Description:

Join the Colloquium on Ethnicity and Diaspora (CED) for its end-of-year event - a virtual performance and discussion with Lia García (La Novia Sirena) and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. García will perform Becoming Mermaid, a performance that dwells upon water as an element of freedom and the power of the voice.  The performance will be followed by a rumination and discussion by Gumbs, author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020). 

Becoming Mermaid responds to water as an element of freedom, femininity and mystery. Where other forms of resistance coexist and affect human understanding, García’s affective encounters, even on zoom, dwell on the communicative power of the voice to touch participants in the performance. Instead of the caution against mermaids practiced by Greek intellectuals, Becoming Mermaid seduces with the voice of the indomitable being. This is the potency of a siren’s voice, the forbidden song that confronts reason and reveals the importance of sensation and emotion to exploring Afrodiasporic voices, spirituality, and interspecies relationalities. 

Becoming Mermaid is the last installment of this year's CED speaker series, Care: As Keyword and Praxis. As we continue to live amid the crises of global health and climate, as well as blatant and systemic inequality, CED's continued focus on Care allows us to interrogate and respond to the pressing conditions impacting the nation, our own campus communities, and the greater Chicago area.  

Co-sponsored by: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities| African American Studies | American Studies |Anthropology | English | Center for African American History | Critical Theory Cluster| History | Philosophy | The Sexualities Project at Northwestern | Latino and Latina Studies Program | Department of Spanish and Portuguese 
 
For questions, please contact: 
Candice Merritt, candicemerritt2023@u.northwestern.edu | Cordelia Rizzo, almarizzo2024@u.northwestern.edu