2018-2019 Theme: “Minor & Minority”
“Minor & Minority” is partly based on theoretical inquiries into what it might mean to “minoritize,” to borrow a term from the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, populations and points of view. In a moment of all-or-nothing politics, of visual, cultural, and expressive bombast, of, even, the reduction of our complex emotional lives to 140 characters or cartoon emojis, the CVC’s year – long theme of “Minor & Minority” brings together a diverse range of speakers to address what gets lost under the rhetoric of the emphatic, the major, or the majority. In this way, minority is a political category that speaks with acuity to the margin and the center. Additionally, the term minor is concerned with aesthetic, affective, and philosophical categories outside the cathartic, the sublime, and the seemingly important. With either term – minor or minority – the concern is not only with nuance, but with those subjects that, or who, resist easy classification.
Please join us for our exciting program of lectures, artist talks, and workshops!
Tavia Nyong’o
American Profanations: Something of Value, oath-taking, and the problem of black indigeneity
October 11, 2018 @ 5:00PM, Elvehjem L140
Miriam Posner
Seeing Data: Information in Culture and Commerce
October 25, 2018 @ 4:00PM, Vilas 4070
Ellis Hanson
Considering the Minor: Mood, Affect, Tone, Theory-in-Practice Lab, Part I
Date TBD
Affiliate Events
Loren Kruger
“Theatre is not part of our [African] vocabulary”? Performance practices in South Africa and beyond”
Thursday, September 27th @ 4:30 PM
in the main room of Special Collections at Memorial Library.
Kruger’s most recent book, Imagining the Edgy City, brings together film and fiction, public art, architecture, and history with previous work on theatre and other performances in Johannesburg. The book shows how apparently new claims for Johannesburg as global city hide a long history of images of Johannesburg as the wonder city of Africa and the world, with comparisons both pertinent and impertinent with other cities from Chicago to Paris, Berlin to Bogotá, Sydney to Sāo Paulo. Johannesburg has been called the “Chicago of South Africa” partly because of gangster culture in both places, but Johannesburg also owes a lot to the influence of Chicago architects and urbanists.