Description:

Description of symposium
The two-day symposium will discuss the power of Beauty as a philosophy, embodiment, and tactic that is employed across the Black Diaspora as it relates to justice. Themes from the symposium will discuss how African descended people appropriate the inseparability of beauty and justice as a tactic to both survive and flourish. The symposium will engage the following themes (1) popular media and postcolonial myth; (2) local rights and global activism; (3) political economy and urban strife; (4) sexuality and spectacular performatives. The symposium discussions will synthesize these themes into a re-imagining and re-articulation of blackness and radical democracy and of national strife and global consciousness by exploring the justness of invincible beauty.

SATURDAY, MARCH 14TH

Morning Panel: 9:00 to 10:30
To Trick the Devil: Beauty, Buffoonery, and Playing with the Master’s Tools
Renee Alexander Craft

Disrupt, Activate, Endure: Dissent as Radical Justice and Performative Beauty”
Oykü Potuoğlu-Cook

Break

Noon Speaker: 11:00 to 12:00

Beauty Against the Grain: Fierce Imagination and the Outrageous Outcast
Kara Keeling

Lunch

Afternoon Speaker: 1:00 to 2:00
"Wasted Beauty: Michael Jackson, This is It, and Exhausted Dance."
Judith Hamera

Break

Audience Wrap-up and Symposium Reflections: 2:30 to 3:00
Moderator: E. Patrick Johnson, Performance Studies and African American Studies, Northwestern University

Reception