Unsettling Archives:
Critical Fabulation and Historically Informed Performance
a dialogue between
Webster McDonald
and
Ben Spatz
Hosted by Emily Worthington
22 April 2026
University of York
(online)
In a moment of planetary crisis that is at once new and old, we are interested in how lineages of black feminist thought (Spillers—Hartman—Wynter) contest Eurocentric methods of “white writing” and offer alternative ways to theorize and activate the university and its para-academic spaces. The session will unfold as a dialogue, touching on relations between the United States and the United Kingdom; among Black Studies and Performance Studies; historical rigour and embodied presence; body and flesh.
To that end, we reflect on various inheritances — archival logics of domination—the lawlike necropolitical management of various bodies and fleshes for premature death. As a response to the archive’s death drive, critical laboratoriality, brackets, for example, the sodomy statute of 1533 and public confessions to render manipulable the structural conditions that produce death worlds and subsequently devises counter-spatial geographies of being. The Lab then functions as a “site/sight” that tarries in the interstices of previous geographies of domination to unsettle their logics of “death-making,” and this unsettling points to a demonic ground compelling irreducible states of being. To that end, we invite you to join us in pushing forms of knowledge and archives to their limits as we attempt to reimagine spaces of history and performance.
Webster B. McDonald is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Kansas. He is an artist-scholar-educator who theorizes a “BlackQueer” Jamaican postcolonial subjectivity to unsettle normative cultural formations, including colonialism, anti-Blackness, and hegemonic masculinity. McDonald’s artistic and theory-infused work includes Critical Decolonial Monodrama Performance (CDMP) and the staging of archival documents. He has published essays in Caribbean intellectual traditions and Black queer theory. His current book project, Archival Weight: Sexuality, Citizenship, and the Performance of Black and Queer Life in Jamaica, considers “archival weight” as both metaphor and material reality—that is, the weight of history bearing down on the body, embedded in the state, and circulating in/through cultural formations.
Embodying Histories is a series of online seminars exploring cross-disciplinary perspectives on embodied knowledge, research and practice in historical fields. The contributors come from across the fields of history, english, historical martial arts, theatre and performance, and draw on a wide range of methods, theories, epistemologies and practical expertise. The aim of the seminars is to promote dialogue and connections between historical performance research in music and its parallels in other fields. Embodying Histories is funded by the Baermann’s Body project and hosted in collaboration with the University of York’s Historical Practice Research Network and School of Arts and Creative Technologies, and the Performance and Embodiment cluster at the Orpheus Instituut Gent.