Jonathan Flatley

Lecture Abstract:

This lecture will address the political potentials and limits of Angela Davis’s Black communist stardom. What kinds of collectivities does the star activate or make possible? And how is that distinct from or related to the collectivities that a revolutionary communist party may bring into existence? What happens when a revolutionary leader becomes a star? I am taking up these questions in relation to Angela Davis, whose extraordinary fame in the early 1970s is marked not only by her exceptional style, charisma and intelligence but also by her anti-racist communist politics. I approach the question of her stardom and its aesthetic and political potential by way of legendary queer performer Vaginal Davis and a story she tells about renaming herself in “sexual homage” to Angela Davis after seeing her in a Soviet film, Our Friend Angela.

Workshop Abstract:

In this seminar we will consider the function of aesthetic practices and aesthetic experiences in collective political formation. I will introduce the topic by talking about these issues as they play out in my current book project on Black Leninism and revolutionary counter-moods with a focus on the specific example of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and their film Finally Got The News (which people can watch before the workshop). Then I hope we can open the discussion for people to talk about aesthetics, affect and collective formation in their own work.

Biography:

Jonathan Flatley is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago.  He is author ofLike Andy Warhol (U. Chicago, 2017),  Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Harvard, 2008), and coeditor (with Jennifer Doyle and José Esteban Muñoz) of Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Duke UP, 1996).  Most broadly, his research concerns collective emotion as it is takes shape in aesthetic and political forms.  He is currently finishing a book called Black Leninism: How Revolutionary Counter-Moods Are Made and beginning a new project about liking and being like trees.