways and examine
their implications for relations to and notions of time and space, ranging from
concepts such as material space over constructions of communal space to the
seemingly endless ether or cyberspace. We will discuss the cultural functions
they fulfill beyond mere techno-utopian or -dystopian imaginings of the future.
Rather, they add to current debates about ‘biomedicalization’ (Estes and
Binney), especially as regards discourses of self-enhancement, longevity, and
immortality; dynamics of global ‘racial capitalism’ (Robinson; Leroy and
Jenkins); ecologism and environmentalism; and claims of human exceptionalism in
the face of more-than-human worlds.