plenary session:
decolonial jewishness and the black planetary
21 April 2024
Tanzquartier Wien
Vienna, Austria
The plenary session is an experimental event combining multiple modes of gathering: lecture, performance, workshop, rest, video, and study. Interdisciplinary nonbinary performer and critical theorist Ben Spatz develops this form of post-laboratory theatre in unpayable debt to the ancestors and the earth. The score will be fixed as a braid of intersecting identities and forms of knowledge. A central question interrogates the relationship between the vital but rapidly diminishing spark of diasporic jewish decoloniality and the warm embrace of a groundless and perhaps not yet imaginable planetary blackness. A central tactic involves the naming of whiteness and coloniality to reframe capitalism and climate crisis.
* plenary from plenitude, fullness, wholeness
* rest after Black Power Naps, Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa
* study after Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
* study after Franz Rosenzweig’s Lehrhaus
* long table after Lois Weaver
* ancestors after Houria Boutleldja and CLR James
* intersections after Tiffany Lethabo King
* decolonial judaism after Santiago Slabodsky
* groundless after Marquis Bey
* planetary from planeta, wanderer
This event included songwork alongside an excerpt from a video recording of a talk by Tiffany Lethabo King. See also my book, Race and the Forms of Knowledge (Northwestern University Press, 2024).
